BY ELI MEYERHOFF AND ISAAC KAMOLA
Learning is under attack. Right-wing politicians, activists, and well-funded political organizations have organized assaults on schools, universities, and libraries with book bans, surveillance and harassment of teachers, canceling classes, and “divisive concepts” bills that limit teachers’ rights to talk about topics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The AAUP and others have defended universities under the banner of “academic freedom,” painting these attacks as violations of academics’ rights to govern themselves and determine their courses. For example, the AAUP’s Special Committee on Academic Freedom and Florida found that Governor Ron DeSantis’s ideological war on higher education threatens to “grievously undermine basic and long-standing principles of academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance.” Likewise, the Special Committee Report on the UNC System found severe violations of academic freedom and governance.
These are just two examples of how attacks against academic freedom have become more organized and concentrated in recent decades. Today, attacks on academic freedom originate from state houses, governors’ offices, partisan political organizations, think tanks, and online trolls. This multi-pronged attack on academic freedom requires a mass political—rather than a merely individual, institutional, or procedural—response. We question whether the language of academic freedom provides the strongest framework for a successful mass defense against this political onslaught. We suggest that an alternative, complementary principle, “freedom to learn,” offers a more widely resonant rallying cry.
Academic freedom is a right claimed by a small section of the overall populace, an esoteric principle based on claims to specialized training and expertise. Even during the high-water mark of tenure during the mid-twentieth century, the principles of academic freedom were susceptible to concerted political attacks. For example, many faculty and faculty organizations, including the AAUP, succumbed to attacks on academic freedom during the Red Scares (as detailed by Ellen Schrecker and Clyde Barrow). More recently, consider the post-9/11 academic repression during the “war on terror” and the ongoing repression of academics and students critical of the state of Israel (see the AAUP’s 2003 report, Beshara Doumani’s edited volume, and Steven Salaita).
With the increased reliance on contingent faculty appointments and the erosion of tenure, academic freedom is experienced very differently depending on one’s employment status. For the new majority of contingent faculty, academic freedom protections feel remote. For the general public, academic freedom and tenure can easily be reduced to an elite privilege, one that offers considerable personal benefit (that is, lifetime employment) without a widely understood social benefit.
For a more effective defense against right-wing attacks on learning, we turn to the responses of social movements, particularly those groups organizing under the broad principle of “the freedom to learn”—echoing a 1949 essay by W. E. B. Du Bois. The Freedom to Learn Movement emerged from opposition to the College Board’s decision to rewrite the AP African American studies course curriculum, at the urging of Florida governor Ron DeSantis in February 2023. The movement is endorsed by numerous organizations, including organizations central to the civil rights movement: the NAACP, SPLC (with its Learning for Justice campaign), National Action Network, Legal Defense Fund, and others.
The movement’s invocation of freedom to learn includes appeals to academic freedom. After all, how can students be free to learn when their teachers are scared because the state legislature has outlawed discussions of gender or race? How can college students enjoy freedom to learn when research from decades of academic inquiry is deemed merely a “divisive concept,” with Republican legislatures deciding what merits academic consideration? The language of “freedom to learn,” in other words, situates the principle of academic freedom within a broader value. In Du Bois’s terms, that value includes giving students the tools “to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be.”
The framework of freedom to learn is also more encompassing, addressing attacks on academic freedom for faculty as well as attacks on the rights of students, parents, K–12 educators, librarians, and the broader public. For example, the American Historical Association’s letter to the Alabama senate in opposition to the “divisive concepts” bill notes that “the bill contains an explicit violation of a bedrock tenet of academic freedom.” It also recognizes that this attack on academic freedom “violates a central tenet of good history education; we help students learn how to think, rather than tell them what to think.” In response to right-wing attacks on a wide range of learning institutions, the language of “freedom to learn” draws political affinities and solidarities between higher education faculty, K–12 educators, students, and librarians. It can link and amplify a common movement against these attacks, across ages and labor sectors, building solidarity across their often disconnected struggles.
Doing so could entail a productive engagement with the AAUP’s understanding of academic freedom. For example, the AAUP’s founding document, the 1915 Declaration, starts with the recognition that “‘academic freedom’ has traditionally had two applications—to the freedom of the teachers and to that of the student.” However, immediately after drawing the distinction between Lehrfreiheit (“freedom to teach”) and Lernfreiheit (“freedom to learn”), the Declaration goes on to state that “It need scarcely be pointed out that the freedom which is the subject of this report is that of the teacher.” In this fraught contemporary moment, “Lernfreiheit” might also serve as a foundation for a more inclusive and publicly supported notion of academic freedom, one that centers not only student learning but also the faculty freedoms and protections required to ensure that students have that freedom to learn.
One challenge when advocating for a “freedom to learn,” however, is that intellectual freedom and “viewpoint diversity” have also become staples of right-wing efforts to undermine academic freedom. Conservative students and organizations, such as the National Association of Scholars, have turned to Lernfreiheit as a way to criticize “diversity bureaucracy” and “components of higher education that have become irredeemably politicized, such as ‘service-learning,’ ‘community service,’ and ‘sustainability’, which have become euphemisms for social justice advocacy,” and to mandate “viewpoint diversity.”
“Freedom to learn” is a contested concept with drastically different versions from different political perspectives. Radical libertarian versions of Lernfreiheit offer a view of the classroom that fetishizes the individual student’s choices and actively devalues efforts to create more equal and just conditions for learning collectively. In this account, the freedom to learn is an individualized, personal freedom, erasing the collective conditions that make learning possible. By contrast, the freedom to learn movement offers a collective, democratic, embodied, place-based view of learning. By situating individuals’ learning within collective practices of study—which bring together fellow students, professors, pre-K–12 teachers, librarians, and more—“freedom to learn” becomes a powerful defensive and movement-building tool. Through understanding our shared material, historical, and intersectional conditions for learning, we can see how our distinct struggles to improve our conditions are bound up with each other. When we see academic freedom as part of, and interdependent with, a broader and collective freedom to learn, we expand our understandings of both principles and also broaden alliances to create better conditions for defending and realizing them.
Eli Meyerhoff is an independent scholar and a lab manager at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Isaac Kamola is associate professor of political science at Trinity College.
Consistent with this post, I have argued for decades that we need to move beyond an elitist conception of academic freedom as a special right of college faculty, largely limited to individuals with tenure, and should embrace instead a more expansive and defensible conception of academic freedom as the freedom to do academic work, including freedoms of teaching, learning, and inquiry.
https://www.aaup.org/JAF8/academic-freedom-freedom-do-academic-work#.Y6MjrOzMIqu
Interesting post. A couple questions.
“Academic freedom is a right claimed by a small section of the overall populace, an esoteric principle based on claims to specialized training and expertise.”
This is puzzling. Don’t academics in fact have specialized training and expertise?
“Right-wing politicians, activists, and well-funded political organizations have organized assaults on schools, universities, and libraries with book bans, surveillance and harassment of teachers, canceling classes, and “divisive concepts” bills that limit teachers’ rights to talk about topics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.”
This description seems partial and selective. The right-wing doesn’t, sadly, have a monopoly on hostility to academic freedom. It’s pretty clear that a substantial number of attacks on academic freedom come from inside the university, don’t come from the right, and don’t fit the quoted description very well. E.g., the recent business at Hamline, pretty well-documented in the Chronicle, limited teachers’ rights to talk about (and students’ rights to learn about) religion and art. Though it did involve the harassment of teachers.
I agree with the concept of “freedom to learn” and a broader conception of academic freedom that includes K-12 teaching. The term “lernfreiheit” is flawed; the German concept was more about the freedom of students to choose their classes and choose whether to attend them, and had little to do with freedom to learn and political freedoms. “Lehrfreiheit” was similarly flawed because it was limited to purely academic speech. The AAUP used “academic freedom” as a term that encompassed a much broader freedom that protected extramural utterances. So I would avoid merging these archaic German terms with more liberatory terms such as “freedom to learn.” While there is a history of cynical conservatives like David Horowitz using “student academic freedom” to call for silencing faculty, we can argue for better understandings of these terms that promote a vision of freedom for everyone.
Great post, thank you! And thank you to the F2L movement — the broadest possible coalition of organizations and members (faculty, staff, students, parents) is needed right now and F2L is a perfect slogan for this movement.
I get the frustration with the regular use of “academic freedom” as a phrase in these discussions in ways that (a) are unlikely to gain much traction, given how few people can actually claim the protections of academic freedom through tenure or equivalent contractual protections; and/or (b) conflate free speech, the student’s right to learn, and faculty autonomy over their research and teaching. Rather than going all in on combining distinct rights (all of which are under attack simultaneously at this cultural moment, for sure) under the banner of “academic freedom,” though, I wonder if it’d be better to use F2L alone for this bigger, broader battle and reserve “academic freedom” for the more specific right of relative job security for faculty by way of tenure or contractual provisions that operate as roadblocks to arbitrary or peremptory termination. (How do faculty know if they have academic freedom if not by the fact that they do or do not have some right to due process and a panel of our disciplinary peers rather than being subject to the immediate dictates of outside actors like politicians or supervisors without any expertise in the areas in which we are working?)
The same forces are coming after tenure and after unions, of course — as you all point out. And I wonder if maintaining some distinct sense of “academic freedom” — or building an awareness of this — might be important as we fight to retain the faculties’ right to determine the standards of their fields, to evaluate one another (rather than cede evaluation to outsiders), and set curriculum. Expanding the phrase “academic freedom” to encompass all learning might weaken whatever judicial and common law (AAUP policies and procedures) supports the term now has — however tenuous and undermined. “Tenure” itself, as a term and a practice, is less important, then, than is the argument that all researching and teaching instructors need to have contractual protections from arbitrary dismissal and provisions enabling them to pursue their fields of inquiry as defined by those fields and their peers (not outside actors) — those are the material bases for academic freedom and we need academic unions to collectively bargain specifically for them while also joining the broader social F2l movement.