BY CAROLYN BETENSKY
At the AAUP Conference and Biennial Meeting last month, one of the most widely discussed sessions featured the presentation of a recent white paper written by Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP’s new Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023 is the first work product of the center, which was kick-started by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. In June, the Center named fifteen fellows.
Kamola is an associate professor of political science at Trinity College and coauthor of Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (with Ralph Wilson, Pluto Press, 2021) as well as Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Duke, 2019). I spoke with him after the conference about his work, the center, and plans for its future.
Free Speech and Koch Money, he told me, was a book he worked on during the pandemic. The book showed how the Koch brothers and their affiliates strategically funded and coordinated right-wing media platforms that crafted (and repeated) a narrative of campus political intolerance. To understand the genesis of the notion that universities were full of leftists bent on turning their students into anti-free-speech extremists, the book argues, we need to follow the money. Koch funds, the book shows, planned, planted, and reinforced the idea of campus antipathy toward free speech.
It was while Kamola was finishing his book that he was struck by the sudden transformation of public discourse in the weeks between the summer and fall of 2020. In the summer of 2020, protests against the murder of George Floyd had generated widespread discussion of structural racism and the need to create a more just state—and then, in September, talk turned, seemingly overnight, to critical race theory and the evil professors who were using it to brainwash their students. This abrupt change in discourse was all too familiar to Kamola, who saw the fingerprints of Koch affiliates all over the new language. Tracing this coordinated messaging back to the same deep-pocketed sources, the white paper Manufacturing Backlash demonstrates the elaborate construction of a right-wing echo-chamber. “It’s sad when you have a simple theory of how the world works, and your theory proves predictive each time,” Kamola observes. “In the end, the theory we developed in the book proved true and continues to prove true.”
Right-wing operatives like Christopher Rufo and Scott Yenor are not concealing the nature of their work. They have been very open about their goals and tactics. This is why Kamola insists that we must pay attention to what they say they’re doing.
This is what they say they’re doing. And they’re doing it. I think it is important to take them at their word. To take them seriously. The reports they write and the model legislation they develop may seem, on face, bankrupt, incoherent, baseless, and cringe. But it’s a clear political strategy backed by millions and millions of dollars. And it is aimed at the heart of higher education.
With its long history as a standard-bearer for the defense of academic freedom, the AAUP is the obvious home for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. The idea for the center grew out of conversations Kamola, Hans-Joerg Tiede, and others had regarding the fire hose of attacks on academic freedom. Instead of forever playing defense, they wondered, could a space be created to research and develop effective solutions to these new kinds of challenges? The manufacturers of backlash have been planning their attacks for decades. They have funded law schools to train lawyers and develop procorporate legal theory; they fund litigation groups that bring cases; and the astroturfed advocacy organizations—like Students for Fair Admission—that recruit plaintiffs and manufacture legal controversies; and then they present these cases before a Supreme Court with a six-judge supermajority handpicked by the Federalist Society. Manufacturing Backlash demonstrates that a similar well-funded and networked strategy has been at play in the recent legislative attacks on higher education.
The center aims to meet these challenges by considering policies that could be put into place to protect academic freedom. The center is interested in thinking about legislation that could enshrine academic freedom into state law and how collective bargaining agreements might include academic freedom protections for faculty.
The questions the center is poised to address have been around for the AAUP’s over 100-year history. The AAUP has developed statements and policies over the course of its existence—work of a moral clarity that is essential. What is imperative now is to find effective ways of defending academic freedom against the current, coordinated legislative attacks.
For the near term, Kamola outlines three interrelated areas of activity for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom:
- It is sponsoring core research projects in fields of the fellows’ expertise and interest. These projects will be written as white papers and circulated widely.
- A series of toolkits will be developed to assist faculty and their allies in communicating the value of academic freedom to different audiences. The center will create practical resources to guide faculty in combatting targeted attacks, such as FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) harassment. In addition, it will collect and share examples of campus practices that address targeted harassment in collective bargaining language.
- It aims to reshape the public narrative through the creation of a newsletter, webinars, and other public events. The Center will share the fellows’ research and solicit feedback on it to foster a broad conversation about what academic freedom is for.
The fifteen fellows have been selected for their diverse areas of expertise. They include law professors, historians, humanities scholars, and education researchers. Kamola insists that defending academic freedom can and should be consistent with the work we do as scholars and teachers. As the epigram for his first book, Kamola had cited the words of Guyanese historian and political theorist Walter Rodney:
Presumably, if one is a factory worker, it is on the factory floor that one’s politicization, one’s consciousness, comes out in day-to-day struggle. And if I am an academic, and so long as I remain an academic, I must attempt to make the most important political input during those very many hours that I spend contributing to teaching or researching or whatever other aspects of academic life may come into play.
In like spirit, Kamola maintains that it is essential that we use the skills we have as academics to organize our workplaces and communicate the value of what we do, and to as large an audience as possible.
Contributing editor Carolyn Betensky is professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, a former AAUP Council member, and a cofounder and executive committee member of Tenure for the Common Good.
“In the summer of 2020, protests against the murder of George Floyd had generated widespread discussion of structural racism and the need to create a more just state—and then, in September, talk turned, seemingly overnight, to critical race theory and the evil professors who were using it to brainwash their students.”
This is a rather dishonest passage. The first part assumes evidence not in court. “Widespread discussion”? Where?
I agree with the second part, but the first part is blatant wishful thinking. The people are not structural theorists. Just admit the discussion was happening internally within academia and academic circles and the Right attacked you.
Do not drag the people into our problems.
“This is a rather dishonest passage. The first part assumes evidence not in court. “Widespread discussion”? Where? … I agree with the second part, but the first part is blatant wishful thinking. The people are not structural theorists. Just admit the discussion was happening internally within academia and academic circles…”
You assert, along with your accusation of lying, that, “The people are not structural theorists.” I don’t know whether you have evidence in court (?!) to prove that assertion, or whether it is something anecdotal, based on your experience.
What I now say is based on my experience growing up as an Indigenous (Native American) person — born, raised and educated on a reservation, with careers in roofing, law, tribal government and finally, as a professor of Native American Studies. I have spent time researching, applying and teaching about the various types of governmental structures that have been built in this country and around the world. I have also simply sat in conversation with or listened to other Native Peoples, both academic and non-academic. All of this has shown me that, because of Indigenous Peoples’ lived experiences with colonialist governments, the vast majority of us are aware of the origins and operations of the governmental structures that we are forced to deal with today.
In a sense, you are correct: we are not structural theorists. Most Indigenous non-academics don’t propose theories about governmental structures. They simply talk about the facts of our existence and make plans about how to best either work around or dismantle those structures that threaten our Indigenous freedoms. No theories, just looking for solutions.
To restate: I am only speaking from my experiences as a Native person who knew facts concerning these structures before I ever entered law or academia. Ever since I became aware of the histories and politics of the world around me, the non-academic discussions I have had with other Natives have shown me that we are mostly aware of governmental, social and cultural structures that result in huge inequities for us and the other oppressed peoples of the world. I resent how you, who are privileged to have extensive academic experience under your belt, can so easily insult those who you believe, because of their lack of education, are not capable of theorizing about such structures.
A personal testimony from an academic from a very real community still does not merit the statement made in the article, which is patently misleading.
Ecological fallacies are largely shortcomings in either analytic skills or interest, or a rhetorical interest — which would include testimony — that finds them cumbersome.
When people try to use their testimony hat as if it were their professor hat, and vice versa, I wonder, who benefits?
That is where the ecological fallacy comes in. But, testimony itself is unimpeached. And you are emeritus. You can tell me who benefits. But I would need an analytic, not a testimonial, answer.
I grant that the distinction I am trying to make here is highly debatable. Please take my words as posing that honestly. I am skeptical about the real extent of the influence of traditional vendors of information in the 21st century, is the simplest way I can put it.
So now we are proposing to violate FIOA laws? Whatever happened to the “pursuit of truth” and “open and educated society?” Apparently the AAUP and its allies hate the general populace so much, that they now wish to abandon these principles they claim they have championed. That, or the have been lying the entire time.
I am ashamed and disgraced to have ever once supported and been a member of this organization.