Through Petitions, Professors Exercise a ‘Special Duty to Speak Out’

What has become a favored form of protest for faculty members of different ranks, disciplines, and types of institutions?

An online petition or open letter.

Petitions or open letters that are started and signed largely by academics have become increasingly popular over the last year and have grown even more prevalent since Donald J. Trump’s election as president.

Through these documents, professors have sounded off on issues like climate change, academic freedom, and the rights of transgender people. One letter, denouncing Mr. Trump’s executive order suspending travel to the United States by citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, amassed more than 70,000 signatures from faculty members and academic supporters.

It’s not clear whether petitions signed by academics have more heft than others or if they have much of an effect at all. Recent efforts suggest that those that apply directly to academe seem to be more successful than those that opine on things far from campus. But that’s not likely to stop academics from weighing in on issues that resonate with them.

“Signing a petition is the least you can do,” says Amanda Ann Klein, an associate professor of film studies at East Carolina University and one of a few thousand signers of a petition last year to reinstate two faculty members who were fired from Mount St. Mary’s University, in Maryland. “If it has no impact, what have you lost? It only takes a minute. And if it changes things, then of course, that’s great.”

Here’s a look at some recent petitions and open letters that have garnered sizable numbers of academic signatures, and their outcomes:

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The cause: Don’t make Jeff Sessions Attorney General of the United States.

The organizers: A small group of law professors.

The argument: Mr. Sessions’ record makes him a poor choice to lead the Department of Justice. “Nothing in Senator Sessions’ public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge,” the open letter reads.

The signers: More than 1,400 law school professors from 180 law schools in 49 states.

The outcome: Mr. Sessions was confirmed as attorney general this month.

Backstory: “We knew it would be an uphill battle,” says John D. King, a clinical professor of law at Washington and Lee University and one of the authors of the open letter. “But we felt like law professors have a special duty to speak out about this particular position. I don’t know how I could go about teaching my students to be conscientious professionals and not speak out.”

Mr. King says the support the letter received was surprising. “I think people were ready to speak out and they wanted a vehicle. We sort of lit the match and the fire took off.”

The cause: Reconsider renaming Yale University’s Calhoun College.

The organizer: Andrew Miranker, a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale who wrote an open letter from the faculty to the institution’s president, Peter Salovey, and its governing board, the Yale Corporation.

The argument: Yale should reverse its decision to let the Calhoun name stick because the university is doing students in the undergraduate residential college “a disservice by forcing them to live unnecessarily under a brand so deeply associated with slavery,” the letter said. John C. Calhoun was a Yale graduate who became a vice president and was an advocate of slavery.

The signers: Almost 400 professors, many of them in the sciences.

The outcome: The letter was one of many petitions and protests on the issue. After months of saying that the Calhoun name would remain, Yale announced on February 11 that it would rename the college for Grace Murray Hopper, a Yale alumna, well-known computer scientist, and Navy admiral.

Backstory: Mr. Miranker was one of a few faculty members who attended a town hall-style meeting for students last year where he saw student after student express dismay after Yale initially announced the Calhoun name would remain. “You could not be in that room without being moved,” he wrote in an email.

For the most part, STEM faculty members at Yale didn’t seem to see the relevance of issues of inclusion and diversity on the campus, and they hadn’t publicly weighed in on them, said Mr. Miranker. He sought to change that, and wrote the letter with STEM faculty in mind. It meant he had to quickly get to the point, much like scientists must do when writing grant applications.

When he wrote the letter, he says he wasn’t “thinking it would make a difference.” But he did want students to see that their professors supported them. He invited only faculty who taught undergraduates to sign the letter.

“This was a very clear way for students to see that it was their faculty who was the voice of this opinion,” says Mr. Miranker. “In the end doing that turned out to be a good choice.”

The cause: President Trump’s ascension to the White House.

The organizer: David Biale, a professor of Jewish history at the University of California at Davis.

The argument: During the presidential election, Jews, Muslims, women, Latinos, African-Americans, and people with disabilities were among those targeted by “unprecedented expressions” of hatred by Mr. Trump and some of his supporters, the statement reads, and “hatred of one minority leads to hatred of all.” Also, the letter says, hostility to immigrants and refugees “strikes particularly close to home” for historians of the Jews. “It is our duty to come to their aid and to resist the degradation of rights that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric has provoked.”

The signers: More than 400 Jewish-history scholars.

The outcome: It’s hard to measure the success of a call for solidarity, but collecting 400 signatures — and having to turn away scholars in other fields who wanted to join in — seems like a positive outcome for the effort.

Backstory: Two days after Mr. Trump’s election, a lunch conversation Mr. Biale had with a colleague turned to the acts of anti-Semitism “unleashed by the Trump campaign,” he says. “We agreed that people in the field of Jewish studies should have something to say about that.”

Mr. Biale was tapped to write the statement, and others joined him in circulating it. People who wanted to sign on emailed Mr. Biale, who manually added the names — many more than he anticipated for a statement that he says was the first from a group of academics post-election.

“The outcome of the election was an enormous shock,” Mr. Biale says. “There was a great deal of fear that a lot of what was said during the campaign would be put into effect.”

The cause: Reinstate two faculty members fired last year from Mount St. Mary’s University.

The organizer: John Schwenkler, an assistant professor of philosophy at Florida State University who formerly worked at Mount St. Mary’s.

The argument: Simon P. Newman, who was president of Mount St. Mary’s at the time, shouldn’t have fired two faculty members after the institution made national news when Mr. Newman likened at-risk freshmen to “bunnies” that needed to be drowned. The dismissal of Edward Egan, a nontenured faculty member who was a law instructor and the adviser for the student newspaper that broke the story, and Thane M. Naberhaus, an associate professor of philosophy who publicly criticized the university’s administration, raises “serious questions about the respect given to moral conscience and intellectual freedom at Mount St. Mary’s,” the petition said.

The signers: More than 8,000 professors from around the nation.

The outcome: Mr. Egan and Mr. Naberhaus were reinstated. Mr. Newman resigned not long after.

Backstory: “As someone who advises students regularly as part of my job, the idea that a president could refer to students so casually in that way and so obviously not care about students was just outrageous,” says Ms. Klein, the East Carolina film professor who signed the petition. “And then on top of that to fire people who spoke out about it was also egregious. Faculty are supposed to be able to weigh in on those kinds of things.”

The cause: Support the more than 200 academics targeted on Professor Watchlist, a list of professors deemed “anti-American” by Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit group.

The organizer: The American Association of University Professors.

The argument: Such watchlists have been used since the 1930s to “silence free speech, chill academic freedom, and harass faculty members,” the AAUP’s open letter says. “We support and stand with our colleagues whose academic freedom your list threatens. Therefore, we, the undersigned, ask that you add our names to the list.”

The signers: More than 12,000 professors

The outcome: The AAUP has delivered the open letter to Turning Point USA.

Backstory: In December the AAUP asked faculty members to sign a letter asking to be added to the watchlist as a way to counter the “alarmist accusations” the website makes about professors, according to a blog post by the association. The document attracted 5,000 signatures within a day.

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.