Defending Academic Freedom: Learning to Resist

The 9th episode of our special series “Academic Freedom on the Line” is a conversation among 4 authors who contributed to the recently published University Keywords, a volume on how universities operate as social and economic engines that shape society beyond their traditional educational roles. Andy Hines, the volume editor,  Senior Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, and author of Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University; Jennifer Ruth, professor in the School of Film at Portland State University, and co-director of The Palestine Exception, who serves on the steering committee of Coalition for Action in Higher Education; and Ellen Schrecker, renowned historian of McCarthyism and US higher education, and most recently the co-editor of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom with Jennifer Ruth and Valerie C. Johnson; and interviewer Vineeta Singh, a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. 

We share this conversation with you in the hopes that it helps you leverage your curiosity, drive for knowledge, and research skills in the service of creating more just universities and more just societies. 

Links to resources mentioned in our conversation: 

To read/watch with your study group:
University Keywords
The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom
No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities
Vietnam: history, documents, and opinions on a major world crisis
Palestine Exception (documentary)

To connect with other academic workers:
Historians for Peace and Democracy
Starting an AAUP Chapter, Step By Step
Upcoming AAUP events and trainings
Coalition for Action in Higher Education  or email CAHE at DayofAction @ proton.me 

Transcript

Vineeta Singh: 0:06

​Welcome to Academic Freedom on the Line, a special series of A A UP presents producing collaboration with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, or CDAF. I'm c DAF fellow Vineeta Singh. If you've been listening to this series from the beginning, you'll have noticed that at least once an episode, somebody will tell you to organize, organize, organize. But we're also aware that organizing spaces. Don't always feel like the most natural fit for all academic workers. A lot of us have hesitations about whether we'll fit in in a space like this, whether we have skills and knowledge to contribute to this kind of work.

Vineeta Singh: 0:52

So today's conversation is about how we leverage studying. Which I think is a core activity and skillset and value, um, in all kinds of academic work. We're gonna talk about how to leverage studying in the service of creating more just worlds. We're speaking with Andy Hinz, the editor of University Keywords, a new anthology from Johns Hopkins University Press. Ellen Schreker, professor Emerita of American History at Yeshiva University and the authority on McCarthyism and Higher education, and Jennifer Ruth, professor of film at Portland State University and with Dr. Schreker, the co-author of The Key Word, academic Freedom in University Keywords. So to get us started, I'm going to ask our guests to introduce ourselves. Tell us your names, your role in the university, keywords, and how you came to this project. I.

Andy Hines: 1:55

Sure. I am Andy Hines. I'm the editor of University Keywords, and I wrote the introduction and I co-authored the entry on alternative institutions as well as an entry on sustainability. And I think for me, it really came out of two things that just kind of kept happening to me. I, I kept observing on social media. there'd be a crisis going on with say an endowment or something like this. And everybody would say, well, oh, like, has anybody ever written anything about the history of endowments? And I would see these conversations just repeat over and over and over again. And, most of the time they would surface some really great essays and material.

Andy Hines: 2:39

But as is the nature of social media, those were really ephemeral posts. And it felt like every time that a crisis was happening in higher education, that people were having to repeat that work over and over and over again. So I saw a real need for people to orient around particular topics And that also touched on what I feel is a persistent kind of organizing challenge, which is that. faculty feel compelled to know everything about what they're wanting to engage in. and they don't want to just know it from reading a book. They want to know it themselves. They want to do the, their own research to build out their understanding of the endowment. But I think in some ways, the premise of this book is that other really smart people have already done that work for you.

Andy Hines: 3:25

So the book tries to solve an organizing problem, which is basically it says that if you need to do research on a topic, you can look at this book first, and then you can talk to your colleagues about really the issue at hand. Based on the kind of historical background knowledge and analysis that you get out of this book. And then the third, I think, is that the book articulates work that's been going on in a lot of related fields, that has been sparked by what is functionally a kind of material crisis in higher education over the last 20 or 30 years. And some of that work has been collected under the term critical university studies. Some of that under abolitionist university studies, some, of that is collected under people thinking about the settler colonial history of universities and colleges. But we also find a lot of that work, in the critical corners of a lot of, quote unquote like traditional disciplines like sociology. And, and then also there's, you know, critical work in higher ed studies too. So the book tries to kind of bring together a large, group of that work to connect a lot of these fields that, again. Just like the kind of organizing challenge we're, we're disparate and not really talking to one another. And so that's why I edited the book and why I'm so pleased that it finally came together.

Ellen Schreker: 4:39

I'm Ellen Schrecker. Uh, I've been thinking about and writing about higher education and political repression since, dare I say it, the 1970s. And at the moment I am in the process of beginning a collaboration with, Jennifer, who I've been collaborating with for, I guess three years now, at least on a reissue of my first book about it was called no Ivory Tower. McCarthyism in the universities, and I've been looking at both of those subjects for a long time. And luckily three years ago, Jennifer contacted me to ask me, this is when 2021, probably 2021, like four years ago.

Andy Hines: 5:36

Yeah.

Ellen Schreker: 5:37

To write a how does what's happening today compare to McCarthy's? And that's a question I've been asked repeatedly since I've written an awful lot about McCarthy's and Jennifer and I have been writing stuff together. We've been talking about stuff together. We've been on the AAUP's, committee A on academic freedom together. And, uh, last year our book, what we co-edited with Valerie Johnson. The right to learn, resisting the right wings to have on academic freedom is a collection of essays.

Jennifer Ruth: 6:21

Hi, I am Jennifer Ruth. I'm a professor in the school of film at Portland State University. Although my work since getting a degree in 1999 in English literature has been primarily on academic freedom issues. And as Ellen mentioned, I contacted her when I was active in trying to fight the divisive concepts and anti critical race theory legislation that was happening. So this is Pret Trump's second administration, of course. And I, that's when I contacted Ellen I emailed her just out of the blue and said, Hey, given your expertise, what do you think about this authoritarians repression of academic speech and academic freedom? And she wrote back and said, give me a day or two. And then a day or two later, she wrote back and said. It's worse. And from that moment on, we've never looked back. I think Andy first approached Ellen, and Ellen then approached me to join her on this keyword, and I'm really, was really delighted to. It's a wonderful book.

Vineeta Singh: 7:28

Awesome. Thank you. So to get us started, a couple of you use the word tool in your description of either your keyword or of the keywords book more broadly. Could you say a little bit more about what that means? Like literally, what would it look like for somebody to use this text as a tool in their organizing or in their advocacy?

Andy Hines: 7:52

Yeah, What I mean by that is that I think it's often for some, it's much easier to talk about and to think through the kind of institutional changes that we're facing. If we have something that we can speak through or learn through or work through together. And I think for academic workers especially, and any workers really, like having something to read gives one a jumping off point for that. the essays in the book are designed to be short. They have great bibliographies that are attached to them. They are accessible to students and they are, accessible not just to academic workers, but to to anyone who has an interest in what's going on on university campuses. I think one can orient, a discussion around these terms and then, you know, build out. An understanding of how they impact one's campus.

Andy Hines: 8:52

I think one of the things that university studies has, or critical university studies has drawn our attention to is there's a, you know, there's a big overarching national narrative in the US and it's worth saying that Coming together and looking at that broad kind of national conversation doesn't necessarily always show exactly what's happening on our particular individual campus. So for instance, you know, one thing I recently try to think a lot about is the relationship between universities and their health systems. I was reading just today actually about how the University of Chicago, within about a decade, it went from having the health system had, generated about 30% of the institution's revenue to over 50% of the revenue. And that, of course, is a large trend across many large, institutions that have health systems and has big ramifications for the ways that we both map and think about power within those institutions, but also how we might think about working together across, e existing unions or existing organizations within those institutions to fight for the institutions that we want to. As there's been, significant attacks on scientific research, on, on healthcare as much as there has been on education.

Andy Hines: 10:04

So there's, you know, lots of interesting ways that, that draws our attention to linked fights. But if you're reading that or thinking about that and you are working in an institution that doesn't have a health system, then that part of that national story doesn't apply to you. And so one has to kind of think about how a version of that happens on your campus. And so I think having, versions of these narratives. You know, invites people into this kind of study invites people into a mode of analysis.

Andy Hines: 10:30

And it's that mode of an analysis can really be really useful and essential for building kind of organizing campaigns because it allows you to see the ways that you can act you know, different points of interest or excitement on your given campus, and the ways that they intersect with those national narratives. And I think that that's especially important because again, speaking generally, academic workers aren't traditionally organizers, and that's okay. one of the things that I hope that the kind of positionality of the book invites among us all is that we all have different expertise that we can learn from each other, both with regards to the university and its multiple dimensions, but also to the roles that we play within the institutions and who we can learn from. I think we tend to think about, knowledge traveling in one direction and universities from from faculty to students.

Andy Hines: 11:17

But I think one of the models that the book tries to pull out is that it's much more complicated than that, that students teach faculty a lot, as much as faculty and students learn from staff as they learn from the community around them. And I hope that the book can, be a tool that orients us towards the ways that that knowledge is being generated about an institution whose focus is not exclusively education. You know, if we learn from all, from each other about the ways that we can kind of orient these institutions into the places of, of study and connection that we'd otherwise like them to be.

Ellen Schreker: 11:48

I see it as a tool in building a movement. Very much so. And as a historian, one of the things that I always look back to is the beginning of the anti-war movement when nobody knew anything about Vietnam and what happened, what sort of jump started the anti-war movement was the teach-in movement. In other words, it was faculty members some of them in East Asian studies, but not everyone. And people who knew how to access knowledge and then disseminated. In this very new formulation through teachers, through all kinds of little leaflets and stuff that was happening. But it was the use of scholarship in the beginning to get a movement underway. And I think I'm not sure anybody has really talked that much about it except for me. I was there and my late husband wrote the first anti-war reader collection of documents that became a bestseller, but also was considered the bible of the anti-war movement. And, you know, movements need bibles.

Jennifer Ruth: 13:18

Yeah, I'd just like to add that I very much like the motivation of the book being an organizing tool and the idea that as academic workers, we tend to think that we have to write something and publish it before we can act on it. And the idea being that people, as Andy put it earlier, people have done this work and you don't need to start there because what we really need right now is not more thought pieces, but more organizing.

Jennifer Ruth: 13:49

And so the idea that we can, every campus can have, uh, a wall to wall group where people say, okay, I'll be in charge of figuring out what our campuses, our university's risk management issues are. And they can go to the risk management keyword chapter. I'll think about legislation. I'm gonna go to the legislation chapter to begin to kind of. Internalize the things that I need to be researching for that are specific to our university. I can look at you know, the endowment and debt there's keywords for each of these things and people don't have to figure it out on their own. They can look at these, they can read these chapters and they can then start researching for their own local situation and contributing to their local chapter. Whether it be an AAUP chapter, whether it be an F, an FSJP or an SJP chapter, whatever the chapter is, whatever the organization. 'cause right now we need organizing and we need coalitions. And I think this book does is extraordinarily helpful handbook. And it's very much in the spirit of Raymond Williams and keywords and political education, which I really appreciate.

Vineeta Singh: 14:59

Okay, so I think that word coalition that you just used, Jennifer, that might be a key word for our own practice. I know that at my campus we've seen a new wave of interest in the AAUP chapter, and I believe that's something that's playing out all across the country, if not in more transnational context as well, that more and more people are joining organizing efforts and. I know it can be quite intimidating when you're first joining something like this, and I also know that many of these organizations, you know, have had people who've been present and active for 20 or 30 years. So do you have advice for us on how we can kind of work across this generational divide, how we bridge those different levels of experience and knowledge?

Jennifer Ruth: 15:53

If I could just jump in real quickly to mention, one of my points of inspiration is my own faculty and staff for Justice and Palestine chapter. We're a very strong chapter, and we have, we do not have students, although we have people who liaison regularly with what on our campus is called Students United for Palestinian Rights, but they're affiliated with S-J-S-J-P. But the faculty and staff relationships that we have built that don't get built through the AAUP, the don't get built through other groups. Are really a model going forward. And so there's generational differences and also rank differences. Contingent faculty are in a different union from our A AAUP chapter on our campus, but in our FSJP chapter, it's contingent faculty. It's full-time non-tenure track faculty. It's tenure track faculty and its staff from all sectors of the university. And that's been incredibly powerful in terms of sharing information and generationally in terms of people who've been around and people who are new. The younger ones tend to be really great at the organizing tools and the social media tools and the elders among us, have a, wealth of knowledge of institutional history that can help us strategize.

Andy Hines: 17:08

And just to kind of add on to that I think we need to focus more deeply on the ways that universities are deeply hierarchical institutions, both internally, and that there are, significant hierarchies that are spoken and unspoken. Whether that's the ranks of faculty, whether that's, you know, who talks to faculty, who talks to staff, which staff talk to students, and which faculty talk to administrators, et cetera. So there's the kind of internal division of labor. you can kind of build that out and look at the system as a whole and think about, which university presidents talk to, which other university presidents and which, the different functions that all of these institutions sit within the hierarchy. And I think we need to focus. Seizing every opportunity that we can, where we can put people in conversation across those various modes of hierarchy.

Andy Hines: 18:04

for instance, even in my own role, I work at an organization called The Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. And one of the things that we do is we, you know, run a reading group and we really open it up to faculty and staff and somewhat serendipitously, when we do hold it, we often get a lot of staff participation in addition to faculty. And those are really powerful kind of moments of connection because people learn about things that are going on on campus, even at an incredibly small institution like Swarthmore that they had no idea about. And some of those things are, things that, involve the, the injustices of those exploitative hierarchies that we talked about. But some of those are just like the lack of knowledge about, oh, like your center or your part, your office is doing this thing. Oh, that actually connects to my class. Maybe my students can benefit. And then I think the thing is despite all of those things being present on so many of these incredibly large campuses, that even, or even small ones, there's not enough opportunities for us to really talk to each other despite the fact that we're all kind of all thrown together.

Andy Hines: 19:08

And I think that is the powerful idea behind kind of industrial unionization that, you know, that the AAUP has kind of been pushing to, and that we've seen, as a successful model in a lot of different places. Thinking about how one can build conversations with people on campus that you don't normally talk to is even that is a wonderful first step that isn't necessarily about taking a political action, but is a step towards building the kind of connections and community that is necessary to, take those critical organizing steps, as we, so desperately need.

Ellen Schreker: 19:42

Yeah. And there are other kinds of groups that academics are involved with, like disciplinary organizations and I'm in a group called Historians for Peace and Democracy, and we are about to push a resolution against the current attack on higher education. Hopefully through the, american Historical Association and the text of that is a resolution that I was sent from the Radical Caucus of the MLA, which is also trying to push such a resolution. And all of a sudden we realize, well if every group or as many groups as we can reach can come out and have their disciplinary organization, that's a different kind of approach. But it says something about what the academic profession as a whole values and, is working toward. And so there are lots of different ways we can do this. And coalitions, of course, are absolutely essential. And we know the other side is working together.

Ellen Schreker: 20:57

In my, uh, research, I looked at the 1960s and the college presidents were talking to each other all the time and to think that they're not doing it. Now. They're also, of course, hiring the same PR firms and the risk assessment people. And we are trying to play catch up. But I think it's something that is very intellectually attractive to people. The idea of a collective response by an entire sector. Of American society very much involved and affected by this and that American higher education, another sort of historical insight as it were has become such a much larger part of American society than it was 50 years ago. And we have to realize that there's a kind of historical movement toward where we are today.

Vineeta Singh: 22:05

If I can riff on that idea of playing catch up, that really resonates with something that I've been struggling with a lot recently. You know, I think in the last year we've, and when I say we, I mean the AAUP, but also probably left us organizing spaces in the broadest sense. I think we've been on the defensive, right? Uh, we've been kind of reacting to all these horrible things that happen. We show up, we fight hard, but. I don't know what it looks like to win if all we're doing is defending. Does that make sense? Um, so I guess what I'm asking is that I would love for you to say what academic freedom as a positive right means to you, right? Like, how do we understand what it is that we are championing and what it is that we're building, um, and how do we center that instead of just centering what we're fighting against?

Andy Hines: 23:01

first off, I totally endorse what you said about we, whether the we is the left or the A AAUP can't just defend what we had in part because what we had sucked for most people, especially within the last 20 years, and we need to build something better. we had $1.7 trillion worth of debt piling up on the backs of the most marginalized students the people teaching those students went from having somewhat secure jobs that were somewhat okay in their remuneration and compensation to having two thirds of those jobs to three quarters of them being contingent. We had an American public who for better or for worse, completely soured on the prospect of what we offered, in part because of those terrible conditions under which many students and many faculty were working.

Andy Hines: 24:00

And so while. incredible things, both knowledge and students and teaching and learning has been produced under those deteriorating conditions. That doesn't mean that we don't need to stand up and fight for something better. And so I think, we need to think about the ways that science hasn't served, many Americans. We have to think about the ways that the healthcare, that cuts that have happened have not served many Americans, which has predisposed lots of people to be somewhat sympathetic to what are, still very unpopular cuts to, to popular services. I think in terms of higher education, I think academic freedom is a positive, right? And I think it's functionally, a right to teach and to learn.

Andy Hines: 24:46

I tread carefully because this is, Ellen's, historical wheelhouse. But I think a little bit about the communist left in the, the mid 20th century. I think about, for instance, I was recently reading a report by Dier Wilkerson, who was an African American scholar of education who left his position at Howard University to join the Communist Party and then to direct the curriculum of institution called the Jefferson School of Social Science in New York City. And the, attorney General was trying to close the Jefferson School of Social Science and Doxy Wilkerson wrote a. Called the right to Learn. It was called Academic Freedom versus McCarthyism. And the report detailed the ways that the government's efforts to shut down what was a Marxist school, even in Wilkerson's concession, meant that not meant that everybody's freedom was curtailed. not just those who were trying to teach and learn about Marxism. And, you know, he saw the, that work akin to burning books. And I think that like isn't unfamiliar to us. all of that feels like familiar territory. But it suggests that, the right to learn the right to study, these are fundamental things that we ought to be fighting for because it, it improves all of our lives in ways that are not just economic, but in ways that are, significant in ways beyond the economic.

Andy Hines: 26:05

And that seems. critical for what we need to be arguing for is that, free inquiry is essential for any democracy. But I think, free inquiry is essential to what it means to be a person. and is something that, we should be fighting for everyone to have access to in, in one shape or form. And so I think in that sense, we were never close to having achieved that before. And so, we have to think about how, what we need to assert is a positive vision to achieve that. For which I think you, there's great potential

Jennifer Ruth: 26:38

I'd like to think about this in terms of horizons a little bit. The question of academic freedom and being a defensive crouch and that we get too off on stuck in a defensive crouch. And think about it in terms of three horizons. One was fairly backward looking in the sense that it does nothing about all of the ways in which the present and the last 30 years have sucked, as Andy very nicely put it. and that is looking at the actual positive procedural aspects of, academic freedom that pretty much revolve around tenure, that are about peer review, that are about horizontal only experts, get to decide the validity of other experts contributions, who deserves tenure, et cetera. And the idea of course, was that boards of trustees, presidents who may come out of a different discipline the public, the layperson, all of these people have no right to determine. Curriculum or who gets tenure and who doesn't, or who gets appointed and who gets fired because they're not in that discipline.

Jennifer Ruth: 27:41

So the disciplinary kind of model of tenure, that was the attempt to try to create an infrastructure for academic freedom that had some justification and some accountability to it. It wasn't just, you're in the university, you have academic freedom, but it was tied to the processes of tenure and that has not been able, while the 1940 statement of a EP had something like 260 organizations sign on, and for a brief period it was capable of spreading the system of tenure throughout the country. Since the 1970s that it's been devolving and eroding. So that's a backward looking horizon. A a present horizon to me are the unions and the idea that what tenure is essentially, and the AAUP made its gambit on.

Jennifer Ruth: 28:34

Tying tenure and academic freedom and job security altogether. Because as we all, if you're a contingent faculty member, you know damn well you have no academic freedom. If one student complaint means that your department chair thinks, ah, I don't wanna bother rehiring that person, they got a complaint. Right? That's not, you have no academic freedom. So the unions are about due process, job security. Those things create the conditions for which you have some ability to think freely and to research and teach and disseminate freely. So the present for me are in the unions. The forward-looking horizon, uh, speaks more to the kind of thing that Andy, and Eli write in their chapter for university keywords, the idea of creating a new vision. For the right to learn and the right to teach and to learn and teach together collectively. So that's, I think where we're at. We're at the present with unions and we're looking forward and trying to imagine what academic freedom would look like in a world where it can be accessible to more and not just a defensive anti-politics, anti-corporate interference model.

Ellen Schreker: 29:48

we maybe have to rethink what is the role of the university in American society? What are we actually contributing to? What common good, I mean, that's the phrase that is always being used is the common good. What does that mean? What does it consist of and, I don't think we've given en enough thought to that in today's sort of totally fractured and very scary society, we can't just talk about truth. We can't just talk about justice or something like, the big abstract nouns. We have to talk about people's lives. And I think that's part of our job as people who are concerned with somehow creating a society that's going to work for most of its members, it's rolling back that neoliberal, inequity that has been destroying academic freedom in a lot more since the 1970s.

Vineeta Singh: 31:05

So I think maybe a second part of that question about coalition has to do with, uh, wall to wall organizing, which has come up a couple of times in this conversation and also in other conversations for this series, I.

Ellen Schreker: 31:20

You know, I'm in a university that is reviled in academic labor discourse yeshiva. And we did have actually they resuscitated their A AAUP chapter. It had disappeared especially after the, uh. Hama in Israel, it just fell apart. But that's my school. It's just unusual. But what I think we're looking at is a realization that you need to involve every group on a campus if you're going to have an impact. And the recent change within the A AAUP itself, which I've followed fairly closely toward an organizing model, has really made a difference. There is more motivation on campuses to organize. And once you begin to think about that, you realize it has to be on a much broader scale and the success in certain institutions. I'm thinking about Rutgers a few, I guess it was two years ago, where they organized just about every worker on the campuses. And there were three campuses was really very inspirational at work.

Jennifer Ruth: 32:55

I think we have to be honest though about the difficulties, incredible difficulties of all to Wall Union organizing. So for example. On my campus, the AAUP chapter represents full-time, non-tenure track faculty, tenure track faculty and academic professionals. But the reality is that when we need help around academic professional issues, we really don't get it from national AAUP and we really don't have much internally to help them either. And then contingent faculty are in a different union. There's been a couple of people on my campus who've been really trying to do all union meetings on a regular basis, and they're really hard to, get the participation in and. In general, we still do see, part of what's disconcerting and demoralizing is just the degree to which we still see a lot of those old school, what I now consider very old school obsolete sentiments around faculty have nothing in common with staff, tenure line faculty, uh, or fear of, so of identifying as labor when you're a tenured faculty because you see, you wanna see AAUP as strictly a professional association. So all of those divisions and tensions are still there to some extent making it difficult. But our current moment of such profound and wide ranging assault is breaking some of them down. I hope and think.

Andy Hines: 34:30

Yeah, and I just to, to say in a different way, I think things that both Ellen and Jennifer have said is that. there's the challenge of entering into a wall-to-wall union, and then there's also what motivates that wall-to-wall union. And that's kind of this idea of. Bargaining for the common good, which of course itself, emerges out of things like the Chicago Teachers Union. a wider kind of strategy that orients the demands that workers make at the bargaining table as not necessarily being about only their own, personal material interests, but of the wider interests of the community. And I think one of the reasons that wall-to-Wall union organization, or wall-to-wall organization within higher ed has become, to be seen as such an effective and a, a tool of great potential is because of the ways that universities represent. through their workforce, not just their students and their faculty so much have given communities. all of us have kind of referenced the ways that universities have become big, economic players and major, American cities and, we can think about Davian Baldwin's work, drawing our attention to this in a, in a strong way. Who, wrote for the book. Also, uh, you know, drawing attention to some of that.

Andy Hines: 35:40

But I think it shows us the ways that universities can be a place where we, you know, wall to wall union organizing means. It really is bringing as many people as possible together around, demands and ideas and a bargaining campaign that can build the things that that community wants and needs and is not receiving otherwise. And that, reveals certain failures of the state, but it also reveals about the ways that the, that the university can be an important point of leverage for the distribution of services, and things that people really need that they're not otherwise are being provisioned elsewhere. And so that strikes me as an important piece of this conversation. And again, another kind of, it underlines the importance of thinking about how the university is a space that both separates and brings people together at the same time. And how we're, how part of the organizing work that has to happen there is about bridging those differences and fighting against those kind of modes of separation

Ellen Schreker: 36:38

Also let us know, we need power and power in numbers and it's absolutely essential. we're at a kind of turning point in that the academic community was like the, uh, frogs in boiling water as it were, they were turning up the heat and nobody was recognizing what was going on. And I think now that has changed. So it does present an opportunity for people within the higher education sector, but also the broader society to sort of say, okay, there are these institutions, they're in terrible trouble, but maybe we can do something together. My vision for a sort of energized campus is one where people think, oh, let's all go to the demonstration. It's what everybody's doing. Let's all go and help block the ice men who are coming to freeze our campuses where it becomes normal to resist and that's gonna take an enormous amount of work. But if we think about the fact that what we've had up until now hasn't worked and that people haven't gotten from the universities, what they need as you're putting it Andy then maybe we can find some kind of sense of solidarity, I guess is the word.

Jennifer Ruth: 38:28

I would be remiss if I don't mention that any kind of future for academic freedom can no longer abide by the Palestine exception to academic freedom and free speech. And that Gaza is the compass in the sense that it's the most profound, that in Sudan most profound place of cruelty and destruction and that there's many, many forces that will try to rebuild, but rebuild using finance capital, using things that require us to continue to accept that from our discourse, to continue to throw that under the bus. And for me, the litmus test of a new kind of way of thinking about academic freedom and a new kind of organizing of thinking and learning would be one that centers Palestine and any kind of marginalized group where the powerful forces are bru, that powerful forces are brutalizing.

Andy Hines: 39:28

Yeah, I, I don't have anything to add to that great answer.

Vineeta Singh: 39:33

All right, so here's my last question and uh, this comes out of a practice that I've recently adopted of assigning our listeners homework. You know, this is very much in this spirit of keywords and study as an organizing tool. So, of course one of the things that I'm going to suggest as homework for our listeners is to read the keywords book, read it with a colleague, read it with a friend, read a specific keyword and discuss it and figure out how it might become part of your organizing practice or help you start an organizing practice. Would you like to, uh, add a few assignments of your own?

Jennifer Ruth: 40:19

I would say, uh, create a book reading group where you read university keywords. And also organize a screening on your campus of the Palestine exception, what's at stake in campus protests, which we've also tried, like, the book itself tried to use as an organizing tool where people screen it on their campuses and then they have panels of activists who are involved from the community or on their campus to talk. So it's sort of like you watch the film, but then you don't have to talk about the film, you can talk about what the film sparks in relationship to the work that you're doing. I we have Coalition for Action in higher ed has three caucuses, a Palestine caucus who rules the academy, which is focused on looking at the role of boards of trustees and the degree to which they limit and worse what we can do in our institutions. And then also an anti-fascism caucus. And we have only a website that's called Day of Action. And so it can be kind of hard to figure out how to plug in with us. I think. But feel free to email me. Maybe you can put put my Gmail email as part of this podcast. And Andy as well is on the organizing collective of, or the steering committee, rather, the steering Committee of Coalition Fraction and higher ed. So we'd love to see you at some of our meetings.

Andy Hines: 41:39

I think people would benefit from reading Ellen's no ivory tower if they haven't read that before. But I also think people can do a lot to learn about the turn of the 20th century, which is, you know, in some ways when the A AAUP formed in the first place and there was a kind of debate over professionalism versus worker and there was a challenge of university boards firing, faculty at will that kind of put us in the position where we are now with the, compromise that has led things like shared governance and academic freedom for some, but not for all on campus. And I feel like, more of us can learn that early 20th century

Ellen Schreker: 42:20

history. The only opposition to McCarthyism on the universities and it throughout broader American society was the victims themselves. The people who were hauled up before the committees and mainly lost their jobs. And that the institutions uniformly collaborate. And they're doing that today, and they're, we didn't talk about things like anticipatory obedience

Andy Hines: 42:51

mm-hmm. Where

Ellen Schreker: 42:52

they're rushing to do that. Out of fear that the government is going to do something bad to them and it's doesn't work. And it didn't work in the 1950s either.

Andy Hines: 43:06

And

Ellen Schreker: 43:06

it's very important to realize that we're dealing with something that is much more vicious and much stronger than McCarthyism was.

Jennifer Ruth: 43:19

Yeah. I think, and I think Andy is alluding to, and he is already brought up the Jefferson School, but the history of racial fascism, we have a lot we can learn from the fights against racial fascism in this and the freedom school in, in so many different ways. The alternative spaces that were created to build communities under Jim Crow, so that would be another site, historical site that we can mine.

Ellen Schreker: 43:42

Actually, I would add that what killed McCarthyism, besides the fact they just pretty much destroyed the American Communist movement was the civil rights movement. All of a sudden you have society having to deal with the real injustice that the country's supposed democratic political system is based on. And that diverted attention, shall we say, from the non-existent threat of domestic communist subversion as it were.

Vineeta Singh: 44:19

That's beautiful. And I think that, you know, really takes us back full circle to where we started with Andy. You were talking about, um, when folks are trying to organize on campus, they feel like they have to start from scratch, but actually they don't have to start from scratch. There's so much work that they can build on, um, intellectually. And that's true in terms of activism too, right? We don't have to be the leaders of the movement. We're not in this by ourselves. throw open the campus walls. There's so much organizing happening all around us that we can be a part of as academic workers or as all the other things that we are right. And I think that maybe has to do with what Andy, you were saying about hierarchical thinking and hierarchical institutions embedding hierarchical thinking into the way we approach the world. Right. Um, so I think maybe looking outside the university might be one of the ways that we can kind of counteract that hierarchical impulse. thank you all so much. This has been such an invigorating conversation.

Jennifer Ruth: 45:24

Really. Well put how you end it. I hope you better keep what you just said. Yeah. Keep that Venita. That was great.

Andy Hines: 45:30

Thank you so much.

Vineeta Singh: 45:31

closing music Thank you for listening to another episode of Academic Freedom on the Line, a special series of A A UP presents produced in collaboration with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom or CDAF. I've been your host, Venita Singh. We've already assigned you a great deal of homework. Please know that you'll find links to all of those things as well as links to the other texts mentioned in this conversation in the show notes for this podcast episode. I'll also be linking to some upcoming Know Your Rights trainings offered by A A UP and other events that listeners might be interested in. Thanks for listening.