Introducing Academic Freedom on the Line
A newsletter published by fellows at the AAUP's Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom
Welcome to the weekly newsletter published by fellows affiliated with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF).
The center is a project of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and made possible with a grant from the Mellon Foundation. The Center brings together higher education and academic freedom experts to develop a comprehensive understanding of the scope and nature of political interference in higher education and develop means of countering this assault.
We’ve decided to title the newsletter “Academic Freedom on the Line” because we believe that academic freedom is at risk of being irreparably destroyed. That being said, we are fully aware that in recent decades, with the aggressive adjunctification and corporatization of higher education, many see “academic freedom” as applying to fewer and fewer people in the academy, and often only those in certain elite corners of higher education. We’re also aware that at a time when all of education–K-12 and higher education–are under attack, rising to defend academic freedom can seem especially disconnected from the pressing concerns of the present.
But, one of our goals with the newsletter is to demonstrate that academic freedom is just one example of the kinds of rights that all laborers should have in order to thrive. Freedom is not just a static idea, but a process which at its core is meant to protect the rights of individuals, while also allowing institutions to do work that conveys broad public benefits.
Academic freedom is, at its heart, a mechanism meant to support democracy and democratic self-governance. The threats to democracy and self-governance across many different democratic institutions are evident. The Center hopes to help identify and counter these threats.
The center has already published a substantial white paper documenting the organized political attacks on higher education, including gag orders and interfering with institutional operations through partisan political interference, as well as several “Action Reports” on specific topics, such as targeted outside harassment of faculty. We have developed an academic freedom field guide as well as an academic freedom syllabus, which can be incorporated into graduate and undergraduate classes, professional development courses, or new faculty orientations.
With the newsletter, by utilizing the expertise of the CDAF fellows, we’ll be providing different ways of better understanding threats to education, knowledge creation, and a society that is meant to secure access to opportunity for all. We’re going to do this by highlighting the work that educators and researchers do and how attempts to constrain or even eliminate this work are detrimental to the common good. One of the center’s first activities, however, was collectively developing a vision and mission statement. These statements came out of extensive conversations about the value of academic freedom, how academic freedom supports the lives and welfare of all, and how we might convey that to a wide audience.
The crafting of the vision and mission statements are a manifestation of the process of academic freedom where people from different perspectives came together to advance a vision that can be discussed, debated, and ultimately be used to do the continuous, important work of protecting our democratic rights.
As our introduction to the newsletter, we’d like to provide an annotated version of these statements including individual comments from some of the center’s fellows. Hopefully, they will give a clear sense of what this endeavor is about, and what you might expect from this newsletter moving forward.
Vision Statement
We believe that teaching, learning, and the pursuit of knowledge are essential to creating and sustaining multi-racial and plurinational societies.1 For those of us working and studying within institutions of higher education, this means pursuing knowledge wherever it leads, free from intimidation and retaliation.2 Such freedoms serve as the foundation upon which we educate students, produce and disseminate credible research, nurture artistic expression, and foster critical inquiry.3
Mission Statement
The Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is committed to preserving and expanding conditions that make it possible to work, teach, learn, create, and share knowledge in ways that promote the common good.4 The center serves as a resource and knowledge hub for all people—including faculty, students, campus workers, alumni, administrators, trustees, parents, journalists, policymakers, and business leaders—seeking to build a flourishing higher education system, rooted in institutional autonomy, workplace democracy, and freedom from coercion and external interference.5
To work towards these goals we:
create practical resources and build strategic partnerships for those engaged in defending academic freedom,6
produce original research that can serve as the evidentiary basis for this work7, and
communicate the value of academic freedom and institutional autonomy to wide audiences.8
The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
Sandy Grande: As an Indigenous woman, this first sentence means a lot to me as it speaks to the truth of the United States as not only multiracial nation, but also to the prior and ongoing homelands of over 8 million Indigenous peoples. More specifically, there are 574 distinctive, sovereign Tribal Nations that remain in a government-to-government relationship with what is now the United States.
John Warner: I would note that the absence of “intimidation and retaliation” does not mean that academic freedom can be successfully pursued without disagreement and dispute. In fact, dispute is central to the exercise of academic freedom.
Demetri Morgan: When higher education is at its best - it is doing each of these things, teaching, conducting research, producing art, and examining the world around us with care, rigor, and passion. However, each of these endeavors are not self-sustaining. They require and demand so much, resources, time, space. But it is some of the more intangible conditions, like academic freedom that undergird all these efforts that are easy to lose sight of. A foundation of academic freedom is necessary but insufficient. It’s a part of the process but not the end. Nevertheless, the erosion of academic freedom is like removing the glue between two pieces of wood - that are meant to be connected. This sentence for me keeps us oriented towards the best features of higher education. It’s not about academic freedom in and of itself- it’s the outcomes and ends that academic freedom facilitates and what that means for students, faculty, staff, community members, and the broader global public.
Tim Cain: This sentence gets at the heart of academic freedom for me. As the US version developed in the early 20th century, it was about the right of the collective faculty to do the work that society tasked higher education with doing. It was not about personal privilege or license, but about creating the core conditions that enable scholars to undertake the important work of discovery, of pushing against boundaries in an effort to develop new understandings, of teaching, and of communicating their findings in multiple venues. It was about creating a space apart from partisan, propriety, and political interests so that ideas could be explored and questions could be followed to their conclusions without intimidation or the threat of termination for offending a donor, administrator, or politician. And, a piece of that was creating the conditions where students could learn not what a donor or other powerful individual wanted, but what the scholarly evidence said that they should.
More than a century after the early debates over academic freedom–which took place amid donor demands to dismiss faculty, autocratic campus leaders who saw themselves as analogues to industrial elites, political pressures, and what the authors of the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles termed the “tyranny of public opinion”–the need for those core conditions is as great as ever.
Isaac Kamola: This notion of a “resource and knowledge hub” has become central to how we are thinking about our work. On the one hand, the defense of academic freedom cannot be done by faculty alone. Rather those who are actually invested in a “flourishing higher education system” must share the responsibility of defending academic freedom, and not only when it is convenient. We are up against an organized political attack, which is well-funded and well-organized. The idea of the Center, therefore, is not to create a new entity but rather provide resources and support for those groups already in the fight. What is the research that is needed to better understand the threat? What organizational and mutual aid work is needed to amplify work already being done? What is needed to discredit the culture war efforts to delegitimize higher education, and to convince a wider audience about the value of higher education, and academic freedom? These are the kinds of tasks–the spadework–that we hope can assist those engaged in the work.
Vineeta Singh The language here is deliberately open and, we hope, inviting. When we speak of “those engaged in defending academic freedom,” we are thinking of this work in the most capacious way possible. College students protesting for their right to assemble in encampments are doing the work of defending academic freedom. An eighth-grader speaking against a book ban at a school board meeting is doing the work of defending academic freedom. Academics condemning scholasticide are doing the work. Professors protesting the defunding of ethnic studies and gender studies departments are doing the work. We make common cause with them all and hope to labor in solidarity with them.
Liz Montegary: As the chair of a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department, I know firsthand how valuable practical resources are when facing targeted attacks against individuals in our departments or on our campuses. But these kinds of resources are also crucial even when we’re not dealing with immediate crises. Rather than panicking over what might be coming down the line, we can prepare by learning strategies for shoring up academic freedom protections at our institutions; we can make sure our colleagues and students know the basics of digital security so they can try to protect themselves from online harassment; and we can review the Center’s “toolkits” so we know how to respond to potential scenarios, like Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. Moreover, as a queer feminist scholar-teacher, I’m inspired by the Center’s ethics of collaboration. We know we’ll be better equipped to respond to and resist the intensifying attacks on academic freedom if we’re working in solidarity with the people who have a long history of fighting to preserve the transformative potential of higher education. One of the Center’s top priorities during its inaugural year has been connecting with potential partners. We hope to lift up and, when possible, contribute to the work these organizations are doing, and we also hope to identify the areas where more work is needed and where we can fill in.
Eve Darian-Smith: Research is core to what many of us do - establishing evidence-based analysis of the attack on higher education both in the US and around the world. Notably, we try to communicate our work to the public to share the message why everyone should care about the extremist political interference into college and university spaces. In my view, what we are currently experiencing is a diseducation campaign on the wider population that silences histories, dehumanizes minority communities and denigrates scientific expertise on vital issues such as health and planetary warming, raising the potential for widespread social harm.
Barrett Taylor: One of my favorite phrases in this document is “evidentiary basis.” Following the evidence often leads to uncomfortable places. It is tempting to ignore or rail against unpleasant truths. This is the reaction I have every year when my doctor tells me to exercise more often. But the fact that I do not like that advice does not make it any less wise; the evidence is the evidence whether I like it or not. Part of academic freedom is the insistence that knowledge rests on a foundation of evidence rather than the desires or preferences of individual people. Evidence-based knowledge might lead us to uncomfortable places, but we are better off facing those uncomfortable truths than ignoring them.
Donald Moynihan Academic freedom is not just, or even primarily, for academics. It provides the backbone for campus speech, by trusting that the people on the campus are the best judges of what they want to teach and learn. This means all teachers in the classroom and all students. It also provides the security to undertake research questions that others won’t. One reason America won the 20th century is that its campuses were able to maintain a greater institutional focus on scholarly values, rather than political values that dominated its rivals. Finally, academic freedom matters because it provides an ability for campuses to speak truth to power. In a time of politicized conformity, this freedom matters more than ever.