AAUP Presents

Academic Freedom on the Line

• The AAUP • Season 5 • Episode 3

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This episode kicks off a new limited series hosted by the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF), AAUP Presents: Academic Freedom on the Line. CDAF serves as a resource and knowledge hub for all people—including faculty, students, campus workers, alumni, administrators, trustees, parents, journalists, policymakers, and business leaders—seeking to build a flourishing higher education system, rooted in institutional autonomy, workplace democracy, and freedom from coercion and external interference. Its current projects include an Academic Freedom field guide that curates resources for individuals, institutions, and organizations facing attacks on academic freedom and Executive Power Watch, tracking executive orders that impact higher education with fact sheets that break down what these new policies are intended for and how campus leaders can resist them. 

The guests are center Director Isaac Kamola and CDAF fellows Tim Cain, Don Moynihan, and Vineeta Singh. Isaac Kamola is an associate professor of political science at Trinity College. He is also the founder of Faculty First Responders, a program that monitors right-wing attacks on academics and provides resources to help faculty members and administrators respond to manufactured outrage. Tim Cain is a professor in the University of Georgia’s Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education and associate editor for the Review of Higher Education. Don Moynihan is the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and co-director of the Better Government Lab. Vineeta Singh is associate director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Virginia Commonwealth University and will be the host for this limited series. 

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Academic Freedom on the Line Episode 1

Isaac: [00:00:00] I think that's so important in terms of thinking about those who are attacking higher education right now. Tend to be folks who want to reproduce hierarchy. Whether those hierarchies are racial hierarchies, gendered hierarchies, or notions of American supremacy or American exceptionalism, right? The fact that America is this amazing country that's unlike any others, has done only good things in the world, and the the few bad things that is done is corrected for, and it's an unquestionable.Unsalable good, right? And that's a kind of a supremacist argument.

Mariah: We are presenting a special series of AAUP Presents in partnership with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. The series will be hosted by Center fellow Vineeta Singh. It's called Academic Freedom on the Line, and episodes will be rolling out throughout the year. Today I am joined by Vineeta to talk a little bit [00:01:00] about the series before we hear the first episode.

Thanks for joining me, Vineeta. Let's start with the basics. What is the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom? 

Vineeta: Thank you, Mariah, for inviting us to be a part of AAUP Presents,

So the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is essentially a conglomeration of. Academic workers who believe that academic freedom is the condition of possibility for the people who make up our institutions of higher learning to work, teach, create, and share knowledge, and the center hopes to help preserve this principle of institutional autonomy by creating practical resources for the academic work.

Who are on the front lines of these attacks, and we're hoping to communicate the value of academic freedom and institutional autonomy to as wide an audience as possible. And that's really where the podcast comes in. 

What is the special series? Academic Freedom on [00:02:00] the Line going to be about? 

Vineeta: what is it that we're defending when we're defending academic freedom, right? I think the language of academic freedom, even the language of, you know, institutional autonomy and shared governance and tenure can feel very abstracted and removed from the.

Day-to-day experience, not only of academics, but of anybody. And we are really hoping to kind of illustrate how attacks on academic freedom aren't just attacks on universities. They're not just attacks on professors, but they're actually attacks on, you know, public life and the possibility for democracy.

And all of these values that, ostensibly are treasured by the American people. So that's one thing that we're trying to make clear the connections between the work that happens on university campuses and. The lives that we're all living [00:03:00] off campus. And we also wanna make sure that we're talking about why higher education is such a focus of attack for the right in 2025, 

What is it that's happening on campuses? What do campuses make possible? What does expertise make possible that. Scares this regime so much. 

Mariah: 

all right, for episode one of Academic Freedom on the Line, who do you have as guests? Give us a quick rundown. 

Vineeta: We're really hoping that this week is the one where we're able to create our shared language.

So we're doing a little history of academic freedom as a concept. You know where that comes from, how it's evolved over the last century. We're talking a little bit about the nature of. The current attacks on academic freedom, right? Figuring out what's a continuation of past tensions and what's new in this particular moment.

And of course, we are trying to draw attention to what C DAF is doing and what listeners can be doing right now to [00:04:00] defend academic freedom in the short and long terms and the way that we're going to. Go through all of those concepts is with the help of three of the center's, amazing scholars we have, helping us walk through the history of academic freedom.

Tim Kane, who's a professor in the University of Georgia's, Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education, where he teaches on the US system of higher education, the professorate and the history of higher education, and then for the political economic analysis. We've got Donald Moynihan, who is the J Ira and Nikki Harris, family professor of public policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and he's the co-director of the Better Government Lab.

And then of course we have Isaac Mola, who is Associate Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College and the director of the center. For the Defense of Academic Freedom. He's also the author of Manufacturing Backlash, which is uh, the Center's First report that details the legislative attacks on academic freedom.

Isaac's report really lays [00:05:00] out how these quote unquote unprecedented times have been in the works for decades. So that's our crew for this first introductory episode. 

Mariah: Without further ado, here's episode one of Academic Freedom on the Line. 

Vineeta: My two really basic questions to get us started are, what is academic freedom and where does academic freedom come from?

Tim, I would love for you to get us started on, 

Tim: Academic Freedom is the condition of faculty work that allows higher education to do the job that society asks and needs it to do. Um, without it, faculty can be beholden to interests in actors that don't care about learning and discovery about asking and answering hard questions.

Without it, they can be prohibited from teaching scientific consensus, but also alternative ideas. Um, and without it, they can be stopped from making breakthroughs in medicine, science, economics, the arts and more because someone with power would rather keep that power than [00:06:00] have us as a society learn and teach new things.

And while some people think of, um, academic freedom as a, a privilege for individual faculty, it's not, it's actually a right of the corporate faculty. That includes and requires the faculty, not legislators or board members or administrators to be primarily responsible for the curriculum, uh, and for reviewing the work and fitness of fellow faculty members.

Vineeta: Quick follow up question for you there, Tim. For folks who are new to the concept of academic freedom, uh, could you tell us a little bit more about. The difference between, you know, what we understand as individual rights and individual freedoms versus a corporate, right. 

Tim: So some people mistakenly conceive of academic freedom as a set of individual rights for specific faculty to do basically whatever they want.

Right? Without any oversight, without any guidelines, without any responsibilities. But that has never been what academic freedom's been about. When it was created in the first part of the 20th century, um, it was about the faculty as a group [00:07:00] having control over academic work. Right. And so there are individual rights that might, might come with that.

But the larger idea is that the faculty are the primary experts. They're the primary people who are knowledgeable about science, about social sciences, about the different disciplinary knowledges. And because of that, they should be the ones who are making academic decisions. Um, some of those academic decisions are certainly collective deciding on the curriculum of a department, of a program, of a university.

Those are collective faculty decisions. That can, depending on the, um, design of that curriculum, override what individual faculty were hoping or wanting to do. Administrator or legislature, legislator, others don't necessarily have the knowledge and expertise to assess whether the work of a faculty member meets the standards that people in those disciplines have.

The faculty of experts who have those, it's why peer review is so important in things like tenure decisions and things like whether an article will be published because the faculty have that, that corporate right to control the needs of their [00:08:00] work. 

Vineeta: I think in a lot of our conversations, this is maybe Leap motif of when we're talking about academic freedom and we're talking about right-wing attacks on academic freedom, on higher education, on education more broadly, there seems to be a suspicion of expertise, maybe a fear of expertise. 

Don, can you talk about that?

Don: Yeah, I, I think we're living through a moment where certain types of tropes that we see in other countries are starting to become more prevalent in the US and.

There has always been a little bit of, suspicion of centralized power and expertise, uh, in America, but part of what we've seen develop in the last, I would say 10 or 15 years, is a much more sharpened attack on people who hold positions of expertise as being the other, as [00:09:00] being a group of elites who are suspicious.

And in the populist narrative, and I think Trump is a master of using the populist narrative about the world. There is always an us and them, and the experts are the them. The experts are some shadowy elite that are holding people back. They're misleading them. They're trying to brainwash them. And those experts can be government officials, they can be scientists, and they can be academics.

And so inadvertently, I think a lot of us woke up one day and. Discovered that we were the them, we were the, the shadowy elite that were somehow damaging the true people that Trump claims to represent. 

Isaac: We can go back to, uh, vice President v Vance's, clear articulation of exactly this. I mean, he's called professors, the quote unquote the enemy, right?

Um, those who. You know, have expertise in areas that may not be of [00:10:00] interest or may run against the power structures themselves, um, are somehow dangerous and threatening, right? As opposed to the notion of academic freedom is predicated on that concept that the common good can only be achieved by doing research and teaching that's free from external, uh, intervention.

Vineeta:  

Thanks, Isaac 

Vineeta: Ted, would you say a little bit more about where these ideas come from? Tell us how we got the term in the way that we have it today. 

Tim: Sure. Um, the idea has its basis in 19th century German universities that emphasized science research and discovery. These were then combined with US ideas of freedom of expression around the, the turn of the 19th into into the 20th century.

The term was first used in the United States in the 1880s, actually referring to students' freedom to choose their classes, but then quickly became associated with the ability of faculty to pursue their work. Um, the first modern case of involving academic freedom is [00:11:00] probably the Henry Carter Adams case, who lost his job at Cornell University after he praised junior workers in 1886, which was a, a particularly turbulent year in labor relations.

Um, Adams kept his dismissal quiet in hopes of furthering his academic career, but a series of high profile public cases involving economics soon followed. The most famous of which involved ea Ross's dismissal from Sanford University in 1900. For offending, its co-founder and benefactor Jane Lahr Sanford.

The dismissal led to multiple resignations and planted the seed that 15 years later, um, led to the founding of the A A UP, American Association of University Professors. In the interim, there were a number of additional cases, including the dismissal or threat of dismissal, faculty members in the US South who argued for improved race relations or did things like Praise Booker two Washington for his leadership of Tuskegee Institute Now University.

So we have this period. Of, uh, the, during the progressive era where faculty are becoming recognized and, [00:12:00] and trying to create, um, the understanding of their expertise. Uh, and as part of that, they are taking this claim that as scholars who are doing important research, important teaching, they needed these professional rights to undertake that work in useful manners to move, um, society forward.

Vineeta: Thank you. Okay, so two things that really, um, stood out to me in that quick little history of the concept of academic freedom rate are one, the role of the a UP. So I'd love to hear you speak a little bit more about how historically the a UP has been, uh, involved in these battles over academic freedom and over the role of higher education in society more broadly.

And then another thing I noticed was that conflict between rights of the faculty and perhaps interests of funders or donors. And that seems definitely like a, um, [00:13:00] framework that, that we see cropping up again today. And so I would love to get everybody's input on, um, that conflict. 

Tim: I'll start with some of the, the a EP pieces.

Um, so we have significant changes in US higher education in the late 19th century, including the creation of universities and shifts in roles of the faculty, and then the galvanization of modern academic disciplines as the public challenges to academic freedom grew. Disciplinary associations occasionally became involved in launching investigations and advocating for threatened faculty.

But by the second decade of the 20th century, it was apparent that the challenges facing faculty and higher education as a whole were beyond the purview of just a single discipline. They affected higher education as an industry and faculty across disciplines. So along with the experiences of the Ross case that I just mentioned, and actually a brief period in which Johns Hopkins University faculty collectively ran their institution [00:14:00] without a president.

These informed, um, the idea that there needed to be a national Association of faculty and led Johns Hopkins faculty to issue a call that led to the founding of the a UP. The A UP Met for the first time in January, 1915, and its first year was consequential for academic freedom. At Arthur Lovejoy's impetus, the organization undertook its first investigations launching a process that has continued to this day.

These investigations have not only uncovered violations at specific institutions, but had in Matt Finks and Robert Post terms created, put a common law of academic freedom. That has helped to extend and define the very idea of academic freedom and the, the policies that we, we hold so dear. Um, just as important as the drafting of what we know as the 1915 Declaration of Principles.

That's the foundational document in the history of academic freedom and tenure in this country. It laid out the arguments for them and warned against the quote, tyranny of public opinion. Um, it laid out a tripartite understanding, the freedom to teach, the [00:15:00] freedom to read and publish the results of that research.

And the freedom for extra extramural expression, that free exp expression piece that was grafted on, um, to, to earlier ideas. Um, and it argued that faculty were not routine employees, but they were academic officers and appointees who need the freedom to control their work. Um, fast forward 25 years in the a UP co-author of the 1940 Statement of Principles with the Association of American Colleges.

Now the A CNU. This is the most influential document on the, uh, in the history of the idea. It had no rule of law behind it, and was a compromised document between two organizations who came in with different ideas. Um, but it was widely endorsed. It led to the acceptance of academic freedom and created the modern tenure system, including the common tenure, uh, excuse me, seven year plot in, um, four year colleges and universities.

Again, the core elements are the freedom to teach, the freedom to research, the freedom of extramural expression with tenure as the primary protection. Alongside this, the committee a investigations into campus level [00:16:00] violations. Also establish the importance of intramural expression. Basically, the ability for faculty members to speak up about the conditions and policies of their institutions and to participate in shared governance without intramural speech rights.

Uh, which again, were developed in part through these A A UP committee. A investigations shared governance do not exist.

Isaac: I, I think this is a really important point too, to kind of. Map out the co-evolution of the notions of academic freedom understood as protected by tenure. And then the understanding of academic freedom is also requiring shared governance and democratic input of faculty. So the idea being by the 1966 statement on governance at the A UP issues that.

It's not enough for faculty to just have the protection of tenure. They also have to have meaningful input in the governance of your institution. So, for example, if you're a biologist who's doing research and requires a lab and have no say in the kinds of facilities that are being built on your campus, and the trustees decide they're [00:17:00] only gonna build.

Business schools, then your, your ability to conduct your re your research is, is severely uh, limited. Likewise, if you don't have a say in who the dean or the president of the institution is, your ability to govern the production of knowledge is also limited. And so at, especially at this current moment where we see the attacks on tenure and the fact that more than 75% of of classes are taught by people not on the 10.

On the tenure track. Then that question of shared governance and how a govern college or university can be organized kind of more democratically with faculty input is also just a really important aspect of, of academic, of, of freedom protections 

Don: as, as a faculty member who doesn't study academic freedom on, like, say Tim or Isaac, I, I sort of intuitively always understood it as the freedom to teach.

The freedom to do research and for my students the freedom to learn. And I think that actually does line [00:18:00] up pretty well with the history of how we've thought about the concept. And to some degree it is, it is a right that's, uh, an individual right, or a privilege that's provided to faculty members, but it is one that has large positive externalities, right?

So it it, it's nice that I get to be able to say things that in other environments would get me fired from my job. But there's a reason for that, which is that collectively as a society, we've decided that it's good to have some institutions that have a little bit of freedom to speak truth, to power, to do research on certain topics or to engage in, uh, certain types of ideas.

And so even though it does benefit us as an individual, the more compelling argument for academic freedom is the collective one that benefits us as a society. 

Tim: And I think going along with that is the idea, it's that academic freedom isn't unlimited, right? That the rights of academic [00:19:00] freedom include responsibilities.

Faculty members don't have the right to, for example, repeatedly introduce ideas irrelevant to the topic of the course into their classroom for political or other purposes, right? It's not a right to do anything, but it is a, the protection to do the work that is required of faculty to do. 

Isaac: And in that way there's that key distinction between academic freedom and, and free speech, right?

Where free speech, at least un understood in its most absolute terms like that of a public park or a public sidewalk, means that anybody can say anything and academic freedom is not that. Right. It's not the right as a historian to teach Holocaust denialism because teaching Holocaust denialism would demonstrate that you are unfit to be a historian.

'cause those kinds of claims violate the disciplinary understanding of what good arguments and analysis and evidence. Data, uh, look like. Right? So that would be evidence of something that could constitute if your colleagues, again, that this idea of the collective, right? If your [00:20:00] colleagues deemed that that was a demonstration, that a, a cause to believe that you are un unfit, then that, then that could be caused for dismissal.

But that decision should not, ideally it increasingly does, but ideally, according to the principles of academic of. Freedom would not lie with, you know, the, a donor or a trustee or the president to make that decision. And we're seeing that right now with, with debates over antisemitism or claims that certain faculty have written things that could be considered antisemitic.

And the people who are making those accusations are donors or trustees, or presidents or journalists or politicians, as opposed to the peers, the scholars, the experts in the. You know, in, in the area of study, kind of make that assessment of what was actually said and what it constitutes. And that idea of a self-regulating community, um, that doesn't mean you can say whatever you want, but also, but is constrained by, by the bounds of that community.

And Joan Scott and her just beautiful essay [00:21:00] on, on academic freedom as an ethical practice points out that there is a bit of a contradiction here, right? Because some of the most important work that it really pushes the, the boundaries of knowledge and understanding kind of brush up against. EE established expertise.

Right? So, you know, evolution brushed up against understandings of, of, of how the biological world was ordered and experienced considerable repression by those who are those scientists who are making those ar uh, those arguments. So in, in a way that that kind of, the border between expertise and what kinds of collective rights that gives you is, is, is one that's always contested, but it should be contested.

By the community itself and not by those who might have external interests, such as the church who would say no. But we don't want you to come to the conclusion that evolution, we, oh, we would prefer that you arrive at creationism and therefore we're gonna insist that those are the conclusions that you arrive at.

That's obviously opposed to the common [00:22:00] good. 

Don: That, that's a really important point. Isaac, I so I, a few years ago, I was lucky enough to spend a year at Oxford University, and you're walking around. These buildings that have existed for a thousand years, and this is an institution that has survived a very long period of time.

Even as we keep hearing about the need to disrupt education or to have more control over educational processes. And if you look at that history, there's, you know, there's always been kings who wanted to do this with the university or governments who wanted to do that with the university. But the way in which higher ed education institutions have survived and maintained legitimacy is providing autonomy to the institution and then within that autonomy giving room to debate about what those values are going to be.

Uh, and that implies having some freedom to disagree with one another on campus. And eventually, and sometimes it might take. A long period of time to move [00:23:00] from one position to another. And some of those discussions are, you know, they're happening on campus about DEI, for example. I'm gonna pick one example where I think a lot of faculty genuinely disagree about that topic, but I would much prefer that we be the actors who can sort out and think through what it means for us as faculty for our staff.

For students because we are the ones closest to the topic and we see how it affects our institutions, rather than have someone who's never set foot on campus, but instead has simply read about the topic on their favorite news site, deciding for us what our values and processes should be. 

Tim: I think that's a really important point on institutional autonomy.

It's not, you know, the same as academic freedom, but it can help enable the conditions that support academic freedom. When we have state legislatures or the federal government mandating certain things happen or don't happen on college [00:24:00] campuses, they're taking away the institution's autonomy to make those decisions.

And the faculty members. As officers of that institution to be fundamentally involved in making those decisions.

Vineeta: 

 so, in hearing you all talk about the historical evolution of academic freedom and the conflicts that have really shaped our understanding of it, I'm led to ask what is, what is new here? How are the attacks on academic freedom that we're seeing? You know, as part of the larger political landscape of 2025, how are these maybe continuations and what's happening here that's new.

Don: I do think there are some things that are different in the way that there are some things that are different about how American democracy is operating right at this moment, and trying to find parallels is tricky. We, we look to history folks will say, for example, in 1930s, Germany. And, and those [00:25:00] sorts of historical parallels can be enlightening.

They can also be in some ways misleading. I think in some ways we're probably closer to present day Hungary than we are to 1930s Germany, because of the way in which democracy is functioning there looks really similar. To patterns we're seeing today, and, and so for example, Hungary is a country where you still have elections, and we think of it in political science terms as a country that features competitive authoritarianism.

That is to say it's, it's still a democracy, but the governing powers have taken control of the institutions and made it such that any democracy is sort of tilted towards their interests and their goals. I. It is not a coincidence that Victor Orbin, the Prime Minister of Hungary, is celebrated as a hero on the American right today.

Vote for what he's done with government, but also what he's done in higher [00:26:00] education. So again, think about JD Vance criticizing universities and faculty as the, as the enemies of the people. He's also invoked what Orban has done. To universities in Hungary and saying he has the right idea. And if you are a fan of academic freedom, that is incredibly worrying because what Orban has done is to cancel certain areas of research.

So for example, studying things like gender and also effectively to run out. Institutions from the country that didn't bow to ORs demands. So the central European University simply left hungry because their values of academic freedom were so compromised by by ORs control. And to me that feels like. A closer parallel to what we're going through.

Now you have a president who is claiming very strong executive power to a way that I, I think is unprecedented in American [00:27:00] history, and one of the venues in which he wants to exercise that power is control over higher education, meaning taking control over. Um, the types of topics that are discussed on campus and to do so using levers like res of funding cuts or of lawsuits or executive orders that can ship away at the autonomy and academic freedom of the people who are in those institutions of higher education.

Isaac: that's a, that's really. I think this a spot on 

 there's oftentimes a analogy that's made to the the pre, the present moment to McCarthyism. Although Ellen Schreker, the historian who wrote the definitive book on the history of McCarthyism in higher education, has argued that the present moment is worse than McCarthyism.

As she pointed out that under McCarthyism. The attacks were on individuals for their political [00:28:00] allegiances, right? So a professor who is a member of the Communist Party would be the target of McCarthys inquiries, right? Whereas what's going on now, which is very much like what's going on in Hungary, is a deliberate effort by the state, be that the federal government or state governments to directly affect what's taking place in the classroom.

So for example, in Florida. The DeSantis appointed Board of Governors is going through university's core curriculums, school like curriculum that the faculty have put together, right? The faculty committees and departments have gotten together, designed courses, decided what incoming students should take as part of the core curriculum, what the necessary things that was important for for students to learn, vetted these classes, discussed the curriculum, and put forward a list of what the core.

Our requirements are now the Board of Governors is combing through those lists oftentimes, you know, apparently just using control F functions to find words like [00:29:00] diversity and race and giving lists to board of trustees saying you should, you should knock these classes outta the core curriculum. A requirement, not because the board of Governors, which is.

Primarily political appointees who have no experience in high, in higher education has any particular knowledge or expertise in what it means to teach a sociology class on race, for example. But because they think in whatever kind of fever dream, they, uh, they live, they live in that these classes are efforts to undermine.

Democracy or whatever are the enemy, right? And you can also see with the, the slate of executive orders that have come out under the Trump administration, a real willingness to send a clear message that certain things will count as threats of civil rights and will be investigated. And that, you know, talking about or having.

Campus efforts to make a campus more diverse or inclusive, which may or may not include classes like teaching of certain classes. Those executive or orders are incredibly murky in terms of [00:30:00] what they mean. But the very clear message is we are willing to use the full enforcement power of the federal government to shape what is taking place on college campuses.

Um, is incredibly scary. And I think the par the parallels to Orban Hungary, I think are are, are really quite accurate. 

Don: If I can add to, to Isaac's point there, I, and I think the false parallel with McCartys is spot on because you know, but McCarty was basically waving names of figures around and holding hearings.

What we are seeing today is a capturing of the administrative machinery of government and purposing that administrative machinery to go after parts of society. Um, including other parts of government or parts of society that are partially funded by government to achieve the goals of the administration.

And that is very different from McCartys. It's very different even from the [00:31:00] politics of, say, Goldwater or Reagan. The, there's no real libertarian inflected version of conservatism that's happening here. It is not about making the state smaller, it's about capturing the state and using it for your own purposes.

Vineeta: Can I just ask us to underline the role of academic freedom and the role of higher education more broadly? Why is that such a focus of attack owhy is that such a threat to this project? 

Don: I think if you are looking at this just purely from a political economy point of view. If you were trying to consolidate power in government and move towards a less democratic and more, uh, authoritarian version of government, the thing you look for is to shut down dissenting voices and to target those actors who have the freedom to disagree and the power to [00:32:00] disagree.

And there are certain patterns that we see again and again in countries that take authoritarian turns. The leader tries to control institutions like the bureaucracy, especially the national security services like the legal system, especially independent judges like the media I. But also like academic institutions because they're inherently suspicious and they have reason to be suspicious, that academic institutions and professors will push back against constraints on individual freedom.

And that is the reason why it, it is so disturbing. But that the reason why we see parallels. Across these authoritarian regimes, they consistently will demonize academics and campuses as radicals and as hotbeds of left wing Marx, Marxism, or whatever you want to call it. But really the core concern is that [00:33:00] these actors have influence, they have freedom, and they can critique me in a way that exposes the illegitimacy of my project.

Isaac: I think that's so important in terms of thinking about those who are attacking higher education right now. Tend to be folks who want to reproduce hierarchy. Whether those hierarchies are racial hierarchies, gendered hierarchies, or notions of American supremacy or American exceptionalism, right? The fact that America is this amazing country that's unlike any others, has done only good things in the world, and the the few bad things that is done is corrected for, and it's an unquestionable.

Unsalable good, right? And that's a kind of a supremacist argument. That's being made about how we should understand American history, consolidating a supremacist understanding of American history, of, of, of, of a binary understanding of gender, a kind of whitewashed understanding of race, [00:34:00] those. Are key to maintaining a political power that's based on hierarchy and supremacy, right?

If you're forced to confront the actual existing archive, if you're forced to confront actually existing data, you see that the world is not nearly as simple as these politicians want to, to portray it as it's a lot more complicated. American history is a lot more. Fraught and so this whole idea that professors somehow just like woke up one day and are exceptionally woke and anti-American and all that stuff is totally false, right?

The truth is that in the 1950s. The, the, uh, the Academy had certain ideas that are very much like the worldview that the right is trying to impose on higher education now about American exceptionalism, about the, the, the, the fundamental importance of, of, of a handful of white men in creating all of Western as a civilization.

But those ideas were undermined over decades of really, really, really hard work. Right. By scholars who did the. [00:35:00] The archival work. Who wrote the books? Who wrote the articles? Who held the conferences? Who published the papers? Who reviewed the papers, who did all of the incredible work that it takes to push knowledge forward?

And that knowledge has us arrived at this position, which is, which seems to resonate as true, right, that the world is incredibly more complicated. The gender is non-binary, that American history is not one of un. Alloy exceptionalism. Right? And so that's not something that is just like an idea that I have, or it's not just a thing I say with free speech.

I don't say, Hey, I'm gonna wake up one day and just say, you know, there's not just two genders. Right? But instead, that's an argument that has been developed over decades of hard work. And those ideas have generally, one, because they resonate as more true. Maybe in a decade or two or three or four, we'll look back at those findings and say, man, those are really off base.

Right? Those understandings of American history, that understanding of gender, that understanding of race was incorrect, right? That it was confined [00:36:00] by the limits of knowledge at that particular historical moment, right? That should be determined by those ongoing debates and discussions and analysis and critique, and write and writing, and the hard work of teaching and re and research, and not be predetermined by the politicians who have an interest, a political interest in upholding supremacist and hierarchical understandings to pursue their, to benefit their own political end.

Right. So that's not saying that the way we understand the world now, the way we understand gender, race, or American history is, is correct. Right? But it's part of a process and it's that, it's that process that academic freedom and institutional autonomy is about protecting. 

Don: I think this is why this shouldn't be an argument about ideology or party.

This should really be an argument about the ability to debate ideas, and it's why if you talk to conservatives on campus, they [00:37:00] tend to be very supportive of academic freedom because they are typically in the minority. In many of these debates, and they want that protection when they contest these ideas with their colleagues.

And so in many cases, some of the, the people who are most disturbed by attacks on academic freedom are conservatives on campus because they realize that they benefit exactly from those protections, that they have most power to change ideas over time. True, the existence of a set of norms and beliefs about the ability to debate ideas.

 Vineeta:  So my last question, and I think this is gonna be the last question for all our guests across the series, what are you paying attention to right now? What should we be paying attention to right now and what should we be doing right now? 

Tim: I think that the challenge that we have right now is that there is a lot going on.

It's going on at the federal level. It's going on in state houses across the country right now with attacks [00:38:00] on tenure, the attacks on DEI, the other efforts to restrict higher education. We need to be paying attention to all that. At the same time, I think we need to be paying attention to what our own institutions are and are not doing to try to resist the efforts to shape and control higher education.

Because as we've argued and as anybody who looks at academic freedom knows its purpose is to help the common good and the attacks that undermine it are attacks on the common good as far as what we can be doing. Talking, right, spreading the word, pushing back. As a center, we are trying to create materials to help people understand the challenges that we face right now, and to be able to communicate to.

Their administrations to their fellow faculties, to the students and to the general public about what's happening. And the more we can do to explain the importance to US society and to global societies of having free inquiry in our colleges and universities, the better off we're going to be. [00:39:00] And of course, organize. 

Isaac: I want to pick up from the, of course, organized because I think that's, that's one of the most important things right now. Organize, organize, organize it. It's not accidental that higher education has come under attack at a time in which the role of higher education in the economy, in politics, in all aspects of cultural and political and economic life is becoming increasingly central.

And so we cannot therefore just kind of request that universities be left alone, but we actually have to defend that, and we have to defend that with organized power in order to create the spaces of, of conversation and dissent and debate and deliberation and all the things that we got into this work to do, to teach classes, to do research, to have hard conversations, to, to, to go to conferences and push new ideas.

All of that is predicated on having the autonomous space to do that work. The opportunity to share ideas and disagree in a productive and constructive. Space free from external interference is actually something that we [00:40:00] have to actively mobilize to defend, and so join your a UP chapter. Join Your Union if you have one on ca on campus, if you're already part of those, become even more active.

The coalitional work that's being done with the a UP now through high. Higher education labor United, where the a UP is working with all unions that, that represent higher education, be they security, uh, workers, janitors, professors, graduate students, administrative staff, right? Defending higher education is not just about defending.

The faculty, it's about defending students, faculty, and everybody who works, uh, within higher education. And so being part of those movements and those organizations, um, is, is really important work. 

Vineeta: Thank you to Isaac Kamala, Don Moynihan and Tim Kane for joining us today. You can learn more about the work of the A's Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom on their website, which is linked in [00:41:00] our show notes.

Here you will also find the Center's Academic Freedom Syllabus, the Academic Freedom Field Guide, which includes resources for individuals, institutions, and organizations facing attacks on academic freedom. And the Executive Power Watch, which tracks executive orders that impact higher education, including fact sheets that break down what these new policies are intended for and how campus leaders can resist them.

In the show notes, you'll also find a link to May 2024 episode where Mariah spoke with Isaac Kamala and Ellen Schreker for more background on the establishment of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. I am Venita Singh, and this has been Academic Freedom on the Line, a special series of AAUP presents.