BY HANK REICHMAN

The following is the text of an address delivered remotely, via Zoom, to the concluding session of a conference, “Universities at the Crossroads: Academic Freedom in a Changing World,” at GAU-Georgian American University, Tbilisi, Georgia, on October 1.

Let me begin by thanking the organizers of this most important and interesting conference for inviting my participation.  I wish it were possible for me to attend in person; perhaps I will be able to do so in the future.

I want to speak today about the state of academic freedom in the United States and to suggest that our situation may be more similar to experiences in the post-Soviet zone than might be expected, perhaps disturbingly so.

University of California at Berkeley education professor John Aubrey Douglass has written:

The past and current national political environment is perhaps the most powerful influence on the mission, role, and effectiveness of universities and the higher education system to which they belong.  The national political environment, arguably, has a determining influence on whether universities are leaders or followers—or something in between. . . .  Further, the particular national political norms and environment largely, but not completely, determine the internal organization and academic culture of universities and their interface with the larger world.  Their level of autonomy, in governance and internal academic management, for example, is to a great extent dependent on the political culture and determinants of national governments.

Now this is a somewhat extreme argument and I’m not prepared to uphold it in all situations, but Douglass is undeniably on to something important.  Especially key here may be his reference to both the “past and current” political environment.  Let’s start with the past.  Not all that long ago—and certainly back in the days of the Cold War—it would have been relatively easy to contrast the American tradition of academic freedom, warts and all, with traditions of academic un-freedom, to use a term employed in your sessions, elsewhere, especially in the rival Soviet bloc.

Ever since at least the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915, academic freedom principles in the US have, almost uniquely, sought to protect the professoriate not only within the bounds of their institutions and their disciplines but also as citizens.  In the US, academic freedom historically has not been conceived as focusing solely on the autonomy of higher education institutions or on the rights of professors within those institutions to conduct research and teach free from external interference and restrained only by professional and disciplinary standards, although these are of course central principles.  It has, however, gone further and also sought to protect the rights of professors to speak as citizens on topics of public concern in venues outside the university and from both within and outside their areas of professional expertise.

This broader notion of academic freedom links that freedom to American political ideals of freedom of speech, even though free speech—which in principle protects the voicing of opinion, however ill-informed, from government restraint—differs meaningfully from academic freedom in research and teaching, which cares quite a bit about knowledge and expertise.  Academic freedom, as it has come to be understood by most US scholars, in research and teaching is a more narrow right than freedom of speech, but in the public arena it is actually a broader right, claiming for university faculty an immunity from institutional discipline for public expression that the US First Amendment does not extend to most other private and even many public employees.

That said, however, in the US the ideal—and the reality—of academic freedom has developed in close connection with the gradual extension of other principles of political and social democracy, including but not limited to freedom of speech.  Hence I sometimes like to refer to academic freedom and freedom of speech as “close cousins.”

US politicians and many citizens like to boast that we are the world’s longest-lasting democracy.  But for much of our history that democracy has been quite imperfect and on occasion besieged.  Our higher education system has reflected and to a great degree been shaped by this political environment and its imperfections, be these based on race, gender, or class.  Yet from the mid-twentieth century US society and government became demonstrably more democratic—in good measure owing to the efforts of mass movements of labor, civil rights, and women’s and gay liberation—and this was reflected in our colleges and universities.

And reflected as well in the state of academic freedom.  It is no coincidence that the heyday of support for academic freedom in the US, most notably through the almost universal adoption of a system of continuous faculty tenure, came during years in which political support for a more democratic and independent higher education system was greatest.  As late as, say, thirty years ago, around the time of the Soviet collapse, I might have been able to stand before you as some sort of hopefully not too smug role model, offering our US experience as an exemplar to be emulated by newly democratizing societies.  In the US, as elsewhere, academic freedom has always been a highly contested value, much of the time as much aspirational as extant, but in those days I might reasonably have claimed that owing to the strength of our political system and its democratic norms, meaningful academic freedom was a more achievable aspiration in the US than just about anywhere else.

Not so today, however.

Today, I’m here to report, academic freedom in the US is under unprecedented assault as part of a broader and highly dangerous assault on democracy itself.   To be sure, the democratic and professional norms of academic freedom have yet to be abandoned and one surely hopes they will prove strong enough to weather the dangers I am about to describe.  But if Douglass is correct, the political environment in the US today is one that is at minimum frequently unsupportive of these norms and, even more dangerously, one that contains within it a powerful movement—arguably a movement that has almost entirely captured one of our two major political parties—aimed directly at their destruction.

Threats to academic freedom—indeed, threats to freedom in general—are always varied, so let me first take note of a threat that I also recognize but do not much fear.  In a recent piece University of Michigan professor Silke-Maria Weineck of this threat wrote the following:

There is an entire complex of organizations, like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, dedicated to creating the impression that the most pressing threats to free speech and academic freedom originate on the campus left. . . .  To be sure, the left has its share of kooks and charlatans, and they occasionally create some misery on campus, but they are not governors, senators, or presidential candidates, and they do not wield the power of the state, which is ultimately, we must remember, the power of violence.

In fact, as Weineck points out, US colleges and universities are not, and have never been, especially left-wing institutions.  “Rather,” she notes, “they are hierarchical operations largely dedicated to reproducing a social order that benefits the upper-middle class, liberals and conservatives alike.”  So-called “wokeness” or “political correctness” on campus, originating at times among a minority of activist students or in well-intentioned but over-zealous student service administrations, may occasionally infringe upon academic freedom and, at some institutions, can create a potentially intimidating environment for some conservative or religious expression.  That is not good.  But the problem has been immensely exaggerated.

Moreover, such leftist intolerance, where it exists, is only incidentally antidemocratic.  A far greater threat to academic freedom and to knowledge itself stems from rightist movements whose thrust is proudly and frighteningly antidemocratic.  In a democratic society, universities exist to serve the common good.  Insofar as the pursuit of knowledge and the tolerance of dissent and disagreement in the course of that pursuit threaten entrenched power and sanctified values, a democratic and academically autonomous higher education system, even one that is hierarchic and elitist, will inevitably come into conflict with any sustained anti-democratic movement.

Such a movement is today the neo-nationalist, anti-pluralist and at times overtly fascist agenda that has captured the commanding heights of our Republican Party, what President Biden has called MAGA Republicanism.  To be blunt, this movement has initiated an all-out assault not only on academic freedom and college and university autonomy but, to a frightening extent, on knowledge and expertise itself.

This is most apparent—and most terrifying—at the level of legislation in the various states designed to limit or totally ban discussion in schools of so-called “divisive concepts” involving not only race but also gender, and especially LGBTQ issues.  The attack is most intensely focused on K-12 public schools and libraries, but extends to colleges and universities as well.  The writers’ organization, PEN America, has been closely tracking this effort.  PEN calls these legislative proposals “educational gag orders,” which seek to restrict what may be taught and studied and to punish those who dare to teach differently.  In 2022, the organization reports,

proposed educational gag orders have increased 250 percent compared to 2021. Thirty-six different states have introduced 137 gag order bills in 2022, compared to 22 states introducing 54 bills in 2021. . . .  In 2022, proposed gag orders have been more likely to include punishments, and those punishments have more frequently been harsh: heavy fines or loss of state funding for institutions, termination or even criminal charges for teachers.

Of particular importance to our topic today, PEN found that

Bills introduced this year have targeted higher education more frequently than in 2021, part of a broader legislative attack on colleges and universities. . . .   And for the first time, some bills have targeted nonpublic schools and universities, too. . . .  Just a few years ago, Republican legislators were championing bills protecting free expression on college campuses; many are now focused on bills that censor the teaching of particular ideas.

These bills, more than a few of which are now law, often bar not only classroom advocacy of allegedly offensive or controversial ideas but any discussion of contentious topics, especially those involving race and gender.  In multiple cases, even the mere acknowledgment of the role played by racial slavery in our history has been met with protest and restriction.  As AAUP, PEN America, the American Historical Association, and the Association of American Colleges & Universities affirmed in a 2021 joint statement, later endorsed by 93 other educational organizations,

these legislative efforts seek to substitute political mandates for the considered judgment of professional educators, hindering students’ ability to learn and engage in critical thinking across differences and disagreements.  These regulations constitute an inappropriate attempt to transfer responsibility for the evaluation of a curriculum and subject matter from educators to elected officials.  The purpose of education is to serve the common good by promoting open inquiry and advancing human knowledge.  Politicians in a democratic society should not manipulate public school curricula to advance partisan or ideological aims.  In higher education, under principles of academic freedom that have been widely endorsed, professors are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject.  Educators, not politicians, should make decisions about teaching and learning.

These efforts have been accompanied as well by campaigns of harassment, waged largely but not exclusively on social media, designed to intimidate and silence faculty members.  Much of this activity is the product of efforts by well-funded organizations and media outlets.  A significant amount of the harassment has been racially motivated.  It has sometimes included threats of violence, including arson, rape, and murder.  The number of incidents is legion and the chilling effects obvious.

There has been considerable debate over how best to label these efforts.  President Biden got some criticism when he called them semi-fascist, although some merely questioned the necessity of the “semi.”  For our purposes I will call them neo-nationalist since, like the ideologies espoused by several regimes in the former Soviet zone and leaders like Putin, Lukashenka, Orban, and Duda, its focus is on the alleged recovery of a glorified and mythologized national past in the service of authoritarianism.

But the impact of neo-nationalism (or semi-fascism, or simply MAGAism) on US higher education is not fully comprehensible without also engaging with another term that has been employed during this conference: neoliberalism.  The so-called neoliberal university—personally I prefer the term coined by Gary Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter, “academic capitalism,” but who’s quibbling—can best be defined as a university run increasingly in accordance with market logic and market priorities.  In the US it is very much a product of public disinvestment in higher education associated with the retreat since the mid-1970s from what historian Gary Gerstle called the New Deal Order.

Even though the neoliberal university is markedly less dependent on public funding than was the case decades ago, it has paradoxically proven more vulnerable to neo-nationalist political assaults precisely because neoliberalism also represents a retreat from democratic governance.  Neoliberalism treats the university itself as a business, privileges the entrepreneur, sees knowledge as a commodity, emphasizes training for careers and the acquisition of “human capital” over educating for citizenship and life, and treats students as “customers” to be accommodated and degrees as credentials for employment rather than markers of educational achievement.  As such it diminishes the power of the faculty and opens the door to assaults on faculty rights.

Overly concerned with fund-raising, public image, and relations with influential politicians, neoliberal university leaders have too often failed to defend (or only weakly defended) faculty members against the proliferation of threats directed against them and too often have acceded to threats and ultimatums directed at the institution.  They have not only failed to successfully resist the sorts of educational gag orders I discussed a few minutes ago, but have sometimes embraced their enforcement with embarrassing enthusiasm.

The state of Florida may stand as an example.  There, in order to gain credibility with Governor Ron DeSantis, University of Florida administrators barred faculty members from testifying as experts in a lawsuit aimed at overturning a law designed to restrict voting rights that DeSantis signed and was defending.  Following passage of Florida’s “anti-WOKE” law—an educational gag order that bars any class discussion “alert to racial or social discrimination or injustice,” and concerned with civil rights, “privilege” and “oppression,” and even more broadly, “systemic racism”—several universities removed public statements that espoused anti–racist principles and canceled anti–racist trainings.  Instructors were also urged to scrub syllabi and course materials of references to racial inequity and terms like “critical race theory.”   Defending the act against a law suit filed by faculty members, the state went so far as to declare that professors’ speech in the classroom is not their own, protected by principles of free speech or academic freedom.  Because professors in class speak as state employees in the course of their employment, the state proclaims, their speech counts as the Florida government’s own speech, which it may regulate and restrict however it wishes.

The problem often starts with boards of trustees, which increasingly are highly politicized.  Earlier this year I co-authored an AAUP investigative report on the University of North Carolina system that documented how that system’s Board of Governors, beholden to a heavily Republican state legislature, has aggressively undermined shared governance and academic freedom, in good measure in service to a longstanding and continuing legacy of institutional racism.  Since that report’s publication it has become clear that North Carolina is not alone.

Efforts to restrict what teachers may say in class or what they may publish as scholars and citizens have been paired with a renewed frontal assault on the system of continuous tenure, long-considered the strongest protection for academic freedom.  In Georgia, the trustees of the state’s university system adopted a policy that will empower administrators to revoke the tenure of any faculty member without a hearing.  In Kansas, the trustees of Emporia State University authorized the school’s administration to dismiss over twenty faculty members, most of them tenured, without any formal review process.

But, of course, the tenure system has already been greatly undermined by what has been labeled “adjunctification,” one of the neoliberal university’s defining features that involves the replacement of a largely full-time tenure-eligible—that is to say, permanent—faculty with a largely underpaid and part-time assortment of contract workers, an often penurious precariat.  If we include graduate student instructors, approximately three-fourths of all those who teach in US higher education are now employed off the tenure track, compared to only about a fourth forty years ago.  At four-year public institutions, 56 percent of full-time and part-time faculty members are off the tenure track; the figure at four-year private institutions is 66 percent.

Under neoliberalism we have seen a shift from the faculty as a community of self-governing scholars to the faculty as a collection of individual struggling entrepreneurs, whose ranks are defined by ever-expanding inequality, competition, and hierarchy.  As a result, the increasing vulnerability of those outside the tenure system inevitably bleeds into that system itself.  Given this erosion of tenure, the academic profession as a whole in the US today is more vulnerable to shifting political winds and the whims of academic fashion than it has been in some time.

If neoliberalism has impeded the faculty’s ability to resist the neo-nationalist right-wing assault, it has also rendered much of higher education’s leadership class cowed and cautious.  According to one recent survey, 80 percent of US college and university presidents acknowledged that they would self-censor their comments on national political issues “to avoid creating a controversy for themselves or their colleges.”  There have, to be sure, been exceptions, not least of whom is Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, a Catholic institution in Washington, DC, that is the alma mater of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.  In a powerful essay published just last week, McGuire called on her fellow presidents to “have the courage to confront the corruption of truth that spreads through politically expedient lies—whether the manipulation of language about slavery or the rejection of scientific truth about climate change, or the undermining of public-health protocols by mocking masks and vaccines, or the persistent denials of verified election results or the daily toxic stew of ‘fake news’ that makes it difficult for citizens to understand the real threats to our democracy.”   She concluded, “Let’s not concede the public forum to the voices that disparage and denounce our very existence.”

I wish there were more like President McGuire in my country.  I hope other leaders will respond to her call.

I have until now avoided discussing a topic that I am certain must have animated much of your deliberations: the war in Ukraine.  That is largely because I have less to contribute to such an exchange and more to learn from it, although I will happily proclaim my sympathy for and support of the Ukrainian cause.  Insofar as academic freedom is concerned, however, I remain aware that war has more often than not been one of its most dangerous enemies.  I came of age during the US war against the peoples of Southeast Asia.  As a student I resisted that war to the best of my ability.  But I saw as well how the war—and the larger Cold War that produced it—warped our higher education system and how those of us resisting that war had to challenge the bounds of academic freedom ourselves.  But, I also recall how resistance to war, combined with resistance to racial and gender injustice, opened up our higher education system in new ways, albeit only after sometimes painful struggles.  Perhaps this terrible war may have a similar impact.  One can hope.

It is encouraging that scholars across the globe have not only spoken out in support of Ukrainian colleagues but at the same time have voiced deep concern over “calls for blanket bans on the participation of individual Russians and Belarusians in scholarly events and scholarly exchange,” to quote a widely-circulated joint statement in March by leading American and British Slavic Studies associations.  That statement added, “Banning Russians and Belarusians based solely on their citizenship goes against our fundamental principles of scholarship, open communication, and dialogue. Such sanctions have the potential to harm those living in authoritarian regimes who are opposed to the war.”

But if few have expressed support for sanctions against individual Russian scholars, some have openly called for a boycott of Russian academic institutions.  Times Higher Education has called attention to “mounting examples of blanket freezes on academic ties by countries and the ending of specific research partnerships by institutions,” in response to calls by “academics within and outside [Ukraine]—as well as many other scholars” for such a boycott in support of the Ukrainian cause.

While it may be difficult, even impossible, at times to sustain institutional scholarly cooperation in times of war, it is also always difficult to disentangle institutional from personal ties.  It is hard to imagine that US or European scholars will under present conditions have a lot of opportunity to continue or initiate projects with Russian colleagues, irrespective of those colleagues’ personal views or institutional affiliation.  Nonetheless, how can we ensure that a boycott of institutions will not have undesirable impacts on innocent individuals associated with such an institution?  What, for instance, about Russian scholars at universities that as agencies of the state have been compelled to publicly support aggression, but who as individuals oppose—maybe even bravely resist—that aggression but whose ties with international scholarship are necessarily mediated through their institutional affiliations?  What if they use institutional travel funds?  What if they communicate with foreign colleagues via the university’s zoom account?  What if they use university funds to research and publish in a foreign journal, perhaps on a topic distant from Ukrainian-Russian relations?

Robert Quinn, executive director of the international organization Scholars at Risk, has criticized those who seek to justify an academic boycott “by saying any contact with anyone, in any institution” in a particular place or country “is by definition complicity” with that institution.  That position, he said, “is such an elastic application of complicity that it risks swallowing up all academic freedom, and I think we just have to be very, very careful about that.”

I agree.  In the US the AAUP has advanced similar arguments in its critique of the academic boycott of Israel, even as the Association has continued to defend the right of individual faculty members to advocate such a boycott.  “Colleges and universities should be what they purport to be: institutions committed to the search for truth and its free expression,” our Association declares.  “Members of the academic community should feel no obligation to support or contribute to institutions that are not free or that sail under false colors, that is, claim to be free but in fact suppress freedom.  Such institutions should not be boycotted.  Rather, they should be exposed for what they are, and, wherever possible, the continued exchange of ideas should be actively encouraged.  The need is always for more academic freedom, not less.”

These are undoubtedly dark days for academic freedom and, indeed, for higher education itself in both the so-called “West” and in post-Soviet space.  But as I imagine your discussions have revealed, there are also reasons for optimism.  Indeed, the very existence of this important conference suggests that all is far from lost.  I am grateful that you have allowed me to participate and regret that I have only been able to do so remotely.  But hopefully we will gather again.  Thank you.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in 2021.