BY JOHN K. WILSON

Former AAUP President Cary Nelson has just published his latest book, Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles (Academic Studies Press, 2024). John K. Wilson interviewed him by email about the book.

John K. Wilson: You and I disagreed about the Steven Salaita firing at UIUC. You argue in this book that the AAUP in its 2015 report on the Salaita case “reversed” a long-standing policy that tweets related to a professor’s expertise can have “professional consequences.” The AAUP since 1964 has protected any extramural utterance unless it “clearly demonstrates” “weighty evidence of unfitness” to a faculty committee that considers the “entire record.” Do you agree these are AAUP’s standards, and didn’t Salaita’s firing violate them?

Cary Nelson: Unfortunately, neither the program that sought to hire Salaita nor the university administration ever considered Salaita’s entire record. Neither all of his major publications nor his social media posts were ever comprehensively reviewed. I am the only person who conducted such a review. One can dispute my conclusions, but not the breadth of the analysis. That 20,000-word review is published in my 2019 book Israel Denial. In Salaita’s books and essays I found that he was unable to distinguish between opinion and evidence, that his scholarship did not meet the standards of a research university. His tweets duplicated the same flawed arguments, and they fell precisely in the areas in which he was to be teaching at Illinois. Any evaluation now of who Salaita is and his fitness to teach would also have to take note of his support for Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel. As to his having been “fired,” for decades the AAUP staff advised faculty members changing jobs that they did not have an enforceable employment contract until the board signed it. They were advised not to resign their present position until that happened.

Like Matt Finkin and Robert Post in their book For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom, I hold that social media posts in the areas of a faculty member’s teaching and research should not count as extramural. They are part of a faculty member’s professional profile. The AAUP, however, now views all social media activity as protected from professional evaluation. That position is irrational and irresponsible and cannot survive public scrutiny. The occasional intemperate post should not be held against a faculty member, but a persistent pattern of professionally compromised public speech merits full academic consideration. The AAUP’s current position means that faculty members should be held harmless for repeatedly making false statements or endorsing calls for violence on social media. The AAUP makes it possible for a faculty member to develop a protected online persona dedicated to hate speech that does serious harm.

John K. Wilson: You argue that colleges can refuse to hire and deny tenure for professors who meet the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) standard of antisemitism. Should a similar rule apply to professors who are deemed racist, sexist, Islamophobic, homophobic, or transphobic, including for political positions? Would this standard allow the firing of Zionists if someone thinks Zionism is racism? 

Cary Nelson: I open Hate Speech and Academic Freedom with a model policy that specifies how the IHRA Definition can and cannot be used. I go on to say specifically that we do not need to hire or promote candidates who indulge in explicit racism or antisemitism. The IHRA Definition’s eleven examples are a useful place to begin an evaluation of antisemitic expression, but that evaluation requires contextualization in both the context of a candidate’s full dossier and in the standards that govern contemporary scholarship. Hiring committees routinely make value judgments about the quality and character of a candidate’s work. They can, for example, conclude that an Islamophobic, homophobic, or antisemitic candidate would not make a productive contribution to teaching or research. Of course scores of Zionist candidates are also already being improperly rejected by programs that believe Zionism is racism. Those programs are guilty of antisemitic bias. Zionism is not simply a political belief; it is integral to Jewish identity, peoplehood, and religious heritage. It has no inherent racist character, no inherent discriminatory aims. Islamophobia, homophobia, and antisemitism to the contrary are all forms of delusional hatred. As I detail in my book, over a period of a decade, the national AAUP has gradually evolved into an anti-Zionist organization that risks identification with antisemitism.

John K. Wilson: You played a key role in the AAUP’s 2007 “Freedom in the Classroom” report. Now you denounce disciplines “pervasively dedicated to indoctrination” and write, “we were wrong.” If “we now face advocacy run amok,” is your solution to revoke “Freedom in the Classroom” and withdraw academic freedom from advocacy you dislike? Who do you trust to ban bad advocacy and allow good advocacy?

Cary Nelson: I remain generally supportive of “Freedom in the Classroom,” but not of its unwarranted universal confidence in academic disciplines. For decades the AAUP trusted disciplinary consensus as a basis for what counts as true and valid for members of an academic discipline. Along with others, I believed that academic disciplines that went off the rails would in time correct themselves. For some humanities and social science disciplines that have become pervasively dedicated to political conformity and indoctrination that confidence is no longer merited. Some disciplines have abandoned research standards and are effectively lost to reason. There is no sign they will self-correct. Disciplines that impose political conformity on their students and faculty are those that represent “advocacy run amuck.” Often they persistently devote themselves to political advocacy having no relation to the disciplinary mission. Faculty senates are well equipped to recognize that pattern. Politically compromised disciplines need to have their authority to hire be withdrawn entirely or turned over to external committees. Their tenure decisions need to be overseen by multidisciplinary committees that engage with disciplinary bias. Faculty in STEM fields and, increasingly, members of the public regard those disciplines with contempt. In Hate Speech and Academic Freedom I deal extensively with the threats posed by social media and detail how they should be handled in personnel decisions. I also recommend a policy that would prohibit academic departments from issuing official statements on controversial political issues.

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author or editor of 36 books. He served as national president of the AAUP from 2006 to 2012 and is currently chair of the Alliance for Academic Freedom.

John K. Wilson is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies and the forthcoming book The Attack on Academia.