BY JENNIFER RUTH

In April 2019, a friend and I visited the grave of Lin Zhao in Suzhou, China to pay respect to one of history’s bravest defenders of intellectual freedom. Scanning a hill dotted with around 300 gravestones, we saw three CCTV cameras trained on one spot and climbed to it. My friend snapped me standing by Lin Zhao’s headstone. By the time he’d stuffed his phone back in his jeans, three security officials had sprinted up the hill. Why are you here? How do you know about this? We pretended to be unable to understand. We tried to get past them down the hill but they blocked us, pantomiming for us to hand them our phones. They scrolled through both phones, finding and deleting the picture on my friend’s. They gave them back but told us to hand over our passports. We began to move quickly, still playing dumb, pushing past them down the hill, and out of the cemetery. They followed for about three yards, consulting a superior on a handheld device.

By LittleT889 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

I thought of this when reading “A Black Professor Defies DeSantis Law Restricting Lessons on Race” in the Washington Post yesterday. The image accompanying the headline features Marvin Dunn, a professor emeritus at Florida International University, with his right hand on Mary Jane Wright’s gravestone and his left on John M. Wright’s, which is engraved with the words “husband, father and Rosewood hero.” The 1923 Rosewood massacre  went unmentioned in the annals of American history until 1982 when a journalist for the St. Petersburg Times published a series about it that gained national attention. Dunn was in the cemetery to tell students and their parents about the Newberry Lynchings of 1916, a hard historical truth that, according to the Washington Post, Dunn “fears will be removed from Florida history lessons under a new education law championed by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) as part of a broader push to root out ideas he deems ‘woke.'”

A lot of the higher ed news these days has me thinking about experiences I’ve had in China. (If you have access to the Chronicle of Higher Education, please see “Non-Critical Thinking in China” and “The Increasingly Authoritarian War on Tenure”.) And thinking about China’s history of totalitarianism more generally. When Mao launched the anti-rightist movement denouncing intellectuals naïve enough to respond in good faith to his call to “let one hundred flowers bloom,” Lin Zhao watched her peers–graduate students and young faculty–at Beijing University criticized, beaten, imprisoned, exiled, and killed for asking reasonable questions and making intelligent points. The Party was creating a culture of terror, she realized, one in which a person would not be permitted to think, write, or speak freely. Attempting to defend intellectual honesty meant she fell victim to the regime herself. Over thirty years later, when documentary filmmaker Hu Jie told her story in Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, he was forced to resign from his job and was forbidden from screening the film within China.

Last Wednesday, the presidents of Florida’s 28 state and community colleges announced they would eliminate any programs or requirements that, in their words, “compel[s] belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality.” Professors can teach critical race theory, the announcement read, so long as it is simply one among other points of view and as long as it is taught “objectively.” Tenured faculty in Florida may try to continue to exercise their scholarly expertise in research and teaching under these circumstances –developing curriculum, for example, on an honest history of America that includes deep dives into slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and police violence—but it will be hard. Faculty without the protections of tenure — the majority of faculty teaching — will be very unlikely to do so and will likely be advised by whomever hires them not to do so.

How do you do teach whole swaths of American history “objectively” or in a way that precludes free-floating feelings of guilt, shame, shock and outrage? “I can’t tell the story of the Newberry Six without expressing my disgust for the lynching of a pregnant woman,” Dunn says in the Washington Post article. “As a teacher who has spent 30 years going from place to place in Florida where the most atrocious things have happened, I don’t know how to do that. And I don’t want the state telling me that I must.” How do you teach holocausts, genocides, slavery, and lynching from a “viewpoint diversity” standpoint? There’s one professor at my own institution who probably considers himself a model for what DeSantis has in mind. He applies a cost-benefit analysis to historical realities like genocide and slavery. And his conclusions? The Belgian Congo, for example, resulted in the murders of something like ten million human beings but it also was responsible for the country’s modern postal system so, on balance, for this white male professor, the scale tips in favor of colonialism.

In authoritarian and totalitarian states where knowledge is controlled by one political party largely with the aim of perpetuating its rule, academic freedom does not exist. It exists only in two-party or multi-party democratic societies that agree to grant universities and colleges the degree of independence from partisan politics necessary to safeguard the integrity of the knowledge they produce and disseminate. Every state in the United States where legislation has passed seeking to restrict teaching on race and gender has rejected this basic precept, one fundamental for a functioning democracy. Florida is going furthest and fastest as Ron DeSantis eyes the White House. 

In a statement issued Friday, the AAUP responded to the announcement issued by the 28 Florida presidents:

In a democracy, higher education is a common good which requires that instructors have full freedom in their teaching to select materials and determine the approach to the subject. Instead, the FCS presidents, while giving lip service to academic freedom, have announced their intention to censor teaching and learning by expunging ideas they want to suppress. By dictating course content, they are also usurping the primary responsibility for the curriculum traditionally accorded the faculty under principles of shared governance.

Whole departments must be prepared to fight elimination and individuals need to be ready to be fired and to then go to court. First, though, the presidents of these 28 institutions must reconsider the cost-benefit analysis they no doubt undertook (i.e., if we acquiesce to DeSantis’s dictates in words, perhaps we can save most of what we do in practice). They should retract their announcement and declare that they stand for academic freedom. DeSantis’s anti-woke campaign is as messed up as Mao’s anti-rightist one was. The state has no business controlling thought. Universities that cater to a state that tries to do so betray their obligation to democracy.

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). 

Photo of Ron DeSantis by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons