POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN
Last week the American Constitution Society hosted a video conversation on academic freedom with Andrew Manuel Crespo, the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law and Executive Faculty Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard University. Professor Crespo is an AAUP member who is serving as general counsel to the Harvard chapter in its joint suit with national AAUP against the Trump administration’s demands that Harvard restrict speech and restructure its core operations or else face the cancellation of $8.7 billion in federal funding for the university and its affiliated hospitals. The program was one of the best and most accessible presentations of both the legal issues involved in this suit and in the Trumpist assault on higher education more generally. It is worth watching by any faculty member or, for that matter, any concerned citizen. Now available on YouTube, it can be viewed below.
It’s a reflection on academe’s willing self-degradation that it should be so concerned now by an effect it holds dear while ignoring the cause of the world’s woes built up since WW2. Apart from Noam Chomsky, Richard Wolff and Thom Hartmann, where are the Ivory Tower voices that ought to be angry about social degradation generally? There’ll be no academic freedom as long as the collapse of America goes on unabated, ignored by navel-gazing pseudo eggheads. Education is facing its greatest crisis and it’s failed already from lack of authenticity and guts. Has nobody in academe read Huxley’s Breve New World? We’re there, children. What are you going to do about it now that you’ve left it till one minute to midnight?