BY JOE LOCKARD
Very few people other than faculty members pay attention to faculty statements directed at administrations. It is rare that they have political impact beyond colleges and universities. We nonetheless write and publish them as instruments for establishing a faculty voice.
Therein lies a problem: faculty statements can become blinkered issuances that use idealistic language to defend faculty privilege. The voice becomes haughty, elitist, exclusionary, and dismissive, often unconscious of its own social resonance.
The June 12 statement from the University of Minnesota AAUP chapter provides an example of this problem when discussing the revocation of Professor Raz Segal’s proposed appointment as director of the university’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
In this statement, community voices became intrusive enemies rather than allies. It refers to “outside lobbying groups,” “outside groups,” and “outside politically-motivated groups.” Even faculty members who resigned from the search committee and objected on grounds of conscience supposedly acted “outside the norms of acceptable faculty conduct,” as though objection constituted academic treason. The statement’s incessant repetition of outside seeks to label people as illegitimate actors intruding upon and interfering with internal decision-making.
Whereas US colleges and universities almost universally emphasize community engagement, this statement rejects the idea that community organizations have legitimate consultative and participatory roles, even in relation to academic units that seek to interact with these communities. Along these same lines, University of Minnesota faculty member Alexander Jabbari suggests that “the community” is a misrepresentative term employed by an outside group whose involvement would have “seriously negative consequences for academic freedom.”
This exclusion is a quasicolonial, antidemocratic model of university-community relations, one in which actors deploy “academic freedom” claims to reject expressions of adverse community opinion and deny influence on decision-making.
The AAUP chapter’s denunciation of outside voices leaves group identity unstated: these are Jewish organizations and Jewish community members. Once again, Jews are the outsiders. The last time the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies undertook a search for a director it was different. In 2012, the Jewish community had a representative on the search committee. According to the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), this time it was “not even made aware that a search was occurring” despite the JCRC’s mission and community responsibility for Holocaust education or its publicly listed status as a center partner.
Those responsible for the search did not care about Jewish public opinion even though the center works closely with the Jewish community. There was manifest insularity in decision-making. If the hire had gone through despite Professor Segal’s outrageous victim-blaming public statements, there may well have been a community boycott of the center.
Segal very visibly embraced a position that is anathema in the eyes of one of the major communities that the center seeks to serve. If the decision-makers involved in the hiring were surprised by the controversy, then they were not competent to make this decision. If they were not surprised, then we should ask searching questions about the mentality or motives behind the decision. The entire story points either to administrative blindness or to a deliberate and insulting exclusion and disregard of broad Jewish community opinion.
Professor Segal complains about “crude and very dangerous” political intervention and a “hateful campaign of lies and distortions.” To the contrary, his extreme and offensive politics provoked a community reaction and letter-writing campaign from people quite capable of reading Segal’s published opinions. That reaction focused on Segal’s appointment to lead a community-engaged center, not on his scholarship. The issue was the impact of Segal’s extramural speech on his professional fitness for this role. The AAUP recognizes professional fitness as a legitimate consideration in academic personnel decisions.
There is deep and untenable hypocrisy in protesting politics or political intrusion while functioning as a political actor. Segal compounds this hypocrisy by asserting in a Democracy Now! interview that political expression by a broadly representative Jewish community organization provokes antisemitism. So, Segal may speak and invoke his Jewishness: other Jews, the vast majority, should remain silent in his opinion. This does not augur well for community relationships.
Attempted defenses from both the AAUP chapter letter and Segal represent the content of extramural political speech as objective scholarship that merits the protections of academic freedom. This is a self-elevating claim for faculty to enjoy privileged speech in the political arena as an exempt special class immune from accountability.
Segal’s “interrelated scholarly and extramural speech” asks for political action yet objects vehemently when there is adverse action for his professional future. A desire for public influence beyond the world of scholarship is commendable but it is unreasonable and unworkable to demand exemption from consequential reaction. As former AAUP president Cary Nelson observes, “academic freedom protects your right to say what you want, but it doesn’t protect you from professional consequences for doing so.”
Demands for individual exemption from consequences, together with demands for community silence on higher education issues, convey raging social arrogance from academic quarters. Worse, the story and the AAUP chapter letter signal disregard and show contempt for the Jewish community at large and the expression of widely shared communal sensibilities.
The call for exclusion of “outsiders” carried here an implicit call for exclusion of the “wrong” outsiders. The academic season now commencing will see many challenges over issues relating to Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. In dealing with those questions, faculty, administrators, and the AAUP should look towards community inclusion rather than exclusion parading beneath a misused flag of academic freedom.
Joe Lockard is associate professor of English at Arizona State University–Tempe.
Post-pandemic the most pressing issue for academic freedom is to re-establish respect for tenure. You can’t build further structures, if that foundation stone is lost.
At the level of tenure, I have yet to hear a compelling use of the academic freedom argument. Tenure is not about the right to make waves. This has been one of the most serious errors — and rather narcissistic — I have witnessed in US academia: a botching of what academic freedom means re: tenure.
The narcissism must be deep, because the solution re: tenure is not complicated. Tenure is the judgment of the faculty of a school they want you in their intellectual community. In this use case, academic freedom is not about making waves. It is strictly about having that judgment respected.
When my school terminated tenured faculty in the covid years, no one made this argument. The official argument, the AAUP argument, is that tenure protects individual rights, the right of that professor.
I cannot think of a better way to misplay our hand, than our current approach of focusing on the individual over the collective freedom of the faculty.
Until this gross misstep is broadly addressed, these concerns about advanced projects are almost unseemly. We are all being divided, and thus conquered.
This essay is a deeply misguided attack on academic freedom. The fact that professors help the community does not mean that community groups should get to censor professors or decide that professors with controversial views should not be hired. It is not “quasicolonial” or “antidemocratic” to argue that faculty can help the community without being controlled by politically powerful community groups. Faculty should be hired based on academic merit, and not based on what outside groups want. It’s not elitism to defend academic merit against the demands of political elites who want to silence faculty with dissenting views. Lockard’s argument that “professional fitness” is violated by “offensive” extramural utterances stands in direct contradiction to the AAUP’s standards. The argument that faculty should be free to participate in the political arena without being fired for their opinions is not “self-elevating” elitism–it is the essence of academic freedom.
I agree with both of the commenters that this is a profoundly disheartening post. Academic freedom is a collective right of peers within the same or similar fields. It is tied to tenure precisely because tenure provides due process — which, again, means the collective judgment of peers.
If peer judgment is antidemocratic and quasicolonial, that just means that we let people with the loudest voices, the most money, the best command of social media dominate academia like they do the rest of the world.
Such a discouraging misunderstanding of academic freedom in this post, one that capitalizes on the anti-intellectual anti-“elitist” wave of so much contemporary politics.
This is a misrepresentation of the situation at Minnesota, a misunderstanding of the value of academic freedom, and a cynical appropriation of social justice rhetoric. To refer to faculty protecting the integrity of the academic hiring process from politically-motivated community groups as “quasicolonial” is an outrageous insult to the many constituencies and communities the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies serves that struggle, both historically and today, against actual colonial oppression. You neglect the fact that other Jewish community groups supported Segal’s hire. You also neglect the fact that Minnesota’s faculty senate passed resolutions of no confidence in the president and the provost for revoking Segal’s hire: faculty across the board at Minnesota–not only those in AAUP, not only those with sympathies for Segal’s positions–recognized that Segal’s unhiring was a gross misstep and violation of academic freedom. In this moment, when the fight to protect academic freedom is as dire as ever, the fringe opinion your piece airs is at best unhelpful and at worst in line with the worst of right-wing attacks on higher education.
This post does not even get the basic facts of the situation right. For example, no one from the search committee resigned. This is a good example of the problem of “outsiders” weighing in on a context they do not understand.
Thank you, Joe, for this incisive criticism of the insularity of the AAUP chapter, and its deliberate bias against one disfavored community.