In a thread arguing that “Everyone upset about the Muhlenberg [situation] should acknowledge the long line of tenured faculty fired for protected speech after leftwing outrage,” Sachs adduced a number of other incidents of punishment around faculty speech, many of which have already been forgotten about. They include Charles Negy, a University of Central Florida psychologist who was fired after he posted tweets deemed racist (after an extensive ordeal, an arbitrator ordered the university to reinstate him; UCF said his termination was unrelated to the tweets), and Timothy Boudreau, a University of Central Michigan journalism professor fired for quoting the n-word in class (he sued, and the university settled). In neither case, as far as I can discover, did the national AAUP get involved. (Negy told me by email that the “AAUP did not reach out to me at all. I’ve lost all respect for them.”) Nor do they appear to have taken any stand in one of the more egregious and high-profile academic-freedom disputes in recent memory: the removal of the University of Michigan music professor Bright Sheng from the classroom after he showed a 1965 film version of Othello featuring a blackface performance.
When compared with its silence on cases like Sheng’s, the AAUP’s flurry of statements defending those in trouble for speech criticizing Israel might suggest that, to a degree, their advocacy is determined by prior political commitments, rather than a content-neutral approach to faculty speech rights. As the Harvard political scientist Ryan D. Enos discusses in a recent essay in our pages, political capture by one or another faction is a perennial risk for organizations devoted to defending free speech and academic freedom.
As Enos tells it, his experience with the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard (CAFH) demonstrated this mechanism starkly. Because “many of the CAFH’s leaders were ... repelled by the politics of the student protesters” criticizing Israel after October 7, “they proved incapable of the principles they had come together to defend.” Instead of speaking up for the speech rights of the activists, Enos says, two of CAFH’s leaders circulated a letter “demanding that the university do two things usually considered anathema to campus free speech: take a political stand condemning the attacks on Israel and denounce the speech of the students.” Convinced that CAFH had shown itself unable to sacrifice politics to principle, Enos resigned from the organization.
Read Enos’s “How Free Speech Failed at Harvard — and How to Rescue It.”
