Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom

 

 

In 2023, the Utah Legislature considered but didn’t pass a bill to ban DEI initiatives at all public universities in the state. The 2024 Legislature, led by the senate education committee chair John Johnson, passed a rewritten DEI ban. When asked, sponsors of the bill reported that they had no data to support the ban. It passed nonetheless. Despite the major disruption of DEI work being done at their institutions, none of the Utah college or university presidents or Faculty Senates spoke out publically against the bill.

 

Building on his success with DEI, John Johnson sponsored a “School of General Education” bill (S.B. 226) in the 2024 session. It failed. Given the DEI precedent, it might well return next year.

 

What is driving these attempts by legislators to take over university functions that are better left to faculty with professional expertise? A February article in the National Review by Stanley Kurtz, co-author of a General Education Actthat served as a model for Johnson’s Utah bill, lays out assumptions untethered to any recognizable general education system and praises the proposed Utah law:

 

“The real problem with higher education is that trustees and legislators have ceded their control over the general-education curriculum to a faculty driven by political motives. . . . [I]ncreasingly, the faculty chooses general-education courses based on its political leanings, not on academic expertise. . . . If legislators and trustees abandon their responsibility to steer the broad educational mission and strategy of public universities — an inevitably values-laden task — then the faculty will insert its own political values in their place, something in no way justified by academic freedom.”

 

            The National Association of Scholars weighs in on SB 226 as well, leaving no question as to the intent to impose a set of conservative values on Utah students: 

 

“SB 226 provides the necessary administrative framework to make sure that faculty teach the courses in the spirit intended by the state government. . . . Utah’s public colleges and universities . . .  have been colonized by committed radicals actively averse to teaching the ideals and institutions of American liberty, republican self-government, and civic virtue. . . . Utah’s policymakers must step forward to defend academic freedom and to preserve the core curriculum that teaches students what our liberty is and why we should cherish it.”

 

            Imagine the rhetorical audacity of a statement that faculty be required to teach “in the spirit intended by the state government” followed by a claim that this is necessary as a defense of academic freedom!

 

            Our UVU Chapter of the AAUP/AFT commits to challenging this kind of ideologically driven legislative overreach. We do so in solidarity with the UVU Faculty Senate, President Tuminez, and Provost Vaught. 

 

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On April 17, 2024, the David R. Keller Chapter of the AAUP/AFT at UVU

joins with AAUP and AFT Chapters across the nation for a

National Day of Action for Higher Education

 

As one of more than 100 other chapters nationwide, we endorse this statement of principles: 

“The Future We Stand For”

[see the principles on the following pages]

 

Further, in the spirit of these principles, we propose this resolution for the UVU Faculty Senate:

WHEREAS the 2024 Utah State Legislature introduced a bill that targets the academic freedom and responsibility of faculty in regard to curricular development and teaching (Senate Bill 226), and following passage of a bill that eradicates DEI work at Utah universities (H.B. 261 Equal Opportunity Initiatives).

 

WHEREAS UVU policy 605, following recommendations of the AAUP, states that “University faculty exercise a central role in the design, approval, delivery, revision, periodic review, and deletion of curriculum” (4.1) and policy 635 states that “Pursuant to relevant university policies and procedures, faculty members have primary responsibility for curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, creative works, performance, and faculty status” ( 4.9.2).

 

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Faculty Senate rejects any attempts by bodies external to the faculty to restrict or dictate university curriculum on any matter and will stand firm against encroachment on faculty authority.

 

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Faculty Senate calls upon President Tuminez and Provost Vaught to affirm that they reject any attempts by bodies external to the faculty to restrict or dictate university curriculum on any matter and will stand firm against encroachment on faculty authority.

 

[Adopted from The Right to Learn: Resissting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, edited by Valerie C. Johnson, Jennifer Ruth, and Ellen Schrecker (Beacon Press, 2024) 116.]

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The Future We Stand For
A Call for a National Day of Action for Higher Education for the Public Good: April 17, 2024

 

We Stand for Democracy — and the System of Higher Education that Sustains It

Today both education and democracy are under attack. Institutions of higher education serve to educate the public and to help generate the reliable information, broad-ranging knowledge, and reasoned analysis that a democratic society requires. Colleges and universities are spaces where research and ideas—including challenging ones—are subject to rigorous study and critical evaluation. In the interest of democracy, our educational institutions must be allowed to function free from interference by politicians, CEOs, and lobbyists seeking to repress inquiry.

 

We Stand for the Freedom to Teach and Learn
Education and research require free inquiry, the freedom to teach, students’ freedom to learn, freedom to publish, freedom of assembly and association, and the freedom to speak as members of the public. Academic freedom differs from freedom of speech; it does not protect every opinion within a university because it relies on the collective judgment of scholarship. For example, scholars and teachers have found such ideas as scientific racism, Holocaust denial, and intelligent design to be intellectually and thus academically indefensible. To ensure the continued social value of higher education, decisions about teaching and learning must be made by qualified faculty—not by those seeking to impose private and partisan interests. 

 

We Stand for the Democratic Value of Dissent

Democracy, like education, requires both consent and dissent. We affirm the right of every student, teacher, worker, and community member to assemble and to speak out on issues of public concern. Protest is a form of learning and community-building; it should be respected by colleges and universities as an essential component of education.  

 

We Stand for Higher Education for All

Higher education is a public good, not only because it trains students for careers but also because learning and thinking are valuable in themselves for all members of the public. Protecting civil rights and advancing racial equality are essential to the public mission of colleges and universities, just as they are essential to a thriving democracy. High quality education at every level should be the right of all. Yet federal and state divestment has made the cost of college prohibitive, and recent attacks on diversity and equity threaten to make educational access more unequal. The burden of lifelong debt jeopardizes futures, while predatory interest on loans unfairly forces poorer students to shoulder higher costs than wealthier students. To ensure equality of access, we must make public higher education freely available to all by reversing decades of budget cuts and reinvesting in our globally leading university systems. 

We Stand for Job Security

Federal and state defunding of public institutions not only harms the futures and livelihoods of students and employees; it also undermines the quality of education. Teaching has been converted into exploitative gig work through management practices shaped by manufactured austerity. Over 70% of the nation’s faculty are now overworked and underpaid contingent instructors with inadequate benefits and no job security. Educators’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions: job security is necessary to the freedom to teach and learn, and a living wage and reasonable workload are necessary to quality education. Colleges and universities need to be stable places to work as well as exciting places to learn, and all workers on our campuses deserve fair pay and better working conditions.

 

We Stand for Democracy within Higher Education

Educators, researchers, staff, students, and community members must have a meaningful collective voice in the governance of colleges and universities. Attacks on entire areas of study, attempts to roll back policies supporting diversity, the defunding of research and teaching, the suppression of protest, the transformation of universities into tools of financial speculation and  into real estate developers displacing local communities, and the imposition of crushing debt on students undermine and render meaningless existing structures of shared governance. State legislatures from Florida to Indiana have taken aim at public universities as part of a broader assault on U.S. democracy. At private universities, unelected trustees, billionaires, and administrators increasingly exercise unilateral power to dictate policies and academic priorities. We stand against these antidemocratic pressures in all their guises.  

 

We Stand Together

We call on all members of the higher education community across the country to engage in collective action for higher education in the public interest. We stand in solidarity with all who are organizing unions, AAUP chapters, and student organizations to win the conditions that make teaching, learning, and research possible. 

 

On April 17, we will mobilize for these goals on campuses nationwide. Our struggles are linked, and so are our futures. On this national day of action and beyond, we commit to working together to build the universities and the democracy that our society needs and deserves.