AAUP am assoc of Uni prof
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148 pp may 2024
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Part 1: The Context 13 Chapter 1: From Black Lives Matter to Executive Orders 14 Executive Order 13958 16 Executive Order 13950 19 Chapter 2: Culture War, Think Tanks, and the Dark Money that Funds Them 25 National Think Tanks 26 Center for Renewing America and the Conservative Partnership Institute Manhattan Institute for Policy Research American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Heritage Foundation State-Level Think Tanks 38 James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF) Cultural Conservative Think Tanks 43 Claremont Institute (CI) Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) Higher Education Governance Think Tanks 47 American Council on Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the Civics Alliance The State Policy Network (SPN) 51 Part 2: The Legislation 63 Overview 64 Chapter 3: Academic Gag Orders 68 2021 Gag Orders: The Roll Out 70 2022 Gag Orders: The Intensification 73 2023 Gag Orders: Doubling Down 80...
Manufacturing_Backlash_final_0
Manufacturing Backlash Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023 Isaac Kamola, Director, Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom American Association of University Professors ikamola@aaup.org
:{Introduction
Today higher education is under attack. Since 2021 we have witnessed what one scholar correctly called an “unusually brazen series of challenges to academic freedom,” unleashed by conservative activists and a “national-level political machine” closely aligned with the Republican Party (Brint 2023). Since 2021 more than one hundred and fifty bills have been introduced in state legislatures seeking to actively undermine academic freedom and university governance. This includes nearly one hundred academic gag orders seeking to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” (CRT) or other so-called “divisive concepts.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has appointed partisan activists to the Board of Trustees of New College in Florida, }:
who fired the college president, replaced her with a political ally, denied tenure to five professors deemed outside the institutional mission, and began shuttering academic programs, starting with gender studies (Bartlett 2023; Pettit 2023). Tennessee, North Dakota, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina have passed laws dismantling institutional efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on college campuses. Republican lawmakers in Florida and Texas have sought to weaken tenure protections for faculty, making them more vulnerable to external pressure. Florida and North Carolina have undermined the accreditation process after accreditors raised concerns over the possibility of undue political interference in the states’ university systems.
Bills have passed in Florida and Ohio, and action taken by governing boards in North Carolina and elsewhere, to establish academic programs, centers, and whole schools designed to teach conservative content. Taken together, these bills constitute an evolving, interlocking, and intensifying effort by Republican politicians and well-funded think tanks to undermine academic freedom and university autonomy. This legislation is often understood as an effect of America’s highly polarized politics (see for example: Anderson 2023; Busteed 2023; Mintz 2021).
Since the election of Donald Trump, the argument goes, American politics have become overly partisan, with polarization affecting university campuses and college classrooms. As this white paper demonstrates, however, this legislation is largely the outgrowth of efforts by right-wing and libertarian think tanks, working closely with Republican politicians, to manufacture a culture-war backlash ...
NAS organizes the Civics Alliance, a project premised on the claim that civics education in K-12 and higher education has become a “recruitment tool of the progressive left,” as exemplified in the adoption of the 1619 Project (Civics Alliance n.d. b.). The Civics Alliance brings together educators and policymakers to promote a civics education that presents America as embodying “an exceptional heritage of freedom” (Civics Alliance n.d. a.). In reality, Civics Alliance is populated by members of conservative and libertarian think tanks.
Coalition members include Christopher Rufo (MI), Keith Whitaker (NAS), Ryan Williams (Claremont), Peter Wood (NAS), Jenna Robinson (Martin Center), Stanley Kurtz (EPPC), Scott Yenor (Claremont), George Leef, (Martin Center), and dozens of other individuals affiliated with rightwing publications, think tanks, foundations, or conservative activist organizations.22
The Civics Alliance monitors state-level legislation pertaining to K-12 civics curriculum. In addition to the GEA (described above), the Civics Alliance has written seventeen model bills focused on K-12 and higher education, including legislation giving states greater “accreditation autonomy,” requiring “syllabus transparency,” and mandating “intellectual diversity” (Civics Alliance n.d.).23
Between 2020 and 2022, NAS has received $2.7 million from eleven of the top twentyfive donors listed in Appendix 2, including the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($7.2 million) and the Bradley Foundation ($2.9 million) (DeSmog NAS). In addition to sharing funders, sitting on shared boards, and circulating each other’s content, many of the think tanks explored in this chapter are also institutionally connected through the SPN.
The State Policy Network (SPN)
Seven of the organizations discussed in this report are members of SPN (see Table 2.2). SPN creates strategic coordination between national think tanks—such as the Heritage Foundation and ALEC—and state-level think tanks, such as TPPF and IFF.
Started by ALEC in 1992, SPN originally included only a small handful of think tanks but rapidly expanded during the mid2000s. By 2022, SPN claimed sixty-three state-level think tanks partners (at least one in each state), more than ninety “national partners,” and more than sixty-six “state partners in key capacities like litigation, advocacy, and investigative journalism” (SPN 2023, 5).
The SPN specializes in connecting think tanks with donors and helping state-level think tanks implement local legislative strategies developed at the federal level. At the 2013 annual meeting in Oklahoma City, SPN president Tracie Sharp described SPN as an IKEA catalog of policy proposals and lobbying support. As summarized by Jane Mayer, Sharp told the audience that “instead of pictures of furniture arranged in rooms,” the SPN offers “state policy projects that align with the group’s agenda,” including opposition to “President Obama’s health-care program and climate-change regulations,” the reduction of “union protections and minimum wages,” cuts to “taxes and business regulations,” additional “voting restrictions,” and privatizing education” (Mayer 2013).
While national think tanks work to shape the national conversation, state-level think tanks take up such issues with local media, legislators, and publics. In so doing they produce state-specific content for state-specific audiences in coordination with national think tanks and activist donors. The composition of SPN’s board reflects their primary role of bringing donors together with state and national think tanks. The board includes representatives from conservative megadonors, including DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, the Commonwealth
Foundation, the JM Foundation, the John William Pope Foundation, the Adolph Coors Foundation, Philanthropy Roundtable, the Roe Foundation, and Charles Koch’s Stand Together Foundation. The remaining board positions consist of representatives from think tanks, including the American Institute for Full Employment, the Bill of Rights Institute, and the Heritage Foundation (State Policy Network 2023, 30). The SPN also provides financial support
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alec 5 nola 8/18
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an 6 25
We speak with esteemed historian scholar Ellen Schrecker about the Trump administration’s assault on universities and the crackdown on dissent, a climate of fear and censorship she describes as “worse than McCarthyism.”
“During the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left. … Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses,” says Schrecker. “The damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education.”
Schrecker is the author of many books about the McCarthy era, Cold War politics and right-wing attacks on academic freedom. Her recent piece for The Nation is headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump.”democracynow.org
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump’s crackdown on academic institutions in the United States was the focus of protests and commencement speeches this week as universities like Harvard held commencement ceremonies.
The Trump administration has now directed federal agencies to review all remaining contracts with Harvard, after it already canceled nearly $3 billion in federal research grants for the university and moved last week to revoke its ability to enroll international students. Harvard has two separate suits pending against Trump, arguing the moves violate due process, as well as free speech protections under the First Amendment because they target the university’s staff, curriculum and enrollment.
In his address at Harvard’s commencement ceremony Thursday, Stanford University professor, doctor and novelist Abraham Verghese praised the school’s defiance of Trump and spoke to students facing threats of deportation or having their visas revoked.
DR. ABRAHAM VERGHESE: When legal immigrants and others who are lawfully in this country, including so many of your international students, worry about being wrongly detained and even deported, perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from an immigrant like me. Perhaps it’s fitting that you hear from someone who was born in Ethiopia when it was ruled by an emperor, someone who then lived under the harsh military leader who overthrew the emperor, someone who had at least — who had at least one his medical school classmates tortured and disappear. … More than a quarter of the physicians in this country are foreign medical graduates. … So, a part of what makes America great, if I may use that phrase, is that it allows an immigrant like me to blossom here, just as generations of other immigrants and their children have flourished and contributed in every walk of life, working to keep America great.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the novelist and medical doctor, Ethiopian Indian American, Dr. Abraham Verghese addressing Harvard’s commencement ceremony on Thursday. His latest book, The Covenant of Water.
Meanwhile, down the road in Cambridge, the Indian American class president at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke about how MIT’s undergraduate body and Graduate Student Union had voted overwhelmingly to cut ties with Israel. Megha Vemuri wore a red-and-white keffiyeh and said MIT students would never support a genocide, and praised them for continuing to protest despite, quote, “threats, intimidation and suppression coming from all directions, especially,” she said, “your own university officials.”
MEGHA VEMURI: Last spring, MIT’s undergraduate body and Graduate Student Union voted overwhelmingly to cut ties with the genocidal Israeli military. You called for a permanent cease fire in Gaza, and you stood in solidarity with the pro-Palestine activists on campus. You faced threats, intimidation and suppression coming from all directions, especially your own university officials. But you prevailed, because the MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide.
Right now while we prepare to graduate and move forward with our lives, there are no universities left in Gaza. We are watching Israel try to wipe Palestine off the face of the Earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it. The Israeli occupation forces are the only foreign military that MIT has research ties with. This means that Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people is not only aided and abetted by our country, but our school. As scientists, engineers, academics and leaders, we have a commitment to support life, support aid efforts and call for an arms embargo and keep demanding now, as alumni, that MIT cuts the ties.
AMY GOODMAN: That was MIT class president Megha Vemuri, now Indian American graduate of MIT.
This comes as Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism — another school facing attacks by the Trump administration — writes for The New Yorker magazine this week about how, quote, “Academic freedom in the United States has found itself periodically under siege.” In his piece headlined “A Tumultuous Spring Semester Finally Comes to a Close,” he describes how he consulted with Ellen Schrecker, a historian and the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, along with other deans at Columbia. They spoke about government repression on college campuses in the 1950s through to the present. Schrecker told him, quote, “I’ve studied McCarthyism’s impact on higher education for 50 years. What’s happening now is worse,” he quoted her saying.
Well, we begin today with Ellen Schrecker in person, joining us in our New York studio. She’s the author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Schrecker is also the author of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. And she just wrote a piece for The Nation headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump.” Schrecker has been active in the American Association of University Professors, AAUP, since the 1990s. I should note she has three degrees from Radcliffe Harvard and formerly taught there. She’s a graduate of Radcliffe 1960.
Ellen Schrecker, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. As we look at these universities under attack, you’ve studied higher education for over half a century. Let’s talk about what was happening then and what’s happening today.
ELLEN SCHRECKER: OK. The main thing that happened then to universities was that about a hundred faculty members, most of them with tenure, were fired and blacklisted. That happened in every major institution of civil society within the United States. And although the universities pride themselves on academic freedom — whatever that means — they collaborated with the forces of repression through — that were actively imposing a climate of fear and self-censorship throughout American society.
Today, what’s happening is worse, so much worse that we have to really find a new phrase for it. I don’t know what it’ll be. But during the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left, in the past and in the present, then present. Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses.
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like you to start off — we have a very young audience. We also have their parents and their grandparents around the world. And I’d like you to start off by talking about who McCarthy is. What do we mean by the McCarthyism of, for example, the 1950s?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: OK, that’s a very good way to start, because McCarthyism, unfortunately, is misnamed. It is not just the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who came in onto the stage of history in 1950 after the “ism” that he gave his name to had been really dominating American domestic politics since the late 1940s. ’47 is when the Truman administration imposed a loyalty test, an anti-communist loyalty test, on its employees.
So, if we wanted to name this phenomenon of political repression, anti-communist political repression — and I want to specify that it didn’t attack randomly people on the left, but very specifically people who had some kind of connection, usually in the past, with the communist movement, that during the 1930s and ’40s was the most dynamic force on the left, even though it was a very flawed, very flawed political group. It was nonetheless very influential on the left. And if we wanted to give that political repression of the 1940s and ’50s a name, it should have been Hooverism, after the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, the movie Good Night and Good Luck, they showed real black-and-white footage of McCarthy, and test audiences thought he was too harsh, unrealistic, not realizing it was actual footage. And now you have Good Night and Good Luck on Broadway, George Clooney starring in it, and it is the financially most successful Broadway show we’ve seen, is going to be now for free on CNN in a few days. But the significance of that, that that — what people feel today was a cartoon character was, in fact, much harsher and sharper than people ever dreamed?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yeah, he was beyond the pale, because, like the current president, he had no guardrails, as it were.
AMY GOODMAN: Not to mention Roy Cohn, his sidekick in the hearings, who would later go on to mentor Donald Trump, until, at the very end of his life, Donald Trump rejected him when he was dying of AIDS.
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Exactly. So, there are lots of similarities with the fact that there’s this very aberrant character at the heart, or at the sort of public heart, of this repressive movement. But what we should have known in the '40s and ’50s, and should know now, is it's not just a one-man show. It has been this moment of trying to crack down on dissent, constitutional dissent, free speech, the ability to say what Israel is doing in Gaza is a terrible thing. That is something that has been building up for decades. And that was the same thing during McCarthyism. There was a kind of network of right-wing activists, similar to groups today, like the Heritage Society, that brought us the 2025 Project blueprint for Trump’s attack on the institutions of civil liberties and civil society, that has come to fruition since he entered the White House.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I mean, you speak as a Jewish author, active member of the American Association of University Professors. Would you say that the McCarthyism of yesteryear is the charges that President Trump, with his sidekick Elon Musk giving the “Heil Hitler” salute, charging antisemitism for what he’s doing?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Antisemitism is a pretext. We know that. Trump has been all his life a racist, clearly befriending these fascist individuals and groups for years. And what we’re seeing is a kind of a melding of Trump’s own right-wing proclivities, reactionary proclivities, pro-fascist proclivities, with a long-term attempt within some pro-Zionist organizations to eliminate all support for Palestinian freedom and Palestinian liberation from American universities, in particular, but from within American society.
AMY GOODMAN: You have, earlier this month, a federal judge, Geoffrey Crawford, ordering the release of Columbia University graduate, Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi from a prison in Vermont. He was picked up by masked, hooded ICE agents at his naturalization interview in Vermont. He was beyond holding a green card. The judge writing in his ruling, quote, “Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer Raids of 1919-1920” and during the McCarthy period of the 1950s. And I wanted to take it beyond that. You note that, you know, that we’re not just talking about individual professors anymore. We’re talking about current attacks being much broader. And you write that — this interesting paradox, quote, “despite higher education’s much larger footprint within American society, today the academy is in a much weaker position to resist political intervention.” Why is it weaker?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: It’s weaker for two reasons. One, because the state is stronger. The state does much more with regard to higher education than it did in the 1950s. You know, it supports most important basic scientific research. It regulates things on campus with regard to, shall we say, diversity, equity and inclusion, with trying to ensure that all Americans have a good shot at higher education. That was a push by the federal government. So, you can see that the government is much more involved. It funds student loans. Most smaller universities without huge endowments rely on students who have to get federal loans in order to pay tuitions. So, what he’s doing by withdrawing federal money from higher education is, essentially, threatening to destroy American higher education today.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the clip of Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking in March following the arrest of the Columbia graduate student, now graduated graduate student, albeit he was in jail in Louisiana when he got his diploma at Columbia, Mahmoud Khalil.
SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: If you tell us, when you apply, “Hi. I’m trying to get into the United States on a student visa. I am a big supporter of Hamas, a murderous, barbaric group that kidnaps children, that rapes teenage girls, that takes hostages, that allows them to die in captivity, that returns more bodies than live hostages,” if you tell us that you are in favor of a group like this, and if you tell us when you apply for your visa, “And by the way, I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities. I intend to shut down your universities,” if you told us all these things when you applied for a visa, we would deny your visa. I hope we would. If you actually end up doing that, once you’re in this country on such a visa, we will revoke it. And if you end up having a green card — not citizenship, but a green card — as a result of that visa while you’re here and those activities, we’re going to kick you out.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, the Trump administration not proven any of this. And a number of students have been released from prison, with very angry judges talking about “Where are the grounds for these people to be imprisoned?” Mahmoud Khalil has been now imprisoned for three months as his little baby was born here in New York. If you can talk about what this leads to, these kind of harsh attacks, when it comes to speech and when it comes to universities? You were just addressing the deans at Columbia University. Some compare Harvard not fighting — Harvard fighting back against the Trump administration, and Columbia conceding, and the pressure it’s put on its students.
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yeah, this has been a constant in the history of American higher education to collaborate with political repression. They, universities, do not fight back. They didn’t fight back during the McCarthy period. They’re not — were not fighting back, until this miracle. It really was a miracle, totally unexpected, of the president at Harvard saying, “No, I cannot go along with what you were asking.” And what they were —
AMY GOODMAN: The Jewish president at Harvard, right?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: He’s Jewish, right.
AMY GOODMAN: Alan Garber, who President Trump is accusing of antisemitism.
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Well, of course, we’re all antisemites, as long as we feel that maybe you shouldn’t be killing babies in Gaza every day.
But what we’re seeing is the beginning of a pushback against what Trump is doing, what his entire apparatus of hoodlums, I think, is trying to do to the universities. And that wonderful quote you had from Secretary of State Rubio, when he said, you know, paraphrasing these supposed terrorists, that they wanted to shut down the universities, he’s doing more to shut down the universities than probably anybody else in America at this moment.
AMY GOODMAN: Threatening to revoke the visas of all —
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: — international students. What about the role of your organization, the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Right. We are a group that is over a hundred years old. And when we were founded, it was a period very much like today, where outsiders, politicians and especially very wealthy businesspeople on boards of trustees, were interfering with what faculty members were saying and doing with regard to — at that point, there was a lot of labor unrest and attempts to create unions. And university professors were sort of saying, “Well, look at the working conditions under which American workers are being oppressed. Let’s do something about industrial accidents and things like that.” Today, we’re seeing that, in every way, the federal government, state legislators interfering with the academic work of university professors. And that is what my organization is trying to do, is to protect the integrity and the educational value of what goes on on American campuses.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you hold out hope, in this last minute we have together?
ELLEN SCHRECKER: Yes, because, unfortunately, we have no model we can follow from McCarthyism, because there was no pushback, but today we’re seeing people marching to commencement at Harvard wearing labels saying, you know, “Enough is enough, President Trump. “We’re seeing huge crowds showing up to welcome Mohsen coming back from Vermont after having been picked up by ICE.
We’re seeing a growing movement within civil society, that has to be maintained, and has to be maintained for years. I mean, the damage that the Trump administration is doing is absolutely beyond the pale and has never, never been equaled in American life with regard to higher education. So, we’ve got to get out there in the trenches and even begin to think some more about: OK, if they’re not paying attention to the judges, if the Supreme Court folds — and let us pray that it does not — what do we have to do?
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, also the author of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. We’ll link to your piece in The Nation headlined “Worse Than McCarthyism: Universities in the Age of Trump,” as well as Jelani Cobb’s piece in The New Yorker that extensively quotes you, Ellen Schrecker, at democracynow.org.
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alec 5 nola 2018 campus watch
https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/08/08/common-cause-exposes-alec-influence-louisiana
ALEC is registered as a tax-exempt charitable organization and claims not to spend any money on lobbying. But according to a new report from Common Cause, a national nonpartisan government reform group, a number of ALEC-backed and -drafted bills have been introduced and enacted by ALEC-affiliated legislators in Baton Rouge in recent years.
“:{ALEC in Louisiana:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:” uncovers the power that “the secretive special interest lobbying group” has already utilized in the southern state. According to the report, nearly 50 members of the Louisiana Senate and House of Representatives have ties to ALEC.[ now gov john bel edwards ?] Common Cause found that legislative language in Louisiana is commonly copied and pasted from the ALEC “model bills,” making the group’s influence “extremely prominent.”
“Shining a light on ALEC’s undemocratic and secretive operations helps voters know who is really calling the shots in their state legislature,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause. “ALEC’s history of rigging the rules against everyday Louisianans on behalf of their corporate funders is not how democracy is supposed to work.”
ALEC is a powerful corporate-funded pay-to-play organization that brings lawmakers, lobbyists, and other groups in the Koch’s influence machine together to vote side-by-side on bills that legislators then take back and introduce in their home states, usually without any public disclosure of their source. The Center for Media and Democracy teamed up with Common Cause in 2012 to file an IRS whistleblower complaint against ALEC, charging the group with tax fraud and massively underreporting its lobbying activity.
This week’s ALEC annual meeting is chock full of union-busting, gerrymandering, fossil fuel promoting, and school privatizing legislation that benefits the economic interests of ALEC’s patrons.
While the exact issues the Louisiana bills address are varied, the bills fulfill ALEC’s admitted purpose, “to strengthen relationships between ‘business leaders’ and legislators” and “satisfy corporate needs,” according to Common Cause.
For instance, HB 727, was introduced by dues-paying ALEC member, Sen. Joseph H. Major Thibaut, Jr. Thibaut’s bill shares text with an ALEC model bill, “The Critical Infrastructure Protection Act.” It was signed into law in May of this year amidst growing local opposition to the construction of the Bayou Bridge pipeline, which will bring fracked oil from North Dakota to Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.
Senate Bill 364, intended to deal with recent conflicts over controversial speakers on college campuses, is based on ALEC’s “Forming Open And Robust University Minds (Forum) Act.”In June, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards signed the act into law, after vetoing a similar bill last year.
With ALEC’s assistance, similar bills have been pushed and enacted around the country at the behest of the right-wing Goldwater Institute and State Policy Network.The American Association of University Professors has criticized the legislation’s approach as “a political agenda masquerading behind ‘free speech'” and objects to its “preference for punishment as a means for ending protests and disruptions that obstruct free speech.”
Meg Logue, a 350 New Orleans activist, told Common Cause that, through ALEC, “our legislators jeopardize our democracy by bending toward the priorities of corporations while undermining the peoples’ right to self-determination and justice.”
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horotwitz blk book:
The AAUP’s attack [on ABOR] was led by its leftist president, Cary Nelson, whose book No University Is an Island,was published that December. In his book Nelson assaulted me personally and followed his assault with an attack on the Penn State policy I had championed. Nelson described the Penn State policy on academic freedom as an attempt to restrict faculty speech and curtail academic freedom.
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Scholar-Activist Cary Nelson Elected AAUP President | AAUP
https://www.aaup.org/media.../scholar-activist-cary-nelson-elected-aaup-president
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The AAUP's Cary Nelson Goes to War - The Chronicle of Higher ...
https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-AAUPs-Cary-Nelson-Goes-to/62619
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[:{ It is an understatement to say Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, sees the nation's faculty members as on the defensive. In No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom,scheduled for publication by New York University Press in January, he argues that academic freedom verges on being a lost cause, shared governance is in retreat, and the professoriate is in danger of losing any semblance of job security in a work force dominated by underpaid adjunct faculty members. His response is to call for an all-out effort to win not just battles but the hearts and minds of other college employees—even students.
Mr. Nelson, who also is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discussed his book in an e-mail interview.
Q. Your book says academic freedom "now confronts challenges powerful enough to ask not what its future will be but whether it will have a future at all." What would life without academic freedom look like?
A. You can get a glimpse of the dystopian world without academic freedom by learning about higher education in countries like North Korea or Syria or, for less severe but telling examples, by talking to contingent faculty members in the United States who censor themselves to avoid offending students, parents, or administrators as a way of protecting their jobs. Or you can talk to faculty members at schools where administrators regard alternative opinions as insubordination.
The world without academic freedom would be one of routinized and unchallenging instruction provided by faculty members motivated by fear. Research would be limited to profitable projects, not devoted to maximizing human understanding. The world without academic freedom would be a cross between 1984 and a Cylon-dominated planet on Battlestar Galactica.
Q. You allege that conservatives have sought to curtail academic freedom by mounting attacks on entire academic disciplines, such as women's studies. Are there disciplines that you regard as having been seriously harmed?
A. The most obvious effect when an academic discipline is subjected to repeated assault from outside the campus is a chilling effect on academic freedom. But even that effect will not be undifferentiated. A campus with strong academic-freedom traditions and with a sufficient percentage of tenured faculty can provide psychological support for faculty members' intellectual independence. As I point out in No University Is an Island, Middle East studies shows the most sense at present of being under public pressure and the most evidence of stress and self-censorship. But other disciplines—from women's studies to English—have periodically been put on the defensive.
Q. Your book says the AAUP needs to more clearly delineate the balance of power between institutions and professors when it comes to determining what is taught in the classroom. Why? Have you seen much evidence of faculty members' being severely constrained in terms of their teaching methods or the subject matter they present?
A. With the approval of our Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, I actually have just appointed an AAUP committee to study this problem and recommend how to negotiate the relationship between individuals and their departments in teaching.
As the reliance on contingent teachers has increased, we've received increasing complaints about decreased freedom in choosing texts and designing syllabi. We need to find collegial ways of balancing institutional needs and interests with academic freedom, with an instructor's right to implement his or her pedagogical philosophy and choose assigned texts that match particular intellectual goals. A stifling uniformity is often imposed now in company with promises of more reliable instructional assessment and more predictable instructional outcomes, but inspired teaching can fall victim to these regimes....
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Cary Nelson - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Nelson
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Cary Nelson :: Home Page
www.cary-nelson.org/
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Another Term for Cary Nelson at AAUP - Inside Higher Ed
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2010/04/19/another-term-cary-nelson-aaup
Members of the American Association of University Professors have elected Cary Nelson to a third two-year term as president of the association. Nelson is professor of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has stressed such issues as the impact of ...
Defining Academic Freedom - Inside Higher Ed
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/12/21/defining-academic-freedom
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https://academeblog.org/2012/04/03/a-crisis-of-censorship-a-response-to-the-national-association-of-scholars/
A Crisis of Censorship: A Response to the National Association of Scholars
John K. Wilson / April 3, 2012
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has issued a new report about California universities based upon false evidence, distorted anecdotes, random online postings, and a series of terrible arguments that are fundamentally contrary to academic freedom and the idea of the university as a place for the free debate of ideas.
What the NAS calls for is a kind of a new McCarthyism, where Regents and administrators ban the use of funds for events deemed “political,” force the hiring of unqualified conservative professors, and silence professors as “political” if they criticize the government in class or stray from the preferred conservative ideology of the NAS.
“A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California” is a new report issued from the California Association of Scholars and the National Association of Scholars’ Center for the Study of the Curriculum.
, and embraced its loony vision of a vast left-wing conspiracy on campus to destroy education:
[vid]
I was just reading something last night from the state of California. And at the California universities, they’re – I think it’sseven or eight of the California system of universities don’t even teach an American history course. It’s not even available to be taught. Just to tell you how bad it’s gotten in this country, where we’re trying to disconnect American people from the roots of who we are, so they have an understanding of what America should be.
Obviously, Santorum is an idiot. The notion that the University of California campuses don’t teach courses on American history is so bizarre that it reveals just how far from the roots of reality the conservative movement has strayed.
Of course, the NAS bears no responsibility for Rick Santorum’s inability to read, or think. But a careful examination of theNAS report reveals numerous errors and an explicit hatred of academic freedom and academic standards.
Many of the facts cited in the NAS report appear to be completely wrong, such as this one: “At UC Berkeley, the mission statement of the Social Work department includes a statement that students must be committed to ‘advancing social justice.’” There is no Social Work department at UC Berkeley, andthe mission statement of its School of Social Welfare says nothing like this. There is one course at UC-Berkeley that mentions “advancing social justice,” in its description, but absolutely nothing about requiring students to be committed to it.
Yet according to NAS, this nonexistent department with its nonexistent mission statement is “in contravention of state law and university regulations” for using the phrase “social justice,” even though it doesn’t. Adopting yet another conspiracy theory, NAS claims about “social justice” that “this phrase embodies more than a vague admonition to do good: it has a specific place in left politics.” No, it doesn’t. It’s a vague admonition to do good, and no amount of ideological dictionary revision should make the words “social justice” illegal on college campuses.
NAS also complains that the UCSC Sociology department “’considers how society is organized in relationship to a vision of a just, free, and equal society – a vision that may require fundamental social change.’ Only a certain kind of political thinker will say that we need ‘fundamental social change’…” Actually, plenty of conservatives want fundamental social change, going backwards. But the NAS misses that key word: “may.” Nothing in this mission statement compels anything. But to the NAS, it’s also an illegal political statement.
No one bats an eye when far more powerful business schools routinely promote their service to corporate America as a fundamental goal of their programs, often without any serious critique of the business world from the viewpoints of workers or consumers. As much as I wish there was more intellectual debate and internal dissent in business schools, I would never support having administrators forcing my preferred ideology upon them.
NAS is also guilty of invoking false statistics. According to its report, “Nationally, a study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in 2004 found in a survey of 50 selective colleges that 49 percent of students complain of professors frequently injecting political comments into their courses even if they have nothing to do with the subject, while 46 percent say that professors use their classrooms to promote their own political views.” But students were never asked about their own experiences; instead, students were asked, “On my campus, some professors use the classroom to present their personal political views”–effectively asking students to speculate on whether they imagine there are any professors somewhere on their campus who make political comments in class. So it’s simply not true that nearly half of all students complain that their own professors make political comments in class.
According to the NAS, “Further, 48 percent report that campus presentations on political issues ‘seem totally one-sided.’” Once again, this is a fake statistic. ACTA asked students to respond to the statement, “some panel discussions and presentations on political issues seem totally one-sided,” which I would agree with. Anyone with a strong point of view who gives a speech on campus is going to be one-sided. By omitting the crucial word “some,” the NAS is guilty of distorting reality, turning a worthless statistic into a fabricated one designed to convince readers that students think pretty much all campus presentations are one-sided.
But as disturbing as the factual mistakes in the NAS report are, what’s even more alarming is the repressive ideology they espouse. It’s simply hypocritical to declare that “the university must never be used for political purposes” and then demand that administrators must step to impose a right-wing political agenda.
The NAS report claims, “when state funds are used either by or in universities to pursue political aims, those funds are used for a purpose for which they were not appropriated, and could never have been appropriated.” In the eyes of the NAS, academic freedom is an illegal allocation of funds for political purposes, because individuals are given the freedom to express their individual political views. It’s hard to think of a more dangerous or repressive idea than this, the belief that individuals must be prohibited from discussing politics on campus.
According to the NAS, “An individual’s political beliefs, on the other hand, are a private matter, and his or her wish to promote them is a private, not a public concern. When even five minutes of class time is used to promote an instructor’s political beliefs,public property has essentially been converted to a private use.” The NAS compares this to when “a piece of university equipment is stolen” and calls it “the definition of theft.” It’s not clear if the NAS wants professors to actually be arrested for the thoughtcrime of expressing political beliefs for a few minutes in class. But it is clear that they want professors who talk about politics to be silenced and punished.
The NAS declares, “when we compare these two cases, it is hard to distinguish them from a moral standpoint. In both, something that belongs to the public is taken by an individual for his or her own use.” It is antithetical to the entire American tradition of individual rights to contend that a teacher’s classroom speech is the property of the public and must conform to the demands of politicians. If talking about politics in class makes you a criminal guilty of stealing from the public, then I hope all professors and students will be thought criminals in the brave new world imagined by the NAS.
The NAS report claims, “a college education influenced to any significant degree by political activism will inevitably be a greatly inferior education.” This is utterly absurd. There is not the slightest degree of any evidence showing that faculty involved in political activism provide an inferior education to students. Not surprisingly, the NAS offers not one piece of actual evidence to prove what it claims “inevitably” will occur. There is a great deal of inevitability throughout this report, and a startling lack of evidence.
The NAS asserts that allowing free discussion of politics causes repression in the classroom: “the fixed quality of a political belief system will stifle intellectual curiosity and freedom of thought when it dominates a classroom….Students will never learn to think for themselves if their thought processes must always conclude by fitting into a particular set of beliefs.” If a professor mentions politics in the classroom, it does not follow in any way that all students are forced to think in a way that fits into those political beliefs. Indeed, the opposite is likely to be true: students will have more freedom to think if they do not have a professor who forbids the discussion of politics in the classroom.
The NAS never mentions how their proposals would destroy student freedom in the classroom as well as the academic freedom of faculty. Is a professor allowed to permit students to bring up political ideas in class? After all, if politics is destroying the “quality” of higher education, then the NAS must want to ban it in the classroom, whether students or faculty are the ones speaking.
The NAS claims, “A genuinely academic thinker must be able to believe for a moment that his own preferred explanation is wrong, so that he can look very hard at the NASe for other explanations, but that is almost a psychological impossibility for the political or social activist.” The idea that it’s a “psychological impossibility” for political activists to consider they might be wrong is so ridiculous that it’s hard to believe anyone could seriously write such a thing. There are plenty of narrow-minded academics and political activists who are convinced everything they think is correct. The idea that all political activists think exactly the same way harkens back to the McCarthy Era, when the firing of past and present communists was justified by the fallacy that all communists had sacrificed their ability to be genuine academic thinkers due to their political activism.
According to the NAS, “Academics live by competing ideas and explanations. When activists try to suppress all views but their own, their intolerance is certainly on display, but that is not the point. What really matters is that they are showing us that they are unable to function as academic thinkers, and that they are un-academic in the most fundamental way.” This shows precisely why the NAS is wrong. The rare academic who is a political activists isn’t trying to suppress all views but their own. But when the NAS wants to suppress political views in the classroom, it shows that they are un-academic in the most fundamental way, by their own definition. Everything the NAS says about their mythical “political activist” is actually true of the anti-political activist such as the NAS: intolerant of freedom and willing to suppress views that don’t match their ideology,
According to the NAS, those who have “a profound respect for the legacy of our past” are the real “academics” while those “denigrate the past” are “political radicals.” Here, the NAS is simply picking sides in an ideological dispute and declaring that one side, the leftists, are “political” and therefore anti-academic. In truth, it is the act of disparaging one’s ideological opponents are non-academic and therefore unworthy of freedom that is truly anti-academic.
I strongly believe that conservative academics such as those who wrote the NAS report are real academics deserving of respect and academic freedom. Unfortunately, they do not believe in the same respect and rights for their political enemies. This is what makes them political activists rather than true academics. (But I strongly believe that political activists such as the NAS deserve academic freedom, too, precisely because it is so dangerous to allow academic authorities to pick and choose who is the real academic from the activist.)
The NAS even imagines that the Regents are required by law to dictate to professors the preferred approach of the NAS to teaching literature: “In studying literature, academic scholars are interested in the great writers who exemplify the imagination and understanding of previous generations at their most powerful, but radical activists ignore these and instead gravitate to those who illustrate the failures of the past.” [Dickens?]
In what might be the most depressing part of this essay, the NAS actually invokes aconspiracy theory that leftist history professors are all plotting to keep college students ignorant of history: “When studies show that recent college graduates are alarmingly ignorant of the history and institutions of this country and of the civilization that produced it, we must understand why this has happened. One very important reason is that from the standpoint of political radicals, that knowledge would keep old ideas alive, ideas that they wish to replace, but not by competition in which the stronger ideas prevail. Instead, to force the outcome that they want, they ignore or systematically slight those older ideas by removing material that embodies them from the curriculum.” We can see the leftist radicals now, secretly plotting to keep their students stupid in order to control their minds. The NAS report even blames too much “negativity” for the alleged (but never proven) failure of history majors to learn history.
This conspiracy theory is repeated in the NAS claim that there were “two prongs to the strategy to conceal anything that might be encouraging” in American history, by abolishing survey classes and focusing optional courses on bad things in history. Of course, survey classes haven’t been abolished, and there was no “strategy” to make students hate America by getting rid of survey classes (especially since there’s no logical link between the two). But like Rick Santorum, the NAS imagines a fantastic plot to destroy America in the advances of the history profession in recent decades.
This kind of crazy conspiracy theory is an insult to every teacher. It is perfectly valid to criticize the theories of left-wing historians, and to critique the teaching techniques of activists. But to assume that all of them don’t want students to learn just because they have differing views from the NAS about what historical events are most important, to imagine some vast conspiracy to promote student ignorance, is just bizarre. It is dishonest, stupid, and just plain wrong to do so. And it exposes NAS for what they really are: a bunch of right-wing political hacks who have the gall to declare their political opponents are too “political” to deserve academic freedom.
For a report that praises history so much, it’s odd that some of the history mentioned in it is factually wrong. According to the NAS report, “When Jesse Jackson led his infamous march at Stanford University chanting ‘Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western Culture’s got to go’ he was in effect destroying a precious chance for the groups that he ostensibly championed to reach full equality.” As I note in my 1995 book, The Myth of Political Correctness, Jesse Jackson never chanted that, and the students who were doing the chanting wanted to replace the course named “Western Culture” with one that studied various cultures; they were not calling for the abolition of Western culture. As Jackson said at the march, “the issue is not that we don’t want Western culture. We’re from the West.” The Black Student Union declared, “we, too, are a part of Western culture.”
The bad history is repeated by the NAS in its coverage of the AAUP’s century of evolution in improving its defense of academic freedom. The report blames the current AAUP leadership as the cause of its defense of political freedom: “It is no longer the AAUP of 1915, 1940 or 1970. Instead, it now reflects the power of radical politics within the profession.” According to the NAS, the 1970 Interpretative Comments merely reinforced the earlier statements. But historically speaking, that’s simply not true. What happened in 1970 was an effort to fix the flaws in the 1940 Statement with a dramatic change to the AAUP’s fundamental principles. The earlier prejudice against “controversy” was rescinded, and a new standard—the AAUP standard today—was created that only rejects “the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.” The “persistently intruding” standard is a far cry from the NAS demand to punish professors who speak about politics for a few moments, and the “no relation” standard is further still from the NAS call to prohibit one-sided statements even if they are directly related to a course.
The idea of academic freedom, and its importance to the university, is simply dismissed by the NAS. According to the NAS, “It has long been understood that politics in the classroom is a hazard to the quality of a college education.” No, actually, it has long been understood that the attempt to ban politics from the classroom is a hazard to the quality of a college education. An effort to prohibit professors from criticizing the government is a universal sign of a repressive regime, and it violates the spirit of free exchange of ideas that is enhances the quality of an education.
The NAS simply assumes that conservative approaches to education are academic, and left-wing approaches are political. One reason why it is so essential to allow politics in the classroom is because, in the minds of certain conservatives like the NAS, any left-wing academic approach is evil and “political” and therefore should be prohibited. In order to prevent political discrimination in academia, we must allow so-called “political” viewpoints to be expressed in the classroom. Everyone is free to criticize professors who engage in politics, but we must not allow repression of “political” speech in order to ban certain approaches to subject matter from being taught.
NAS tells us that we should not worry about giving administrators vast new powers to silence controversial faculty because “A dean will always want to give any instructor the benefit of the doubt when the case is not clear-cut.” This kind of blind trust in authority is startling in its naivete.
[hmnn]The corporatized language of the NAS is a scary vision of the university that suppresses freedom in the name of “quality.” According to the NAS, “Administrators are essentially the quality control mechanism of the university, yet they have stood by and done nothing while incompetent one-party departments of Politics or Sociology were created; they have done nothing while blatantly politicized departmental mission statements and course descriptions were being printed in campus catalogs;…they have done nothing while teachers were abusing their classrooms by using class time to promote their own political views; they have done nothing while university funds were being used to support campus events that were uneducational political rallies.”
Nothing is more frightening than the idea of universities as assembly line factories where administrators are the “quality control” officers tossing out any professor widgets who show the defect of expressing liberal views. This is a call for political repression under the guise of “quality control.” By re-defining all left-wing ideas as “political” and therefore “un-academic” and “uneducational,” the NAS is demanding massive repression of liberal views on college campuses.
When a department funds an event disliked by conservatives, the NAS report not only argues that such events should be deemed illegal and banned, but that the department that dared to propose them should be punished: “it also confronts the administration with the possibility that one of its academic units has been corrupted and may need to be taken in hand.” This odd phrase “taken in hand” is never explained, but it seems to mean that administrators should take over a department and suppress academic freedom, imposing a new regime of conservative ideological control.
According to the NAS, “State law is explicit about one of the most important duties of UC’s administration: ‘The university shall be entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom.’” This is the essence of the NAS’ Orwellian call for repression on campuses: because some faculty express leftist political views, the administration must impose conservative politics in order to liberate the institution from politics. In doing so, the NAS fundamentally misunderstands the difference between the individual and the institution. The institution remains free from politics by allowing all individuals the liberty to express political opinions. The fact that some faculty mention politics in the classroom is not a violation of the institutional requirement to be free from politics; in fact, when an institution seeks to ban leftist politics in the classroom, it is imposing its own political ideology on the campus and violating this prohibition on political influence.
The NAS is often guilty of projecting its own faults on to others: “The nation is best served when left and right both recognize that the other represents one of the two great historic approaches to government, and a principled position that deserves to be taken seriously. The radicalized campus promotes something that is very different: it demonizes its opposition as an evil and unprincipled group, and a detested enemy.” This Manichean approach is precisely what the NAS does in this report. It accuses all leftists on college campuses uniformly as a evil and unprincipled enemy.
If you look at the other side as the enemy, it is very tempting to seek any means to get rid of them, and the NAS report wonders, “why have we been so foolish as to allow college teaching about our nation’s history, culture, and political institutions to be mainly in the hands of people who are alienated from it?” Yes, why haven’t we banned college teachers who dare to criticize our nation’s history? Why haven’t we forced all historians to sign an oath of obedience to conservative ideas? Why have been so foolish as to allow academic freedom where political extremists don’t have the centralized power to decide if they will “allow” those they disagree with to teach.
But the NAS wants that power of repression. In its conclusion, the NAS recommends that the Regents “instruct campus administrations to ensure that those departments are restored to competence through appointments that abolish the damaging intellectual monopoly of ideas that has been allowed to develop.” This is very easy to understand: it’s a demand for ideological hiring preferences. The flip side of this is equally simple: it’s a call for a ban on hiring left-leaning scholars even if they are the most qualified applicants for a position.
It’s no small irony that the NAS report goes on to denounce “faculty hiring procedures that, consciously and unconsciously, have subordinated scholarly criteria to political ones.” The NAS wants to explicitly subordinate scholarly criteria to political criteria in faculty hiring, and uses as its justification that completely unproven claim that leftists are guilty of doing this. A report titled “A Crisis of Competence” demands that an explicit university policy for politically-based hiring should replace academic competence as the basis for faculty appointments.
The lack of conservative faculty is a problem that needs to be addressed by encouraging more conservative voices to join academia, but forcing ideological affirmative action for the right and having administrators imposing the appointment of right-wingers to the faculty would be a fundamental betrayal of any devotion to “quality” that the NAS pretends to embrace.[2012 before koch-ademia clear?]
The NAS report readily admits that it is demanding the hiring of unqualified conservatives for purely ideological reasons: “It may be true that political science departments would now find it hard to find recently graduated Ph.D.s who could remedy their present lack of ideological diversity, but that too is symptom, not cause.” No matter what the excuse, hiring unqualified professors solely because they are conservative is a violation of any principle of academic competence.
For administrators who have the integrity to defend academic freedom and reject this loathsome betrayal of academic ideals, the NAS recommends that the Regents fire them: “Consider whether each of the existing campus administrations has the understanding, the will, and the ability to lead the campus back to health. If not, changes may be needed.”
It’s no surprise that the NAS concludes by denouncing the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley as a “sinister turning point” and a moment when “Berkeley led the nation in a downhill path.” Freedom of political speech is precisely what the NAS demands to have suppressed on college campuses, and the movement for campus free speech at Berkeley, celebrated by all advocates of intellectual liberty, is for the NAS the “sinister” cause of all of today’s evil on campuses.
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, said about the report: “In the past, the Regents took seriously their responsibility to keep the university free from politics. We call on the Regents today to take up that responsibility again.” That past, when Regents intervened to “keep the university free from politics,” represents the dark days of censorship, when the university was most subordinate to politics and the least free. FBI records show that in 1965, top officials from the CIA and FBI met to discuss the University of California and “planned to leak FBI reports to conservative regent Edwin Pauley, who could then ‘use his influence to curtail, harass and at times eliminate’ liberal faculty members.” The NAS dreams of returning to the days when Regents arranged to “eliminate” liberal faculty for political reasons.
Factually defective, intellectually embarrassing, and ideologically frightening in its call for a new wave of campus repression based on political ideology, this report marks a disturbing low point for the National Association of Scholars and its embrace of right-wing politics rather than any principles of intellectual freedom or academic integrity.
Taking the Fight Where It Belongs
It’s been a bad year.
Not just for higher education. And not just at it winds down.
The coming 2018 does not bode well for American colleges and universities. For one thing, theJanus case against agency fees (when unions can assess non-members for fees as a result of gains and benefits the unions have won for them) heading to the Supreme Court may prove to be the final straw that breaks the back of unions in this country, including those protecting faculty rights such as academic freedom. We all need to be ready for this contingency, ready to help our unions survive this new attack, propping them up, supporting them more than ever before, because new straws will come even if our unions–and (and including) the AAUP–survive this.
According to Sarah Jones, writing for the *New Republic*, the Koch brothers have “been trying to get a case like Janus before the Supreme Court for years, and if the court rules in their favor—with Neil Gorsuch on the Court this is a likely possibility—it’ll strike a blow to unionization and effectively transform portions of the public sector into right-to-work territory.” And it will only get worse. As Risa Lieberwitz writes for *Academe*:
No matter what the outcome is…, we can expect more attacks on unions in the courts and legislatures. Twenty-eight states have enacted so-called right-to-work laws that prohibit agency fees. As we continue to fight against these attacks, it is important to remember that in the face of adversity, employees can and do organize. We must remain focused on the power of organizing to build union membership and expand the labor movement to work for social justice and fairness for all employees.
As if that weren’t enough to scare those of us who care about the quality and integrity of higher education, there is also the concerted attack on academics through social media, especially when faculty attempt to assert their own rights to free expression (not to be confused with academic freedom). This is no small thing. As Hank Reichman writes on this blog:
The entire academic profession must condemn the burgeoning epidemic of targeted harassment of faculty — and of students. Professor [George] Cicciarello-Maher [who recently resigned as a tenured associate professor at Drexel University as a result of his own activity on social media and the responses it engendered] bravely stood up to this onslaught for as long as he could. It is now up to the rest of us to pick up that banner. Whether or not your political views are consistent with those enunciated by Professor Cicciarello-Maher, it is the duty of all of us to heed his advice to “defend our universities, our students, and ourselves.”
Janus andthe social-media attacks are, of course, related. They stem from an on-going attack on colleges and universities whose roots go back at least to the 1960s (though, I would argue, those roots dig deep and back into the attitudes Richard Hofstadter outlines in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life). Their most prominent sponsor, over the past few decades, has been David Horowitz, someone who likes to write about higher education for people with little exposure to it and from a vantage point of no real experience of it (he was last a student in the early 1960s and has never really been a teacher).
One of Horowitz’s acolytes, Jack Kerwick (who actually is an academic with a PhD and who, at least, teaches), recently posted on Horowtiz’s FrontPageMag, “Is Academic Rigor Racist?” Toward the end, he writes this:
The Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC)is a sprawling industry with tentacles reaching into practically every area of our culture. There is no place that it has impacted to quite the degree that it has impacted academia. In fact, the emergence and growth of RIC has corresponded to and fueled the emergence and growth of the Academic-Industrial-Complex. The two intersect and blend with one another.
He is responding to attempts to fight racism through academia, something the right, which relies on racism (the new ‘opiate of the masses’) to gain and maintain power, does not want to see. This particular instance is an academic article by Purdue University’s Donna Riley, who wants fellow academics to understand that “rigor” can have the result of narrowing academic pursuits with its generally unspoken adherence to the ways of the power structure. In the abstract with her article, she writes, “Understanding how rigor reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualizations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigor to vigor.” As citizens of a racist patriarchy, this is something we need to consider; as academics, “rigor” is something we need to constantly re-examine.
Kerwick goes on to argue that Riley is simply trying to replace one power structure with another, that her “argument is powered by the leftist’s singular obsession with realizing his or her vision of Equality.” This is odd, because Kerwick shows the same obsession, if that’s what either is.
Snark aside, what Kerwick is trying to do has nothing to do with Riley and everything to do with creating a popular image of American higher education as out of step with the general (read, “white”) population. His post starts, “If you’re a parent who is giving consideration to refinancing your home for the sake of sending your child off to a university, you may want to reconsider” and ends with “Parents with college-bound children, particularly (but certainly not only) whiteparents, should bear this in mind.”
Kerwick’s is a typical tactic of the right against higher education. The goal is to create a divide between what goes on on campus and what goes on in “regular” American lives and the tactic is to balloon a single person, purpose or effort within academia into a representation of the whole. This is extremely difficult to counter, for colleges and universities, for the most part, really do foster diversity of individuals, ends and means. Yes, academics do tend to be liberal, but that has no more significance to what goes on there than does the fact that most in corporate America tend to be conservative has on the ways of doing business.
When Catherine Rampell, writing for the Washington Post, asks “Why do so many Republicans hate college?” the answer should be obvious: Because they have been taken in by decades of drumbeat propaganda of the sort of Kerwick’s post. Rampall understands this. Speaking of Arizona, she writes, “Republican politicians clearly view beating up on colleges as a way to prove their conservative bona fides.” This has worked for a generation and there is no sign it is lessening. So pervasive has the anti-academia feeling become that even a liberal like New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo can beat up upon the City University of New York without repercussion.
The aim of the right, concerning public higher education, is to create a milieu in which continuing reduction of funding is acceptable to the large conservative block of American votes so that private, conservative funders can be stepping in and, as Rampall says, “replacing dwindling public dollars with private ones, especially those that will appease suspicious conservatives.” They want to make American higher education responsive to their own political philosophy solely, doing so by claiming that it is now responsive only to another political philosophy, the dreaded “Marxism.” That this is untrue, as anyone who spends real time on campus knows, is irrelevant.
Over the coming year, we who are fighting to preserve American higher education (the greatest system of higher education the world has ever seen) are going to have to start finding ways of effectively countering people like Kerwick, Horowitz and the battalions of politicians who make up the Koch army. One thing we are going to have to do is show that we can disagree without trying to demolish our opposition. That’s going to mean that we stop allowing careers to be destroyed because of political forces, be they George Cicciarello-Maher or someone on the right whose ideas are out of step with those of fellow academics. The AAUP is always willing to support faculty when they are wronged in ways relevant to their academic pursuits no matter which side of any political divide a particular scholar may fall upon. The rest of us need to follow suit.
We need to start being extremely careful when we react to what other academics say, even when they are attacking even another academic whose opinions are similar to our own. Otherwise, we get caught up in messes like the McAdams/Abbate one at Marquette University. Marquette suspended John McAdams because of his criticism of a teaching assistant, Cheryl Abbate. This is one that conservative columnist George Will is now using to further the right-wing attack on academia.
Will describes Abbate as having “a precocious aptitude for academic nastiness” and describes her as an “aspiring philosopher” whose “argumentation skills can be inferred from her reliance on epithets” and as someone who “claimed for herself the coveted status of victim.” When she left Marquette, according to Will, she left wreckage in her wake, so much so that prospective “Marquette students, and Marquette alumni, must decide whether this school, awash with the current academic hysteria and corruption, merits their confidence and support,” using this situation, just as Kerwick did with Riley, to further increase the divide between the conservative bloc of American votes and American higher education.
Instead of wishing situations like these away or of helping remove from campus whichever side we see as the bad guy, we need to start embracing, in the public sphere, the difficulty such incidents raise, discussing them calmly even when others are shouting in our faces. However, we should be careful to know just who we should be addressing. We are not going to convince Will any more than we would Horowitz and Kerwick—the gain they now gather is greater than either logic or academia could offer them. It is not in their interest to even listen to the other side. They are not who we should be talking with.
No, what we need to be doing is engaging those who can gain through higher education, showing just what that is and how it is achieved. The right never has been addressing us, but we have made the mistake of responding to the right rather than to their real audience, the white American voting bloc now so heavily invested in Donald Trump. As a result, we have lost the fight.
So far.
[don q]
This year, we need to start speaking farther abroad than normally we do, engaging with people way beyond academia’s walls—not to the politicians and pundits, but to the very people that many of us, after the events of the past 13 months, are loath to speak to at all. And we need to listen to them patiently, hearing out even nonsense conspiracy theories. Then we need to show them something different from what they imagine, inviting them onto our campuses and even into the meetings of our organizations (why can’t we find a way to allow members of the general public to attend our sessions for free—and why can’t we invite them?).
If we are to turn things around, we are going to have to do it through new types of weapons. We need to hear what Will, Kerwick and Horowitz are saying and see who their real audience is and why it is responding so positively. We can’t fight them directly (that won’t help) but we can find ways of countering their influence. As Riley says in a quote far above, we need to welcome “diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being”—even if that means listening to our opponents and learning from what they are doing.
Otherwise, next year will be a bad year, too. Or worse.
==
North Carolina Trustees Would “Defend” Free Speech by Attacking It
Hank Reichman / December 12, 2017
BY HANK REICHMAN
This summer the North Carolina Restore Campus Free Speech Act, passed earlier in the year by the state legislature, went into effect. Directly inspired by a proposal by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank, the legislation’s premise is that free speech is under attack on American campuses. Among other provisions, the law mandates strict disciplinary measures against individuals accused of violating the free speech rights of others, says that universities ought to be neutral on public issues, and calls on public universities to issue annual reports on campus free speech.
On Friday, December 15, the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina system will vote on the policy to implement the law across the 17 campuses of the UNC system. It would make dissent unsafe, will chill healthy academic debate, and creates a preference for some forms of speech over others. As Michael Behrent, Associate Professor of History at Appalachian State University and Vice President of the North Carolina state conference of the AAUP, reported on this blog in November, the policy would create new restrictions not found in the law itself,notably by inventing such terms as “acceptable forms of dissent.” William P. Marshall, William Rand Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law at the UNC School of Law, called the proposed policy “overbroad and will work to chill constitutionally protected speech.”
The policy prohibits expression that “substantially interferes with the protected free speech rights of others,” a provision so broadly defined it could potentially be used to discipline any student who disagrees vocally with a speaker, anywhere on campus. As Behrent reported,
“Taken literally,” Professor Marshall explained, “this policy means that a student could be sanctioned for protesting (or maybe even just vehemently disagreeing) with an unscheduled speaker (which presumably could mean anybody including a fellow student) almost anywhere on campus—given that the word ‘speaker’ is not defined and most areas of college campuses are nonpublic fora. This means students could be disciplined if they attempted to shout down a speaker outside their dorm room or eating hall.”
Professor Marshall added that the “policy and statute are unclear as to what it means to interfere with the rights of others to “listen to expressive activity.’ Is speaking too loudly near an unscheduled speaker sanctionable? Is trying to talk over the speech of another person a possible subject of discipline? The policy discusses actual physical obstruction with access or egress to the location where the speaker is speaking but the language of both the policy and the statute reach far more than physical obstruction.” For these reasons, Professor Marshall fears the policy may be “inconsistent” with the First Amendment. “As the policy purports to recognize,” he says, “the first amendment protects both speech and counter speech. The approach taken by both the policy and the statute, however, creates a preference for only one type of speech that is inconsistent with first amendment principles and treads far too broadly into core first amendment expression.”
By focusing on disruption of speakers the policy demonstrates a marked preference for speech over counter-speech, in violation of the First Amendment. In a piece published today on NC Policy Watch, Behrendt and Jay Smith, Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill, note:
“All speech is free, but some speech is more free than others.” This seems to be the motto of the current members of the University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors and their General Assembly backers. Like the dictatorial pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm—who declared “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”—the Board is putting a noble veneer on self-serving and disingenuous arguments. . . .
The Board . . . sees higher education as a hostile power. . . . But even as they champion freedom and diversity of opinion, they subscribe to the troubling notion that every social institution must be ideologically balanced. The idea of critical inquiry has undoubtedly attracted liberals to the academic profession. But academe is not the only institution with pronounced political sympathies. The military, for instance, overwhelmingly votes Republican. Should liberals insist on ideological balance among those to whom we entrust our protection? Yet this is precisely what the Board wants for UNC.
The great irony is that the very people who want to make universities “diverse” also embrace the conservative belief that the state always stumbles when it tells society what to do. The Board and the legislature are, in this respect, socialists—precisely in the sense that the Right uses the term. In attempting to inject the “correct” balance of opinion into university life, they are engaging in the kind of social engineering conservatives have always denounced. Reagan famously said that “government is the problem.” On the issue of campus free speech, the Board believes that government is the solution. When it comes to expressing your beliefs, the Board knows what’s best for you.
The North Carolina AAUP is collecting signatures from UNC faculty members and friends on an online petition urging the Board of Governors to reject the proposed policy. It may be accessed here.
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