BY JENNIFER RUTH
Nobody has a crystal ball but given the president-elect’s words and acts during the campaign—not to mention his seedy experiment in higher education—we would be fools not to expect an attack on the liberal institutions of shared governance and academic freedom. We need to look at what has happened to the sanctity of free intellectual inquiry and academic self-governance in other countries where illiberal regimes came to power. How were German universities deformed by the ascendance of National Socialism? What has Putin’s re-assertion of Soviet-era control over the press and academia meant for the Russian professoriate? What about Xi Jinping’s ever-tightening grip on scholars and teachers? What from all this is conceivable here? How will we use what remains of our infrastructure—the tradition and policies built by AAUP—to protect academic freedom from attacks stemming from both without and within the university? (There are always a few intellectuals wishing to hitch their stars to illiberal movements.)
It is terrifying to realize that I wrote the paragraph above on December 21, 2016, for this blog. As the faculty editor at the time for the Journal of Academic Freedom, I’d also recently solicited an essay from Johannes Chan and Douglas Kerr, faculty at the University of Hong Kong. Authoritarianism has remade the world so quickly in the seven years since then that if Johannes Chan were to write for the Journal today it would not be about how pro-Beijing forces in Hong Kong stopped him from becoming a vice-chancellor, it would be about how he has been forced to retire early and how another faculty member from his school—ex-law professor Benny Tai—now sits in jail and is likely to receive another sentence in a trial that started on Monday and includes forty-six other prodemocracy activists, including Joshua Wong.
Sunday, February 5, the Washington Post reported that the Koch network “plans to endorse a single candidate by the end of this summer, according to a person familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were confidential.” Emily Seidel, chief executive of the network’s flagship group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), is quoted as stating, “AFP Action is prepared to support a candidate in the Republican presidential primary who can lead our country forward, and who can win.” This candidate will not be Trump and they have not said who it will be, but I think we all have an idea.
The Koch ideology is or was libertarian, but libertarian and authoritarian interests have been converging for some time now. By funding think tanks, academic centers, and fellowships for individual academics churning out stories decrying left totalitarianism, as Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola explain in Free Speech and Koch Money, the libertarian network has succeeded in portraying universities and colleges as places where mobs run rampant and conservative speech must be defended. This well-funded and well-coordinated network has helped to create the political world in which right-wing pundits and politicians argue that authoritarianism is now necessary and desirable so as to “defend” the America they wish to see.
In a column in August 2021, Ross Douthat explained that Viktor Orban’s Hungary is an aspirational ideal for some conservatives because Orban’s “interventions in Hungarian cultural life, the attacks on liberal academic centers, and the spending on conservative ideological projects, are seen as examples of how political power might curb progressivism’s influence.” In “How the American Right Fell in Love With Hungary,” Elizabeth Zerofsky quotes conservative writer Rod Dreher on Orban’s defunding of gender-studies programs: “A few years ago I would have said, No, the government cannot get involved in the freedom of the universities” but now “having seen how incredibly destructive these sorts of programs have been to American society . . . I’m much more sympathetic.”
We don’t need a crystal ball when it comes to Ron DeSantis. We know what he’ll do if elected president. And we know what the people around him will try to do for him—the lawyers who will use Garcetti v. Cabellos to argue that faculty speech is not protected by the First Amendment but is employee speech under the the control of the employer; the Chris Rufos who will fill out posts like the secretary of education; and all the other culture-war grifters who will seize an opportunity to gain fame and power by twisting logic into knots in the name of an expertise that is unrecognizable to the majority of their peers (think of “academic lawyer” John Eastman).
The most recent news involving DeSantis’s pressure on the College Board is only the latest assault on academic freedom. To my mind, it does not much matter whether the president of the College Board is being honest when he says, as he did to NPR, that the revisions had already been made before Florida rejected the course. The entire incident has been another culture-war success for DeSantis as he draws national attention to himself and Florida.
In “The Meaning of African American Studies,” Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor asked Robin D. G. Kelley what he thought “happened with the College Board and this course?” Kelley answers:
There’s two levels. One is that it’s about Ron DeSantis possibly running for President. I think that’s the most important thing, because, no matter what we think about DeSantis and his policies, we know he went to Yale University, and majored in history and political science with a 3.7 G.P.A., which means that he was at one of the premier institutions for history. That’s why I get frustrated when people say he needs to take a class. He took the class. He knows better. He knows that the culture wars actually win votes. He’s trying to get the Trump constituency.
So I think this is about Ron DeSantis wanting to run for President. But I also think that the focus on Florida occludes a bigger story. As you know, this goes back to the Trump years—well before Trump, but let’s just talk about the Trump years—the attack on the 1619 Project . . . Chris Rufo’s strategy of turning critical race theory into an epithet by denying it any meaning whatsoever. And creating a buzzword. That’s actually a strategy that has nothing to do with the field of African American studies; it has everything to do with vilifying a field— attacking the whole concept of racial justice and equity. So, to me, if DeSantis never banned the class, we would still be in this situation. And although it is true that a number of states did accept the pilot program for the A.P. class, some of those same states have passed, or are about to pass, laws that are banning or limiting what they’re calling critical race theory. So there is a general assault on knowledge, but specifically knowledge that interrogates issues of race, sex, gender, and even class.
The AAUP has appointed a special committee to report on academic freedom in Florida. United Faculty Florida (UFF) is mobilizing. UFF issued this press release on January 25. “UFF supports the rights of all Floridians to learn without authoritarian control and to exercise their constitutional freedoms,” they state. Incoming University of Florida President Ben Sasse will be greeted Monday by protesters demanding, among other things, that he commit to protecting academic freedom and the institution of tenure. Union chapters and faculty senates everywhere should be discussing how to join forces within their state and across the nation as we prepare to defend academic freedom.
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).
Home page feature photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
