Symposium Presentation by Former President of the UVU AAUP Chapter: David Knowlton
The Decline and Fight for Academic Freedom
and Integrity
David Knowlton
A cornerstone of professional life and shared university governance, academic freedom is found in our University and USHE policies. These policies encode and refer to the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Unfortunately, in practice these words are grounds for struggle and often feel more like virtue signaling than the guarantees of evident and clear policy governing the University.
In my decades as faculty in Utah, first at a private, religious university with strong apparent guarantees of academic freedom in policy and now for twenty years at a public University, I have learned that policy plays many roles and only one, sometimes the least one, is of actual governing. Although policy is important and becomes part of the contract between faculty and a university, its use in governance can bend it and even break it like trees before a hurricane in the force of the administrative suite’s desire, that of the Trustees or Regents, and of social or political pressure
We faculty are left with the weak weapons of organization, speech, publication, the press, and so on to maintain the rights guaranteed in a clear reading of the policies. We also have the difficult tool of last resort, the legal process though expensive and problematic when we are more considered employees in a right to work state where juries tend to genuflect towards institutional authority.
As someone defended by BYU’s young AAUP chapter, and later a member and then an officer of UVU’s AAUP, I have found myself in the breech between administration and faculty, without clear institutional acceptance of the AAUP and only the power of organization and suasion. In what follows, I shall give my analysis of a few issues of academic freedom that have either arisen in my experience as an advocate or are on the horizon.
The 1940 AAUP statement on Academic freedom was hard won and, amazingly, has been maintained through much dedication, discussion, and work over the last eighty some years at a national level.[1] There have been many efforts to amend it, change it, or even negate it. Yet it has persisted because of much dedication and even hard work on the part of the AAUP, faculties and even administrators at institutions around the country. To this set, I would add the ecology of private organizations that has grown up around higher education, as well as the action of legislatures. Even challenges to academic freedom have enabled it to reemerge as an ideal and a basis for defense and action.
I recommend faculty study the words of the 1940 Statement carefully. While they boldly speak of being “entitled to freedom” as researchers, teachers, and citizens, they also contain trip wires referencing common issues and problems. These concerns also remit to the social and political niche in which we, as professors exist.
Teaching and Axson-Flynn
An example of how this is important. In this and future examples I focus specifically on teaching, only one of our three ares of activity as faculty, namely research, teaching, and citizenship. I do this because our university centers on teaching and because professors’ activities in the classroom easily become a red flag to the charging bulls that run with us, whether administrators, powerful community stake holders, or politicians.
The AAUP Statement holds: “teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject…” However, in 2001, Christina Axson-Flynn sued the nearby University of Utah alleging that “[d]efendants’ Acting Program curricular requirements that she use language that she found objectionable amount to a constitutionally impermissible infringement of her rights to Free Exercise and Free Speech.”[2] Her objection combined the very hot button of religion—particularly in a state where a majority of the population belongs to a single faith and where that Church is a strong and politically active institution— with concerns over profanity, authors’ rights, and the rights of professors as experts to set the curriculum. It also, thereby, was a challenge to institutionalized professional communities beyond the university where individuals—in this case actors—might feel a conflict between that field and their personal values.
The university for the interests of attorneys and external actors is more than a simple place of students and professors engaging the material of a subject. It can so easily become a site for conflicts whose main fora are elsewhere, in this case the place and rights of religious individuals and religious bodies in a secular society. This microcosmic explosion happened less than a decade after congress, with quite some fanfare including the strong voice of our then senior senator Orrin Hatch passed the problematically entitled Religious Freedom Restoration Act.[3] Arguably, the broader furor provided the streets and bulls based on which Axson-Flynn could find personal motivation, attorneys, press, and so on at a time when most Latter-day Saint actors simply followed the requirements of their training programs in theatre and film. Though focused on the classroom, it was about so much more.
The suit sent shock waves through the academic communities of Utah because of its argument for privileging individual religious beliefs (with the massive Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints invoked behind Axson-Flynn) above the freedom of a professor to decide pedagogy and course material and of departments to establish curriculum.
Though Axson-Flynn’s case was settled and did not proceed, it has had impact. This was not just due to the suit or future threats of suits, but arguably to interests external to the academy around religious freedom.
At UVU this became a charging bull when a draft policy providing for accommodation in course material and pedagogy appeared before the faculty senate. Despite substantial faculty concern and discussion, as well as opposition, this policy, though revised is now in force in UVU and limits academic freedom in the classroom in the face of student rights of conscience perhaps for good and perhaps for bad.[4] In any case, the revisions in the policy show the possibility of shared governance to slow or shift the force of external social and political interests while ostensibly acknowledging them. The policy also established a bureaucratic interest when an accommodation is asked for, and a means for adjudicating between the academic freedom of faculty and the new rights of students to advance their value. Academic freedom is ostensibly maintained and the rights of students are ostensibly enabled. For neither side are the values fully realized.
The Trope of Students, SRIs, and Academic Power
Note that issues like this are not driven by individual students, despite what may have happened to Christina Axson-Flynn, but by the idea of student as ideological image to whom rights of political value are attributed for the purposes of challenging institutional prerogatives, especially the rights of professors to academic freedom. Individuals may be sought by broader institutional or entrepreneurial actors for the purposes of gaining attention to their cause or for filing lawsuits. Certainly, even in the case of Axson-Flynn, when the issue appeared as a policy proposal at UVU, her name was no longer attached. It shifted and became one of the rights of students in general. As label, students, are a category in UVU policy at the same time they are a politically valuable tool as trope, connected to many people’s families, for motivating political passion and support in the various struggles of our society and even that of other countries; The issues are seldom only those of our country.
Another example. Some sixteen or so years ago, I first became aware of Student evaluations becoming something different. Originally a tool for faculty to assess the effectiveness of their teaching and its reception by students, student evaluations began to be used for rank advancement decisions including denial of tenure and dismissal.[5] Although UVU faculty had found many problems with these assessments and rejected their use as factors for deciding rank advancement or termination and, though they had no grounding in the policies guiding such actions of the time, they appeared more and more commonly in documents evaluating faculty for rank advancement or even for dismissal. In my experience, they have become key tools for deans and our Academic- Vice-President-now-Provost’s office in weighing faculty, despite strong faculty and Senate opposition over more than a decade.
Besides a quantitative and hence simple way of reducing the complexity of variables in ranking professors within disciplines and across them, SRIs also relate to ideological issues in our culture wars. As such, they provide wedges that can mobilize public and legislative pressure to reduce faculty’s “freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject.”
These wedges include the broad political idea of students as consumers, instead of education sensu strictu, as the purpose of Universities. Students’ opinions as market users—or as proxies for broader political concerns for modifying curriculum or for challenging intellectual’s power. These numbers can easily be seen as more important than the professional training and rights of faculty as experts to set pedagogy and curriculum. In other words, they fit into a set of challenges from large scale ideological battles over who gets to set the agendas in American life and which interests they represent.
Two long sought conservative issues come together in the struggles over SRIs: restoring/enhancing hierarchical power and strengthening management. SRIs provide tools that are not simply about students or authority but can be seen as external, empirical measures; hence facts, to be managed. Instead of difficult conversations about appropriate pedagogies or even about disciplinary ideas or facts, SRIs change the focus to qualities that students are encouraged to rank which re then extracted and context-free. Ostensibly those qualities are not violations of academic freedom but assessments of performance within the frame of academic freedom. Nonetheless, qualities such as ideas of organization or classroom management directly challenge the rights of faculty as pedagogical experts in their fields.
While these ideological objects come to ground for us, in part, in our struggle at UVU over SRIs, they also form part of political projects around which numerous research, publishing, and advocacy groups have formed. Indeed, these groups are a veritable industry. They exist at the national level as well as at state levels and may even feed into academic research. It appears we have substantially more conservative organizations than liberal, though both sides of the aisle have them.[6] Besides creating studies about academia, they also distribute press releases and articles, and they produce model legislation. In addition they offer conferences for legislators, governors, and state leaders, as well as university administrators where such issues are discussed and positions advocated.
This world of research and advocacy creates and provides expertise above that of professors in the classroom, a meta-expertise if you will, based on educational research that trumps faulty as pedagogical experts such as envisioned in the AAUP’s Statement.
This means for us here at UVU that the issues that arise before us often appear suddenly out of left field, with power and weight. It also means they can persist despite our rejection of them, such as CRIs and even much of the religious accommodation policy, because they have been cultivated for often long periods of time at national levels. From these levels they flow down through an almost rhyzomatic system of interconnections to university administrators, state university systems, government officials, and legislators, But, we faculty do not receive them with annotations of this history of motivated development and discussion. They just appear, immaculate and seemingly inviolate. and we must consider and evaluate them de novo, cleanly, and without preparation. We are disadvantaged.
We also lack the financial and lobbying capacity to make our thoughts and decisions have weight and value, even if co-governance does open possibilities for modifications of these ideas.
Controversy, Political Action, and Academic Freedom
One more example of academic freedom issues that are important for us. The AAUP statement warns professors about “introduc(ing) into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.” The implication is that such is not protected by expectations of academic freedom. However, the mere notion of strong controversy can cause a social and political situation in which the relationship of it to the subject may be forgotten or erased.
In Utah, we have lived this in historical fights over teaching evolution and more recently feminism which some labeled “extreme feminism” to make it controversial. On the horizon are very difficult struggles over the teaching of gender (including trans-issues), sexuality, race, internal colonialism and so on. I say this as a social scientist whose field and teaching may be on the front lines of the unsayable and unteachable again.
I do not see this as necessarily a political or a partisan set of concerns, nor controversial issues. They are matters of analyzing society based on scholarly norms and empirical data. Even if in their origins they may have been political, they have lost that and become mainstream academic concerns. Nonetheless, they have become been politicized of late in the US as part of creating divisions among the electorate and seeking advantage to create a different society.
I will pause here. I speak as someone who has done extensive work in Latin America where social scientists were targeted in the dirty wars as people who brought critical perspectives to understanding society instead of simply accepting hierarchy and the dominant voices’ statements of how society was and should be. The Fulbright Program sent me to Buenos Aires to help train a graduate cohort of anthropologists as part of replacing the scholars who were disappeared by the militantly right wing and religiously nationalist governments.
With this in mind, I noticed in Tuesday’s Salt Lake Tribune that Governor De Santis of Florida will be the keynote speaker at Utah’s Republican State Convention. As you may know, Governor de Santis has actively promoted educational change in Florida. He may have single handedly led to revisions by the College Board in the curriculum of the national AP class on African American Studies, including dismissing for one reason or another important scholars such as the late bell hooks who has been on our campus and is much loved.
De Santis has also spoken strongly against so-called Critical Race Theory and about “wokism” which he uses as a portmanteau term for much progressive thought in which he includes another of his bêtes noires, diversity.
Of course, De Santis is not alone in this, even if he has an increasingly powerful voice. Rather the issues developed in conservative foundations and think tanks, as well as in the right wing media. To show this, I offer Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, who claims to have created Critical Race Theory as “the perfect villain”.[7] What he argues is telling:
“it […] seemed like a promising political weapon. “Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’ Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.” Most perfect of all, Rufo continued, critical race theory is not “an externally applied pejorative.” Instead, “it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.’”[8]
Rufo claims to have chosen a term whose basis and arguments in academic legal theory he seems to have understood. He made it a label for more general progressive ideas on race and inequality, labeled them as negative, even communist using red scare techniques, and made CRT an offensive portmanteau term. He took an inside academic term, changed its definition and weight, and used it promiscuously. That it was academic was all the more valuable in a broader conservative quest to challenge the academy and subdue it to more conservative likings, including reduced or no tenure, stronger hierarchy, ideological purity, and so on. De Santis named Rufo a Trustee at Florida’s New College, a once classic liberal arts school.
You will see these ideas making their way through Utah legislators and through our state system and our universities. In a weakened form, thanks in part to AFT lobbying for modifying the stronger version, the issue was already the subject of a Utah legislative resolution concerning k-12 education. However We probably will see it arrive strongly in higher education and challenge our freedom to teach.
While the politics seem evident, let me explore how specifically this might arrive at our doorsteps via the AAUP Statement on Academic Freedom. It warned that teachers “should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.” This was a well balanced warning recognizing that matters of public controversy were teachable if they had a “relation” to the class’s subject.
Now we see entire swaths of academic research and scholarship made controversial by think tanks and their members, such as Rufo, for politicians, such as De Santis. It is difficult to remember the “in relation to the class’s subject” clause when the entire field has been tarred and feathered with controversy. It becomes very difficult, in this instance, for universities to stand firm against strong and powerful political pressure.
This battle is being waged today in Florida in public view. On Feb 27th, the AAUP released a statement that a “Florida Bill Would Destroy Higher Education as We Know It”. I recommend you read that statement.[9]
Universities have powerful institutions to protect themselves such as their policies and procedures, systems of governance and co-governance, and the presence of trustees or regents. We already see these in action on this issue. The Dean of Humanities at the U of Utah recently released a Message[10] defining the issues and arguing the higher education practice is different from what is envisioned in the legislative resolution. UVU’s SCULPT released a bit over a year ago a Statement on diversity, equality, inclusion and critical race theory that strongly advocates for them.[11]
While these are important actions. Along with faculty activity, they will go a long way towards mitigating the political storm. Just like the marshes and mangroves of gulf coastal waters do for hurricanes. They still may not be sufficient and we should be prepared.
By y appointing trustees or regents to advance a political agenda, by choosing partisan university presidents and officers, by stacking the courts using previously developed new right wing legal ideologies, and by denying or removing tenure university systems can be overwhelmed. They also can be weakened by political pressure directly on colleagues in our departments and by deans or administrators who believe that these newly controversial fields are somehow unacceptable. They may move to deny advancement or tenure and make life difficult. They may also deny funding to scholars at their universities.
Conclusion
Shared governance, tenure, and academic freedom are now more important than ever. We need the strength, knowledge and agility of those who run with bulls as well as the organization, rootedness and density of mangroves marsh grass if we are to survive.
[1] https://www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure (consulted March 29, 2023)
[2] Axson-Flynn v. Johnson, Shotwell, Shippobotham, Smith, Gardner et al. 2001. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/151/1326/2491718/ (visited March 27, 2023.)
[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/1308 Consulted March 29, 2023).
[4] UVU Policy 601 4.7.4 . https://policy.uvu.edu/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/getDisplayFile/5750ed2697e4c89872d95664#search=601&phrase=true&page=0 (consulted March 27, 2023).
The policy states “Faculty are expected to reasonably accommodate individual religious practices. Such reasonable accommodations may include but are not limited to a course assignment modification (see sections 4.7.7 and 4.7.8), an excused absence, rescheduling, flexibility in scheduling, or voluntary substitutions. Denial of an accommodation request for a sincerely held religious belief or practice is justified only when undue hardship to the University’s legitimate academic purposes would result from each available alternative of reasonable accommodation…”
[5] c.f. Derek Gottlieb, The Troubled History of Teaching Evaluation. https://www.aaup.org/article/troubled-history-teaching-evaluation#.ZCNp-RXMKz1 (Consulted March 27, 2023)
[6] Ness, E. C., & Gándara, D. (2014). Ideological Think Tanks in the States: An Inventory of Their Prevalence, Networks, and Higher Education Policy Activity. Educational Policy, 28(2), 258–280.
[7] Benjamin Wallace-Wells, How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory. The New Yorker, June 28, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory (Last consulted March 28, 2023).
[8] ibid.
[9] https://www.aaup.org/news/florida-bill-would-destroy-higher-education-we-know-it#.ZCbNkezMKz0 (consulted March 26, 2023)
[10] https://humanities.utah.edu/news/deans-message-crt.php (consulted March 26, 2023)
[11] https://www.uvu.edu/sculpt/docs/dei.pdf (consulted March 26, 2023)
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