BY JENNIFER RUTH
It’s worth highlighting an AAUP toolkit from the past in light of these two alarming articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education — “Public University Curricula are Government Speech, Florida Says” and “It’s Not Clear Whether Public-College Professors have First Amendment Rights When They’re Teaching”:
The AAUP Action Plan for Protecting an Independent Faculty Voice
Speak Up, Speak Out
It is essential that faculty members have the freedom to speak on topics important to both the academic community and the public as a whole. At public colleges and universities across the country, however, faculty are facing a very real and serious threat to their academic freedom and speech rights.
In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that when public employees speak “pursuant to their official duties” their speech is not protected by the First Amendment. (Garcetti v. Ceballos) Although the Court expressly left open whether its ruling should apply to “speech related to scholarship and teaching,” subsequent lower court decisions have ruled against faculty free speech at public institutions.
While these court decisions are troubling, much can still be done to protect faculty members’ speech rights and academic freedom. The American Association of University Professors has launched a nationwide action and awareness campaign calling on faculty members and all supporters of free speech to tear off the suppressive muzzle created by these cases. The time to act is now!”
For the rest of the toolkit, see here.
See also Keith Whittington, “Florida All in for Assault on Academic Freedom.”
Whittington writes:
Florida is right that First Amendment protection for individual professors in their scholarship and teaching at state universities is murky. Denying that such protection exists at all would be the easiest basis on which to uphold policies like the Stop WOKE Act, and Florida is willing to take that route. The stakes for the future of academic freedom in higher education could not be higher. If Florida wins on those grounds, the state could direct state university professors on what they say in their teaching and scholarship and sanction or fire professors for teaching or researching ideas that politicians do not like. Academic freedom in state universities would be a matter of grace.
