BY JENNIFER RUTH
In a review in spring 2022, which seems a century ago, I wrote that “an irony or paradox adheres to [Ellen Schrecker’s book] The Lost Promise in that this riches-to-rags story leaves readers not dispirited but inspired.” Although Schrecker’s book traces the seemingly lost promise of the 60s’ dream of free public higher education, it also provides an account of how faculty members across the country at big and small institutions, some giants in their fields and some whose names mean nothing today, rose together to meet various crises, again and again. Reading the book one is awed by the sheer number of committees formed, statements issued, teach-ins held, petitions signed, faculty senate resolutions passed, marches and demonstrations organized, and ads placed. We live in such a time as then now, one in which partisan forces seek to delegitimize universities. These partisan forces now wield the power of the federal government to try to defund universities and crush academic freedom.
And, as then, so now we are raising our voices.
The University of Toledo’s Faculty Senate asserts that “in well-functioning democracies academic freedom is valued and protected and faculty exercise judgment governed by the professional norms of their disciplines both in research and in the classroom.” See its resolution Preserving Academic Freedom. Northwestern’s AAUP Executive Council calls on Northwestern to “Rollback Propaganda and Support Education.” See this powerful post written by NU-AAUP Chapter President Jacqueline Stevens. See Johns Hopkins’s AAUP chapter’s Open letter to President Daniels: Addressing current threats to academic freedom, in which they write:
We write now to affirm our collective responsibility to defend the right to intramural and extramural utterance, including the expression of political disagreements: a right aligned with U.S. First Amendment protections, which are now actively under attack. Targeting members or groups of our community for retribution, criminalization, or deportation based on ideological criteria that equate disagreement with discrimination, contravenes this core principle. To allow outside political powers to target and retaliate against JHU academic units engaged in the work of discovery and instruction, we believe, is likewise to betray our institution’s foundational values.
See this open letter to Columbia’s President Katrina Armstrong and the Board of Trustees from faculty in the history department at Columbia. They write:
Authoritarian regimes always seek to gain control over independent academic institutions. That is what we see unfolding now. We call on scholars, students, administrators, and staff here at Columbia and around the world to reject such efforts to dominate colleges and universities. Such interventions jeopardize our ability to think honestly about the past, the present, and the future, and to do so with our students, who deserve every opportunity to learn and to think for themselves. Should this control be realized, here or elsewhere, it would make any real historical scholarship, teaching, and intellectual community impossible
See NYU-AAUP’s essay in Washington Square News, in which they write:
Over the past 18 months, campus leaders have effectively criminalized dissent and protest, like no other time in NYU’s history. They have disproportionately punished students for minimal conduct violations, and subjected faculty, staff and students alike to arrest by the New York City Police Department on three separate occasions. Mills has also colluded with openly Islamophobic outside groups, such as Mothers Against College Antisemitism, who have called for the deportation of student protestors. Most tellingly, our campus remains on permanent lockdown, hyper-surveilled, over-securitized and barricaded. NYU’s only public response to the detention of Khalil has been to shut down the two remaining open spaces on campus, preventing any student gatherings. Far from opposing the Trump agenda, campus leadership has preemptively turned our campus into a would-be crime scene, which now awaits the Department of Justice’s production of the crime.
Historian James Millward’s letter to university administrators urges them not to take the easy way out, writing from his own experience as part of a group of scholars singled out and visa-banned by the PRC over two decades ago:
At the time, we in the ‘Xinjiang Thirteen’ tried in vain to get our institutions, which included Georgetown, MIT, Dartmouth, University of Kansas, Mt. Holyoke, Miami University of Ohio and others, to get together and respond collectively to the attacks on academic freedom from the People’s Republic of China. This proved impossible. Many institutions were worried that to do so would jeopardize their burgeoning initiatives with the PRC. As a result, the impediments to academic exchange stood. One colleague left the field; another was denied tenure; another lost a research fellowship.
See Scholars for Social Justice’s statement Faculty Nationwide Condemn Arrests of Mahmoud Khalil & Leqaa Korda, DHS Raid on Columbia’s Campus (adding signatures).
For a letter against the denial of Steven Thrasher’s tenure in the service of appeasing fascism, see Supporting Thrasher (adding signatures). See also Thrasher’s own statement on X.
See the Open Letter to Chancellor Julio Frenk from the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism, read out loud at the press conference announcing CAIR’s lawsuit against UCLA yesterday. See the Jewish Faculty Network’s Statement of Solidarity with US Academics and Not in Our Name (adding signatures), a letter drafted by members of Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff – Boston Area, in collaboration with colleagues from across the country.
University of Pennsylvania’s AAUP chapter demands that Penn must uphold research, sanctuary, DEIA, nondiscrimination, and the rights of all members of our community. This statement was accompanied by an action on Penn’s campus yesterday, co-sponsored by a coalition of six unions across the university and the health system: AAUP-Penn, GETUP-UAW, CIR/SEIU, Penn Libraries United / AFSCME Local 590, RAPUP, and Penn Museum Workers United/ Philly Cultural Workers United – AFSCME Local 397. Not bad organizing, indeed!
Please keep writing statements and letters and keep them coming (jenniferhruth@gmail.com). I will add them to this post or a subsequent one.
And please join actions where and when you can, actions such as the rally held yesterday at Cornell for Momodou Taal. As AAUP President Todd Wolfson writes us, “Meet. Plan. Protest. Repeat”:
On April 8, AAUP will join the “Fund Don’t Freeze” day of action to send a clear message: Trump’s cuts kill, and we’re standing together to protect our healthcare, research, and education. Join the member meeting to learn more. On April 17, AAUP has joined the Coalition for Action in Higher Ed (CAHE) for a Day of Action for Higher Education that will feature rallies, teach-ins, walkouts, tabling, and union membership drives. Let CAHE know what you’re planning for April 17! Record your event here. You can also join a planning call for April 17 with CAHE on March 28 at 3 p.m. ET. RSVP here.
We are one in the struggle.
Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and coeditor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. She is the director, with Jan Haaken, of the film The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?
