In AAUP, there is a tension between the collective rights of faculty to discipline one another such as through the tenure process and the individual rights of a faculty member to free expression. It's therefore important for us to make a distinction between academic freedom and free speech.
A wrinkle addressed by Michael Berube and Jennifer Ruth is a lack of distinction between speech that is of "high-value," and conversely, speech that is of "low value" because it is not based on expertise. I do like this distinction, by the way, when evaluating statements that faculty make because the hammer doesn't need to come down on faculty when they, like others in the public domain, myself included, express an opinion. As a blogger, I am conscientious about high-value speech by focusing on topics that do align to my area of expertise, even as I give myself permission to grow and expand to various other—typically adjacent—areas that I choose to explore.
This very topic of professors' speech has interested me, for example, over the past several years for reasons that should be obvious. I've read—and have had my students read—books on academic freedom and free speech and entertain your thoughts and opinions on the matter.
Authors Berube and Ruth take issue with the idea that there are both sides to any issue and that this reflects a stance of impartiality with respect to either side with the idea that what you have to do is teach both sides of an issue. So much of the conversation around critical race theory is happening exactly with this framing. Academic freedom is speech that is based on one's expertise, the kind of speech that is specific to universities. Not all opinions are equal, nor are there necessarily moral equivalencies across two sides of an issue.
Since faculties' academic freedom needs protection, the authors recommend the establishment of "Academic Freedom Committees" that would consist of "field-appropriate" review panels, for example, in the social sciences, humanities, and the like. Moreover, faculties' studied positions should be autonomous from legislators, donors, and the courts.
I'm still processing this. We need a healthy dialogue around such matters.
-Angela Valenzuela
When Professors’ Speech Is Disqualifying
Michael Bérubé, Jennifer Ruth /March 21, 2022
Should academic freedom really protect those who make false and morally repellent claims? It’s time for a rethink.
Does academic freedom protect professors espousing white supremacist ideas? The answer, for the past hundred-and-more years since the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915, has been yes. This is a disturbing realization for anyone who thinks of academic freedom as one of the cornerstones of a free and open society—and who understands how profoundly it is threatened by Republican state legislatures trying to criminalize the teaching of critical race theory (CRT). Also disturbing is the fact that, over the past decade, the concept of academic freedom has been confused—sometimes innocently, sometimes not—with free speech. The result is that even while pusillanimous university administrators remove a professor from his class for using a Chinese term that sounds like the N-word, seriously racist work continues to enjoy protection on the grounds that academic freedom is co-extensive with free speech, and scholars like University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax can call for a “cultural distance nationalism” whose core belief is that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.” Indeed, in Wax’s case, this strange idea of academic freedom has permitted her to make claims in public, in a 2017 interview with Glenn Loury, about the academic achievements of Black law students at Penn that her own dean characterized as “false.”*
Wax did not emerge entirely unscathed; she was removed from required first-year law classes, and her misrepresentations of Penn’s Black students were repudiated by her dean. But she remains on the faculty, and she remains a hero on the right and a cause célèbre for libertarians; in 2018, Penn trustee emeritus and law school overseer Paul S. Levy actually resigned in protest over Penn’s decision to remove Wax from those required first-year courses, writing to then-President Amy Gutmann that the decision effectively suppresses “open, robust, and critical debate over differing views of important social issues.”
