Abstract
Students at Stanford University, where one of the big furores of academic freedom happened 100 years ago
Credit: Rodolfo Arpia / Alamy
One hundred years of attacks on US academic freedom come under review by
Yet there are those who believe that the freedom of professors to speak their minds without interference from university boards or business interests is still under threat more than two centuries later.
Howard Gardner, Hobbs professor of cognition and education at Harvard University, believes academic freedom is a precious asset. He told Index: “I think of it as central to the profession of being a professor, just as physicians are expected to adhere to the Hippocratic oath, and journalists are expected to cover the news in a fair and disinterested manner. Professors are expected to study their fields, keep up with discoveries, report what they have learned, and help to develop the minds of the students. In return, they receive the privilege of speaking out on a range of issues, without having to worry about whether they still have a job.”
But the evidence clearly suggests that a century on from the publication of the US’s first declaration of principles on academic freedom and tenure (see sidebars, p23 and p24), faculty members are still being removed from their jobs, gagged by commercial interests and encouraged to alter their course material to avoid offending their ultimate paymasters, the students themselves.
The American Association of University Professors is at the coalface of defending academic freedom. Hans-Joerg Tiede, chapter president of the AAUP and associate professor of computer science at Illinois Wesleyan University, said that although a century has passed since the foundation of the association, battles are constantly being fought.
They alter their course material to avoid offending their ultimate paymasters, the students themselves
“Throughout the entire history of AAUP the issue of professors speaking publicly on economic and political matters and their institutions disapproving of them doing so has been a constant,” he said. Tiede cited the treatment of English professor Dr Steven Salaita as evidence that academic freedom is still being challenged.
In summer 2014, Salaita had resigned his tenured position as associate professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and was preparing to relocate to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he intended to take up an appointment as associate professor of American Indian Studies. All that was required was for the appointment to be approved by the university’s board of trustees.
However, when the board met in late July, it was informed of a number of anti-Israel tweets made by Salaita – who is of Jordanian and Palestinian descent – relating to rising tensions and fighting between Israeli troops and Palestinians. In August, Salaita was told that his appointment was not going to be recommended for submission to the board; in September, the appointment was subsequently submitted to the board but with a negative recommendation and Salaita’s appointment was rejected by eight votes to one.
In January this year, Salaita sued the university for alleged breach of contract and violation of his rights to freedom of speech.
In response, the university issued a statement which said: “[His] statements [on social media]… demonstrate that Dr Salaita lacks the judgment, temperament and thoughtfulness to serve as a member of our faculty in any capacity, but particularly to teach courses related to the Middle East.”
Students see red on free speech
The organisation Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), founded in 1999 by University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, aims to defend individual rights at America’s colleges and universities, including freedom of speech.
One of its most high-profile activities is to shed light on institutions’ rules on free speech through the Spotlight Database, which is based on an annual survey of public and private institutions. The report ranks institutions on a traffic light basis: red for institutions that clearly suppress freedom of speech of students; yellow for those that restrict narrow categories of speech and green for those that get a clean bill of health.
Of the 437 public and private institutions surveyed in 2015, 55% got a red light, 39% a yellow light and 4% a green light – but the report pointed out that the number of red light institutions had fallen for the seventh consecutive year.
It added: “As a private citizen, Dr Salaita has the constitutional right to make any public statement he chooses. Dr Salaita, however, does not have a constitutional right to a faculty position at the University of Illinois.”
Changing attitudes towards students are also raising new challenges for the AAUP. One of the big issues is trigger warnings, whereby academics are required to inform students that their course material will cover subjects that may trigger damaging emotional responses to traumatic events they have experienced in the past.
In February 2014, Ohio’s Oberlin College caused a stir when it proposed a policy that suggested faculty members remove triggering material “when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals”.
The policy highlighted Chinua Achebe’s book Things Fall Apart. While recognising that the work “is a triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read”, the document warned that it “may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more”.
It added the following guidance for teachers at the college: “Strongly consider developing a policy to make triggering material optional or offering students an alternative assignment using different materials. When possible, help students avoid having to choose between their academic success and their own wellbeing.” The college has since changed its policy.
In the same month, students at the University of California, Santa Barbara proposed a resolution that would have mandated professors to issue trigger warnings for course content that included details of “rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-injurious behavior, suicide, graphic violence, pornography, kidnapping, and graphic depictions of gore”.
Recognising that this might be construed as an attack on professors’ right to freedom of speech, the resolution went on to say: “[This] does not restrict academic freedom but simply requests the respect and acknowledgement of the affect of triggering content on students with post-traumatic stress disorder, both diagnosed and undiagnosed.”
Academic freedom milestones in North America
When Stanford silenced a socialist
“What American labor object to is exposure to competition with a cheaper man. The coolie cannot outdo him, but he can underlive him. He cannot produce more, but he can consume less. The Oriental can elbow the American to one side …”
If one of the most respected economic minds of today made such a public statement, it would certainly be condemned.
Yet Professor Edward Ross’s comments at a protest meeting against immigration in San Francisco on 7 May 1900 – no matter how abhorrent they appear under the stark daylight of modern mores – directly led to the establishment of principles that would guarantee academics the freedom to express views that were in conflict with those of their institutions, their boards and trustees, and the organisations funding them and their research.
The views of Ross, a sociologist at the Leland Stanford Junior University, were not particularly unusual at the time. But the controversy stemmed from the fact that they displeased Jane Stanford, who had co-founded the university with her husband Leland. Stanford University had only been open for nine years at the time of Ross’s declaration; Leland had died in 1893, but his widow was seen as the guardian of his founding principles. The Stanfords had made much of their fortune – the money that allowed them to found their university – building the Central Pacific Railroad, a project that heavily relied on Chinese immigrant labour.
Mrs Stanford wrote to the university’s first president David Starr Jordan, who had recruited Ross, to demand that his contract not be renewed. In her letter, she wrote that the Stanford professor who “steps aside and out of his sphere to associate himself with the political demagogues of this city, exciting their evil passions, drawing distinctions between man and man, all laborers, and equal in the sight of God, and literally plays into the hands of the lowest and vilest elements of socialism … brings the tears to my eyes.”
Jordan, fearing the damage this would do to the then young university’s reputation, initially resisted the founder’s requests, but eventually was forced to act. Ross’s dismissal became a cause célèbre for academic freedom and several Stanford professors resigned in support of his right to speak out.
The events at Stanford were uppermost in the minds of philosophers Arthur Lovejoy and John Dewey when, in 1915, they organised a meeting to sound out views on establishing an organisation that protected the academic freedom of faculty members, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
In its first year, the AAUP’s committee was informed of 11 cases of alleged infringement of academic freedom, including dismissals of professors and a university president. Most of the cases involved an academic being sanctioned for extramural activities – that is, their right to express opinions outside the university or to engage in political activities as citizens was under threat.
AAUP’s Hans-Joerg Tiede told Index: “Sometimes it seems as things have shifted in a hundred years but at other times it seems as if we have come full circle.”
Without belittling the grievances of trauma survivors, Tiede believes that all-encompassing requirements to issue trigger warnings are a clear incursion into the area of academic freedom. “Having blanket requirements to make a list of all the possible ways that someone might be triggered is just not reasonable.”
Few higher education institutions have put formal policies on trigger warnings in place, but the AAUP issued a report on the subject in August 2014. It said: “A current threat to academic freedom in the classroom comes from a demand that teachers provide warnings in advance if assigned material contains anything that might trigger difficult emotional responses for students.” But it went on to conclude: “Instead of putting the onus for avoiding such responses on the teacher, cases of serious trauma should be referred to student health services. Faculty should, of course, be sensitive that such reactions may occur in their classrooms, but they should not be held responsible for them.”
The organisation Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, established to stand up for the right of students to free speech (see sidebar, p22), believes trigger warnings threaten to “stifle the spirit of free and open inquiry that must exist at an institution of higher learning”.
In a 2014 blog post, FIRE executive director Robert Shibley and his wife Araz commented: “Trigger warnings now threaten to drag the protective impulse of parenting into the college curriculum itself. If we want colleges to train students to be rational, free-thinking, fully participating members of a democratic society, mandating trigger warnings is an excellent way to ensure that we fail.”
The trend for higher education institutions in the US to globalise, opening up branch campuses in countries where freedom of speech is not enshrined in the same way that it is in the US, is also challenging the tenet of academic freedom.
Harvard’s Gardner thinks US universities need to go further. “In my own view, American universities should not have formal arrangements to establish beachheads in other countries, unless those countries agree to permit academic freedom in the classroom. To behave one way in the US and another way in a non-democratic society is to undermine what it means to be a professor with freedom of speech.”
The reverse situation has arisen with the rapid spread around the world of Confucius Institutes, which are affiliated with China’s Ministry of Education and have as their mission to promote Chinese language and culture. AAUP issued a statement in summer 2014 saying: “North American universities permit Confucius Institutes to advance a state agenda in the recruitment and control of academic staff, in the choice of curriculum, and in the restriction of debate.”
Trigger warnings threaten to stifle the spirit of free and open inquiry that must exist at an institution of higher learning
It seems incredible that academic freedom can still be an issue one hundred years after that original declaration of principles. As Hans-Joerg Tiede put it: “Some of these challenges come from the way American universities are governed by a board of trustees, who are often not drawn from a background in education and do not always have a good understanding of why academic freedom and tenure is as it ought to be.”
© Mark Frary
