Attacks on academic freedom undermine the quality of US education

What do anti-woke activism, cancel culture and trigger warnings have in common? They undermine the academic freedom essential to higher education.

Anti-woke activism poses the greatest threat. Popularized by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), this latest iteration of MAGA ideology seeks to forbid educators from teaching about race, gender or sexuality.

Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law severely restricts the discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in public schools. DeSantis followed it with the “Individual Freedom Act,” otherwise known as the “Stop Woke Act.”

That law forbids teaching that anyone “by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.”

Under the guise of “race neutrality,” the law allows parents to object to material dealing with race on the grounds that it might upset their children.

Not content to restrict K-12 teaching, DeSantis has taken aim at higher education. Florida House Bill 999 proposes sweeping changes to state colleges and universities designed to promote his anti-woke agenda.

What the bill prescribes threatens academic freedom as much as what it prohibits. It contains the usual laundry list of banned topics: “Critical Race Theory, Critical Ethnic Studies, Radical Feminist Theory, Radical Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Social Justice, or Intersectionality.”

But it also calls for “instruction on the historical background and philosophical foundation of Western civilization and this nation’s founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments thereto, and the Federalist Papers.”

This prescription amounts to nothing less than replacing an objective, inclusive U.S. History with the mythology of American exceptionalism, the belief that U.S. civilization is not only superior but a divinely sanctioned example to the entire human race.

“Cancel culture” also undermines academic freedom, albeit to a lesser extent than anti-woke activism. This amorphous term includes a wide array of behaviors. Broadly defined it means boycotting a person or denying them freedom of expression because something they said or wrote offended a group or even a powerful individual. However, it can escalate to harassment and threats to the person’s employment or opportunities for promotion.

Once focused on celebrities like “Harry Potter” author, J.K. Rowling, who faced cancellation because of her transphobic tweets, cancel culture has invaded American campuses.

Students, faculty and outside groups have called for the dismissal of instructors because of something they said in class or posted online and sought to ban from campus speakers they find objectionable.

In many cases, professors have been legitimately called out for gratuitously offensive remarks, but in others, they have been criticized for unpopular views on controversial subjects such as diversity, feminism or abortion.

Despite the conservative hue and cry against cancel culture, however, relatively few academics have lost their jobs, and some of those cases in which they have are less clearcut than they appear.

For example, the University of Massachusetts Lowell Solomont School of Nursing removed Dean Leslie Neal-Boylan after she stated in an email to students “BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS,” for which she later apologized.

However, in a letter to the provost, Neal-Boylan stated that the administration was using the email as a pretext to dismiss her for reasons unrelated to her performance or what she wrote.

One undeniable case of cancelation targeted a liberal academic rather than a conservative one. 

The board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill refused to approve the recommendation of the School of Journalism to appoint Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the opening essay of the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” to a tenured position.

Under a firestorm of protest, the board reversed its decision and also awarded Hannah-Jones a cash settlement to avoid a lawsuit. She then left UNC for a position at Howard University.

Of greater concern than faculty being called out for their comments is the dampening effect cancel culture may have on academic discourse among students.

In a New York Times guess essay, Emma Camp wrote about the problem at the University of Virginia. “During a feminist theory class in my sophomore year,” she explained. “I said that non-Indian women can criticize suttee, a historical practice of ritual suicide by Indian widows.” Many of her classmates challenged her right to criticize a culture to which she did not belong.

A 2021 survey of 37,000 students at 157 colleges revealed that 80 percent self-censored their views at least some of the time. More disturbing, 66 percent found it acceptable to “shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus” and 23 percent considered violence to stop a speaker acceptable.

Taken too far, trigger warnings (alerts of potentially disturbing topics) can also dampen discourse. A resolution by the Student Assembly of Cornell University not only asked faculty to put content warnings on their syllabi but insisted they “refrain from penalizing students who opt out of exposure to such content.”

Cornell President Martha E. Pollack promptly rejected the resolution, saying that it would “infringe on our core commitment to academic freedom and freedom of inquiry.”

Asking professors to warn students about upsetting material is reasonable; asking them to excuse students from a class session that engages such material is not.

I alert students in my course on “white supremacy in the United States” about the disturbing nature of the Equal Justice Initiative’s “Lynching in America” report, but I require them to read and discuss it.

Higher education should make students uncomfortable with their established ideas and untested assumptions by exposing them to challenging, sometimes disturbing information and ideas.

Academic freedom should not be a license for saying whatever we please. But it must encourage and protect an atmosphere of respect for a diversity of views, even those with which we disagree or which upset us.

Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and the author of “Violent Extremists: Understanding the Domestic and International Terrorist Threat.”