BY HANK REICHMAN
Today the New York Times published an article recounting the continuing struggle at Barnard College, the women’s college of Columbia University in New York, over the academic freedom and free speech rights of faculty and students. To briefly summarize, three weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies posted a statement on its departmental website that condemned the attacks, but also expressed support for the Palestinian struggle against “settler colonialism.” Within days major portions of the statement were removed by the Barnard administration, without notice to members of the department. On October 26, Barnard president Laura Rosenbury released a campus communication, “A Time for Action,” condemning both Islamophobia and antisemitism, the latter of which the statement conflated, inaccurately many charged, with critiques of Israeli policy or of Zionist ideology. Rosenbury also ominously informed the campus that “I have led our senior team in reviewing and improving various policies at Barnard, including those related to on-campus events and postings and student group funding. We will continue to revise our policies so that we may more quickly take action in response to hate speech and discrimination.”
Those policy changes governing political activity, website materials, and campus events, were in late October and November implemented behind closed doors by top administrators, unvetted by any representative faculty body. They give the administration extensive power, to quote the Times, “to decide what was and was not permissible political speech on campus, as well as final say over everything posted on Barnard’s website.” On December 19, Arthur Eisenberg of the New York Civil Liberties Union dispatched a six-page letter, citing the AAUP at length, to Rosenbury outlining in detail the organization’s concerns that the newly imposed policies “violate academic freedom” and represent a textbook example of “prior restraint.”
“If private campuses decide that they can stifle political discourse they don’t approve of, then schools are no longer a haven for debate, discussion, and learning,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union in a press statement. “Barnard’s new review process stifles the give and take of political and academic scholarship and is a flagrant example of ‘prior restraint,’ the most restrictive kind of censorship because it curtails speech before it is uttered. In this moment, when academic freedom is under attack, the academic community must encourage more speech to refute ideas that may be objectionable, invite more voices into difficult conversations, and create an environment where faculty and students can voice their beliefs.”
While perhaps more draconian than some, the Barnard measures are, unfortunately, just one example of a broad assault on academic freedom and campus free speech focused at the moment on pro-Palestinian expression that some may construe as antisemitic (but not all Jewish scholars do; see, for example, here). That assault, however, will have an impact on more than expression concerning the current Mideast morass. Well before October 7, many university administrations sought to curb faculty and student expression that they fear may alienate important external players: trustees, alumni, donors, or politicians. At the University of California, for example, the board of regents is set to vote this week on a proposed “Policy on Use of University Administrative Websites” that would bar websites of “schools, departments, centers, units, and other entities” from “publicly expressing the personal or collective opinions of unit members or of the entity, as other means of publicly conveying such opinions are available.” In a letter to the Board, the UC Academic Senate expressed its concern that the process by which the policy was developed “circumvented normal shared governance protocols for a policy that will significantly affect faculty across the University.”
Returning to the Barnard events, I can’t help but point out that as co-chair of the AAUP’s special investigation of political interference in Florida’s public higher education system, I was already familiar with President Rosenbury’s cavalier treatment of academic freedom. Rosenbury came to Barnard directly from a stint as dean of the University of Florida’s law school. There she negatively distinguished herself for her collaboration with efforts by the university administration to prevent law school professors from testifying before the state legislature in opposition to measures supported by Governor Ron DeSantis and the board of governors. In interviews with multiple members of the law school faculty, we heard of Rosenbury’s callous disregard for faculty rights and of her efforts to “rein in” faculty governance. One law professor told us that then-Dean Rosenbury might say the right things in a faculty meeting, but never in public.
The search committee that recommended President Rosenbury’s hiring included four faculty members and two students but was dominated by trustees and employed a search firm. As has sadly become all too common, no finalists were announced and, so far as I can tell, Rosenbury did not meet with members of the campus community before her appointment was made. And I’m guessing that no one probed very deeply, if at all, into her record and views on academic freedom and on her apparent fealty to the demands of that great “educator,” Ron DeSantis.
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.
Departmental endorsement of political positions is a clear threat to academic freedom. Students will be intimidated and untenured faculty would have to fear serious problems at tenure review if they were to take different positions from the official departmental orthodoxy. The AAUP should stand firmly against such undermining of academic freedom.
To clarify, I did not intend to suggest that either the statement in question was appropriate or that there are not weighty academic freedom and free speech issues surrounding the practice of posting such departmental political statements. This is a matter of some debate and I, for one, am skeptical. But the issue at Barnard is much larger. It is, first, a matter of the administration’s declaration of policy that ALL political expression on campus must be subject to advance administrative approval. This means that in the end the Barnard president gets to decide which speech is inappropriately “political” and which isn’t. So, as the Times article notes, while the pro-Palestinian statement was taken down, other political statements about other, less controversial, issues (to some) remain. The questionable workability of such a policy notwithstanding, I therefore think the NYCLU is correct to warn of its ominous implications. Second, these policies — and the proposed policy in California — have been developed, and in the case of Barnard imposed, without any faculty input or consideration. This is all the more problematic precisely because professors disagree about whether such statements are appropriate and whether they might be seen as imposing orthodoxies.
Thanks, Hank Reichman, for your thoughtful comments.
But don’t you think the administration’s own position is political? We cannot escape politics, especially if we claim to be trying. To speak out against racism and genocide is a political position, but it’s one that I hope we can agree on, even as some nations practice racism and genocide. Administrators and wealthy conservative donors have their own political investments–they are not, and cannot be, neutral.