The Review

Earlier this month, our Garrett Shanley wrote about a social-media dust-up between the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), both of which work on behalf of academic freedom — at least, as each understands it. First, the AAUP president, Todd Wolfson, speaking for the organization, called Trump’s electoral victory “disappointing.” Then Alex Morey, FIRE’s vice president for campus advocacy, posted this on X: “If you’re a faculty member with anything other than ultraprogressive views, don’t count on the AAUP to defend you ... Trading almost a century of principle and the org’s good name for political expediency is a damn shame.”

That was probably unnecessarily incendiary, but the AAUP’s response — sent from its official X account — was positively scorched-earth. Morey’s claim, the AAUP said, was “laughable” and “utterly false,” an “unwarranted attack from an elite, politically motivated and funded” group that had “aligned itself with far-right assaults” on the sector.

Behind this unfortunate mutual distemper lies a genuine clash of principles. First, the AAUP has recently reversed its policy prohibiting academic boycotts, a move which FIRE, as well as a previous AAUP president, considers to threaten academic freedom but which the AAUP considers to expand it. Then the AAUP issued an official statement declaring that the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria in hiring and promotion is not intrinsically in tension with academic freedom, whereas FIRE has long argued that such criteria impose “a pall of orthodoxy” on campus.

And both sides have accused the other of political capture, especially when it comes to the part of academic freedom to do with the professorial right to freedom of extramural speech — freedom to speak as a citizen about matters of the day. In Inside Higher Ed, Joan W. Scott wrote that “an initial motivating force” for FIRE “was the endorsement of the right of racist expression on the University of Pennsylvania campus. This is a telling choice of where their political affiliations lie.” FIRE has cited in its defense its opposition to the “Stop WOKE Act,” championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican of Florida, and its frequent work on behalf of left-wing faculty members — and suggested that the AAUP has been slow to defend conservative faculty speech toward which its membership is politically unsympathetic. (For what it’s worth, as I wrote in September, I am sympathetic to this critique of the AAUP, for which I think there is a good case.)

The most interesting and complicated aspect of the disagreement between the AAUP and FIRE has to do not with faculty members’ extramural political editorializing but with the very heart of academic freedom: the academic freedom of scholarly activity proper. The fraught controversy over the use of DEI criteria in hiring and promotion reflects some difficult ambiguities: Is academic freedom an individual right or a guild right? Does it apply to individual scholars or to scholarly disciplines? And whose interference does it protect against?

As the legal scholar and academic-freedom expert Robert Post writes, academic freedom “is at root disciplinary in nature,” dating back to the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, which “conceives academic freedom as the freedom to pursue the ‘scholar’s profession’ according to the standards of that profession” (emphasis mine). Gatekeeping around hiring, publication, and promotion and tenure are not obstacles to academic freedom; they are the disciplinary activity academic freedom protects. When an appropriate process of peer judgment blocks a scholar from publishing or prevents a scholar from being hired or tenured, that scholar’s academic freedom has not been impinged. Academic freedom of research and teaching is an individual right only insofar as it is a right of individual scholars to act and to be judged according to the standards of their discipline, rather than, say, by church, state, or nonacademic community.

It follows, Post writes, that “if a professor sues a university for a violation of academic freedom for its refusal to award him tenure, the right question for a court to decide is neither the individual rights of the professor nor the institutional prerogatives of the university. It is instead whether the tenure decision is made on the basis of the proper disciplinary standards.” By the same token, the question of whether the use of DEI criteria in hiring and promotion are or are not violations of academic freedom depends on whether DEI criteria are valid features of a scholarly discipline. If they are not — if, for instance, they are simply imposed by a central administration or a university president — then they would be difficult to reconcile with the requirements of academic freedom.

The AAUP understands this, which is why its new statement, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation,” continually stresses the need for DEI criteria to be “implemented appropriately in accordance with sound standards of faculty governance,” rather than imposed from on high: “The AAUP does not consider it a violation of academic freedom per se when an appropriate larger group, such as a faculty senate or a department, collectively adopts an educational policy or goal and evaluates individual faculty members’ performance by reference to” DEI criteria, even if those individual faculty members consider the criteria in question to be irrelevant or worse.

Can a faculty senate really decide, for all of the various departments it represents, that DEI criteria are core components of a scholarly discipline — of every scholarly discipline? To its critics, the AAUP’s new policy looks like it invokes “faculty governance” to justify political rubrics formally incompatible with academic freedom. FIRE’s theory is that some hiring-and-promotion criteria are intrinsically at odds with academic freedom, even if a majority of the members of a department or professional organization vote for them. To FIRE, DEI criteria are more like the anti-Communist loyalty oaths of the past: They would constrain academic freedom even if they had the near-unanimous support of any given academic group. No “appropriate process” could make them a feature of a scholarly discipline.

The AAUP might respond that DEI criteria in promotion and tenure are similar to criteria regarding competent teaching — core to the scholarly role, even if not to research per se. That is why their new statement stresses “legitimate educational goals” in its defense of DEI criteria. The question then becomes whether those criteria are irreducibly ideological in such a way that evaluation on their basis is a political test.

After all, during the immediate post-war decades, a very large number of faculty members felt that Communist Party membership was fatally compromising to a professor’s capacity to teach well. Some — like the historian and philosopher Sidney Hook — considered CP membership flatly incompatible with working as a faculty member. Others, like the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., thought that “Communist professors should be fired only when it was established that their beliefs influenced their teaching — that they attempted to ‘indoctrinate’ students,” as Peter Novick summarizes. Nor were such attitudes limited to historians. “Most of the academic establishment,” Ellen Schrecker writes in a fascinating essay on the topic published in the AAUP’s journal Academe, “operated on the Cold War assumption that Communists were by definition unfit to teach.”

Today, we tend to consider that both Hook’s and Schlesinger’s positions amount to an inappropriate ideological test. No degree of consensus about educational goals, we now believe, could justify so much official political prescription. And, of course, we recognize the anti-Communist consensus itself for what it was — a political orthodoxy impossible to reconcile with academic freedom. The AAUP’s recent statement is an attempt to check the momentum of those who consider DEI criteria to be similarly threatening. Opponents of those criteria — like FIRE — are gambling that their own position, like the rejection of anti-Communist loyalty tests, will eventually become common sense.

Recommended

• “Having a career that lasts over half a century is not unusual, but being an art critic for that long definitely is.” In The Nation, Zachary Fines writes about Peter Schjeldahl, perhaps “the most inventive, entertaining, and self-observing art critic to have ever worked in the English language.”
• If the Bauhaus was only semicoherent, how did it become so influential? Crucial here is the way it was reduced to a style.” In the London Review of Books, Hal Foster reviews Robin Schuldenfrei’s Objects in Exile: Modern Art and Design Across Borders 1930-1960, just out from Princeton.
• “She was as significant to the British counterculture of the 1960s as D.H. Lawrence, but following the eulogies and obituaries, it didn’t take long for Murdoch’s 26 novels to be consigned to the oubliette of literary history.” In The New York Review of Books, Frances Wilson remembers the — now neglected? — work of Iris Murdoch.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin