BY JENNIFER RUTH
I don’t think I need to rehearse the incident and its very unjust consequences for one adjunct professor. It’s all over the news, both in higher ed and mainstream outlets.
“Our response to the classroom event does not disregard or minimize the importance of academic freedom,” said Hamline University president Fayneese Miller in a statement. “It does state that respect, decency, and appreciation of religious and other differences should supersede when we know that what we teach will cause harm.”
For the Hamline president, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) come before academic freedom. What do the majority of faculty think? Of course it’s very hard to generalize, and nobody can say with a super-high degree of confidence. My guess would be that most faculty (and administrators, for that matter) take both academic freedom and the need to think through how to reform higher education so that it is truly in service of a multiracial and multicultural democracy very seriously—and hope that the two priorities are reconcilable. (We see this hope in verbs that are starting to circulate, as in the phrase “harmonizing DEI and academic freedom”.) For some others, the two are in irredeemable conflict, on a collision course leading predictably to the Hamline car wreck. For some of this latter group, diversity, equity, and inclusion spell the death of academic freedom. For still some others, academic freedom is DEI’s most formidable adversary, a nuclear-grade weapon of the privileged that gives them impunity to disrespect others or at least to complacently remain oblivious to perspectives that do not suit their interests or reinforce their power. For still others, DEI offices and platitudes are neoliberal and result in reinforcing a status quo that needs to be disrupted by genuine racial and social justice—both academic freedom and DEI, then, are problems.
I want to suggest that we begin to think of this impasse as a logistical and infrastructural challenge, not a philosophical or primarily political one. In other words, how do institutions navigate these moments in an informed way? I don’t trust that a vice provost of diversity, equity, and inclusion will make the right call for an art history class. Yet I also don’t trust those loud members of the academy who believe they are defending free thinking by refusing to reflect on their pedagogical practices or to consider scholarly work that complicates simplistic (white, heteronormative) notions of freedom. 
So whom would I trust? That is the question here. Not, of course, whom I personally might trust but, rather, what kind of composition of people following what kind of process might be more trustworthy than others? We see this same set of questions playing out with free speech (which is not the same thing as academic freedom, of course). We don’t trust the government to make the calls, but we don’t trust Elon Musk either.
In academia, as opposed to social media, we actually have an easier path, though it is also uphill. We have an easier time precisely because we are talking about academic freedom instead of free speech. Academic freedom is not the First Amendment right to say whatever you want; rather, it is the freedom to pursue scholarship and teaching without interference from partisan political or commercial forces (thus, the most formidable adversary of academic freedom today is hardly the diversity, equity, and inclusion officer on campus but Ron DeSantis and the like). The first step is to acknowledge that we cannot have single actors making the call. The second step is to acknowledge that we cannot have administrators—here, I include both DEI and non-DEI administrators—making calls about situations that play out within disciplines in which they have no expertise and in classrooms within which they have no experience. We need faculty committees composed of both people with disciplinary expertise in the fields at hand and faculty or academic professionals who have some expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion issues. We need a process that is not reactive to immediate crisis (the complaint of a student, the phone calls from alumni).
We know how to do this. We may hate committees but we live and die by them if we believe in academic freedom as a collective enterprise and not just an individual, quasi-libertarian one. As of now, we mostly have silos. Academic freedom is—or should be—the province of faculty as exercised in departments and faculty bodies like senates. Incidents involving protected categories of persons are the province of diversity, equity, and inclusion officers who work for administration. These silos need to be broken down if we want to successfully navigate the present in a way that does not almost inevitably lead to the unfair sacrifice of either faculty members or students (in any number of scenario permutations). Michael Bérubé and I offer some preliminary thoughts on this in our recent book, and a few institutions already have in place processes, committees, or mechanisms that go some distance toward breaking down the silos.
A number of commentators have rightly pointed out that the Hamline instructor could not have been “let go” (not rehired) so easily if she had been tenured. Those of us with tenure are not nearly as vulnerable to the dysfunction resulting from the siloing and the lack of truly shared governance. Those of us with tenure pass resolutions in our faculty senates or say in our faculty handbooks that all instructors have academic freedom, but that’s a platitude as bad as any other. Contingent faculty do not have academic freedom if they do not have enough job security to guarantee at least some degree of due process. The Hamline incident should have been referred to a faculty review panel that included members (either voting or ex officio) with expertise in racial and social justice issues. The Hamline DEI administrator who made the call that the president then ran with could have served on that committee, but hers would not have been the only voice.
Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (2022).
See the AAUP’s January 6 statement on the Hamline University incident. See also the AAUP’s January 18 letter to the university regarding a committee of inquiry.
POSTSCRIPT: I write this two hours after posting the above because, between the AAUP tweet about the post which reproduced the phrase I’ve seen circulating and that I reference (“harmonizing DEI and academic freedom”) and Wilson’s comment below, I see that perhaps I need to state unequivocally: the post is not about whether or not the Hamline instructor should have been fired (not rehired) — they patently should not have been. It is about how we adjudicate cases — some of which, unlike this one, actually are quite difficult — as we move forward to prevent the arbitrary firing of a faculty member OR the arbitrary dismissal of student concerns. What I recommend is not “harmonizing” which suggests some kind of compromise formation. I recommend a faculty-led panel of peers in the specific discipline with some degree of participation or consultation with faculty or academic professionals with either racial/social justice or DEI expertise.
Feature photo on home page: Old Main building, Hamline University by Eoin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Hamline case is one of a professor fired without due process for presenting legitimate academic content that offended a student, so it bothers me that Jennifer Ruth seems to “both sides” this incident as if this were a difficult case. It isn’t. She is right that a faculty committee ought to be the one to determine if there is any professional misconduct here (there clearly isn’t), although I disagree with the idea of putting administrators on these committees. While having faculty committees rather than administrators decide these matters is an important logistical issue, we do need to address the philosophical question as well: Concern for diversity does not supercede academic freedom. Offending students is not an academic crime or a form of harassment.
I make it clear that my opinion is that this faculty member was unjustly let go. I don’t think this is a difficult case. I never had any doubt that this was a travesty personally — if what I’ve read about the case is accurate. My strong hunch is that a faculty review panel would have defended her academic freedom. The point of my post is that these decisions are not one person’s call but need to be collaborative with faculty taking the primary lead. My own opinion on the case is relatively irrelevant.
I am very grateful for this piece.
Since DEI exploded during the Trump presidency, I have been shocked by the many statements of its supporters attacking both academic freedom and faculty governance. Sometimes these attacks come by name, but more often they come implicitly or behind the scenes. Some of the demands made by the strongest DEI advocates are explicitly directed at administrative procedures, some of which exist primarily to protect faculty and students. Most DEI administrative offices are set up to “cut across” existing policies and procedures, and DEI officers can often be heard expressing frustration at existing of policies and procedures, including those that exist to protect academic freedom and faculty governance.
Yet while FIRE, likely due to its own political leanings, has expressed serious concern about DEI challenges to academic freedom and faculty governance, AAUP has largely remained silent.
I assume this is because AAUP officers and members, like me, share the apparent goals of DEI programs. Yet AAUP’s reluctance simply to insist that academic freedom and faculty governance cannot be abrogated even for a “good cause,” and certainly not by administrative fiat, has been very troubling to me.
On my own campus, which I shall not name for anonymity’s sake, our chief DEI administrator (the 4th or 5th most powerful administrator on campus) issued an abstract statement several years ago specifically saying that DEI and academic freedom can and do conflict, and that it is up to that office to determine when such conflicts happen and to adjudicate them. Period.
At the time and for many months afterwards, I attempted to raise an alert at the local, state and national offices of AAUP about this and ask them to push back with a simple statement, but they refused to say a word. It should have been easy: no specific case was mentioned, and the principles are at the heart of AAUP’s advocacy work. “Administrators cannot revoke academic freedom without proper consultation with the faculty” or something of that sort, just as you suggest here, would have been perfect. Saying nothing was understood here as tacit agreement with this shocking power grab.
Academic freedom and faculty governance are primarily matters for the faculty and nobody else. This applies to DEI matters as much as anything else. We cannot let our own policies and procedures be seriously harmed because we agree with the reason it is being done.
The gross lack of understanding of academic freedom and faculty governance expressed by the Hamline president, and her implicit assertion that these matters are up to her and not to faculty, should set off alarm bells at AAUP, and I hope they have.
Has AAUP sent a letter to the Hamline president directly addressing the academic freedom part of her response, in which she stated that asserting its value “begs the question”? I hope so, but I have not been made aware of it if so. FIRE has sent two public letters, and good for them. I very much hope AAUP’s response is exactly the same one FIRE has had.
I appreciate this. I am not an elected official of AAUP or on the staff so don’t — can’t — speak for the AAUP. I am a contributing editor to the blog and active my own AAUP chapter at Portland State, etc., and I appreciate that the AAUP allows me to state my opinions on this site without first getting some kind of official clearance.
All that said, my guess is that you nail it on the head here: it’s tough terrain. Easier for FIRE with its political leanings and free-speech priority (not academic freedom). Do read the AAUP statement on the matter — which is underneath my byline. It is strong.