BY HANK REICHMAN

Last week the AAUP released a special investigative report, “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.”  In interview after interview with faculty members in Florida, the investigating committee, which I co-chaired, “heard repeated complaints not only about the silence of their campus and system administrators but also about administrators’ direct complicity in implementing policies that would severely restrict academic freedom and faculty and student rights more generally.”  Our report acknowledged that “institutions might suffer devastating retaliatory budget cuts” if university leaders more openly resisted policies promoted by the legislature and governor that provide their funding.  Still, we concluded, “the approach of many of the administrators appears more cowardly than cautious.”  At a December 6 press conference announcing the report, in conversations with reporters, on the AAUP Presents podcast, and on the Changing Higher Ed Podcast, which has an audience of higher education administrators and trustees, I and other committee members have repeatedly emphasized this theme, calling on more university leaders to “grow a spine.”

How can college and university administrators stand up to external political pressures like those we found in Florida?  That question acquired additional urgency last week when, even as the AAUP was releasing its report, a Congressional committee interrogated three university presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, demanding not only that they condemn antisemitism on their campuses but that they punish students and faculty members who, in the eyes of politicians, may be overly critical of the Israeli government, and that they enact more stringent limits on expressive rights.  As Len Gutkin noted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the hearing “represented the appearance on the national stage of the political interference state legislatures have been bringing to bear on colleges for the last several years.”

Directly linking the hearing to the Florida assault on higher education, right-wing provocateur Ilya Shapiro responded to the resignations of Penn President Magill and Board Chair Scott Bok, which followed the hearing, with this post on X (formerly Twitter):

The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote of the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s, in which faculty members, entertainers, journalists, and government officials were compelled to disavow purported past Communist affiliations and prove their sincerity by “naming names” of others, that, in these efforts, “Communism was not the target, but the weapon.”  So now today antisemitism is not the target; it has become a weapon employed in a broader assault on academic freedom and liberal democratic education more broadly.

This point has been well made by John Wilson on this blog, free speech advocates like Eugene Volokh and Will Creely of FIRE, and by many writers and journalists, including Will Bunch, Michelle Goldberg, Robert Kuttner, Jay Michaelson, and Gutkin.  As Kuttner put it, “The extreme right defends Jews as a way of both bashing universities and defending Netanyahu, who conflates criticism of Israel’s actions with antisemitism.  It is a cynical alliance of cynics.”  There is little need, therefore, for me to recapitulate those arguments here.  Instead, I want to address the question of how college and university leaders might best respond to this sort of external pressure.  For if anyone thought that the kind of political interference we have decried in Florida (and before that in North Carolina) would be limited to so-called “red states,” this hearing and the backlash it produced should serve as a dire warning.

Indeed, on December 9, New York Governor Kathy Hochul sent a letter to all New York State College and University Presidents declaring her shock “to see the presidents of several prominent universities . . . fail to clearly and unequivocally denounce antisemitism and calls for genocide of the Jewish people on their college campuses.”  She then announced that “if any school in New York State is found to be in violation” of federal or state antidiscrimination laws “I will activate the State’s Division of Human Rights to take aggressive enforcement action and will refer possible Title VI violations to the federal government,” suggesting (improperly) that expression of such sentiments might violate these statutes.  And if the implication was not clear enough, Gov. Hochul added, “The moral lapses that were evidenced by the disgraceful answers to questions posed during this week’s congressional hearing cannot and will not be tolerated here in the state of New York.”

Gutkin has identified two “plain truths” emerging from the Congressional hearing.  “First, many politicians misunderstand academic freedom, or pretend to do so, and if left unchallenged, might prove perfectly capable of McCarthyite interventions more repressive than anything seen in half a century or more.  Second, elite-college leaders are unequipped to address the perception, held by much of the public and by many within their own institutions, that they tolerate an egregious double standard when it comes to academic freedom, one that punishes conservatives and consecrates the left.”  I’m not sure what we can do about the first problem, beyond continuing to work to convince our fellow citizens to vote such politicians out.  But the second problem is one that we should address.

I believe this perception of a double standard is greatly exaggerated, but not entirely unfounded.  Certainly there are legitimate debates to be had over how best to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, or how best to address various forms of “hate speech” and prejudice among students and, to a degree, faculty too.  That these debates have too often been sabotaged by ideologues and partisans should not extinguish them.

That said, however, there are other reasons that so many higher ed leaders are unequipped or poorly equipped to handle controversy.  For one thing, as Swarthmore College history professor Timothy Burke explained in a perceptive essay on the topic (which deserves a full and careful reading), college and university presidents “are extremely unpracticed now at communicating in situations that aren’t one of two things: intensely controlled or entirely predictable.”  He continues,

What they know, however they’ve learned it, is to send intermediaries into the more fraught situations, or to simply avoid them entirely.  It’s relatively easy to be too busy at need, to delegate as a sign of seeming respect for the delegatee (while more or less knowing it’s hanging someone out to dry), or to insist on process and incrementalism as a way to wait out a potentially unrehearsed conversation or appearance.

This would go generally for a lot of heads of organizations, including corporations, but I think higher education’s structures for managing communications and controlling conversations are more comprehensive, in part because they dovetail into general ideas about civility, decorum, consensus and process that are more generally shared within the professional environment of most universities and colleges.

Moreover, decades of acceding to the demands not only of legislators but of major donors, of running campuses “like a business,” and of treating students as “customers” to be coddled rather than learners to be challenged have, it seems, created an academic leadership class predisposed to striving for conformity from those below them while making comfortable those to whom they report, especially when they hold the power of the purse.  So, as The New York Times has documented, at Penn President Magill was the target of a ruthless and sustained campaign by powerful donors and trustees to undermine her authority, even as she sought to assuage that group with actions that, in effect, alienated many on the campus.  As the Penn-AAUP Executive Committee wrote,

President Magill has spent the last several months fruitlessly attempting to placate donors, trustees, members of Congress, and lobbying organizations that neither understand nor respect the principles of academic freedom—principles that the AAUP set out a century ago to safeguard the academic mission of the university.  President Magill has recapitulated their dangerous conflations of antisemitism with an overly broad range of academic programming and political speech and has tolerated and even contributed to the targeted harassment of faculty.  In doing so, she has not protected herself from criticism, but has emboldened attacks on faculty members, on academic freedom, and on the basic academic functioning of the University of Pennsylvania.  Yesterday’s Congressional hearing provided the clearest evidence yet that President Magill has committed a grave error in casting her lot with those who have threatened and humiliated her in order to instrumentalize her in a campaign against scholarship and teaching.

As further illustration last week we also learned that University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz will depart that institution to become president of Michigan State University.  The AAUP’s 2022 special investigation of the North Carolina public higher education system, in which I also participated, found Guskiewicz to be no hero.  But despite some missteps he was well respected by the faculty.  He tried tirelessly to work with, and even at times stand up to, a board and a political establishment disdainful of shared governance and academic freedom, and which demonstrated levels of intolerance, venality, and general know-nothingness exceeded, perhaps, only by the Florida Board of Governors and the New College of Florida Board of Trustees.  Upon the announcement of his departure, Mimi Chapman, Frank A. Daniels Distinguished Professor for Human Service Policy Information in the School of Social Work at UNC-Chapel Hill, who served as chair of the university faculty from 2020 to 2023, described in vivid detail what Guskiewicz had endured in a too often fruitless effort to accommodate trustees and still protect the institution, much of which is also recounted in the AAUP report, an experience she described as “brutal.”

“Who wants to lead in such a situation?” Chapman asked.

Imagine what it must feel like to prepare for two days per month with your board, the entity with which you are supposed to hold the institution in trust.  Yet you might as well be walking into a viper pit, full of people who hiss one thing to your face and another behind closed doors.  This one’s jockeying for political office.  This one wants to get rid of tenured faculty.  That one is a champion of civility, except to those who tell him things he doesn’t want to hear.  Yet another is all about free speech for everyone except you.  You, Chancellor, are not to speak unless we okay it.  In fact, don’t make an announcement to reduce tuition for lower income families or lament a U.S. Supreme Court ruling the institution fought for nine years.

One wonders why these people want to be involved in the university at all.  Except for the basketball games and the glitzy fundraising events, they seem to hate everything about the place.

“Choosing to serve in a public institution, in whatever capacity, is a gift to the larger world. It is a statement that says everyone deserves to have access to a college education, that the world needs research and scholarship that is done for the public good, not to enrich a corporation or stockholders,” Chapman eloquently concludes.

So, what is a university president to do?  “Beleaguered university presidents now face a three-front battle,” Kuttner writes.  “First, they need the right balance of defending free speech while not condoning hate speech, much less incitement.  Second, they need to stand up and resist the new McCarthyism.  And third, university trustees need to prevent billionaire donors from deciding university policy.”  Might sound simple, but it’s a tall order given the realities on so many campuses today.  Indeed, the dust had barely begun to settle at Penn when billionaire donor and trustee Marc Rowan yesterday circulated a loaded “questionnaire” to the trustees that, in the words of the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee, threaten a “hostile takeover of the core academic functions of the University of Pennsylvania—functions related to curriculum, research, and the hiring and evaluation of faculty.”

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic, enraged that the testifying presidents “let half a country down,” concluded that higher ed leaders “are charged with defending a way of thinking and living that is under ceaseless attack” and “have a responsibility to represent that way of thinking and living for the rest of us who believe in it but don’t have the opportunity” to publicly defend it.  To meet that charge such leaders, he argues, need to “show a little passion.  Passion would communicate that this actually matters to them in a deep way.”  In short, these leaders will have to, at long last, “grow a spine.”  And remind themselves of what and whom they stand for.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair 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 October, 2021.