THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM ARE ESCALATING

Harry Targ

Letter to the Editor: Resolution Defending Academic Freedom As It Relates to Teaching About Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Critical Race Theory - The Heights (bcheights.com)

(“Meanwhile, Kenneth Griffin, a megadonor who gave Harvard so much money that it named its largest graduate school after him last year, said at a conference Tuesday that elite universities now produce “whiny snowflakes” instead of “leaders and problem solvers” because of their excessive focus on “microaggressions [and] a DEI agenda.” The Boston Globe, January 31, 2024).

David Horowitz launched an assault on higher education in 2005, not too dissimilar to the McCarthyite attacks on higher education in the 1950s. He and a variety of organizations such as the National Association of Scholars (NAS) sought to purge higher education of critical thought.

Another round of more sophisticated and highly resourced attacks on higher education were expanded in the twenty-first century by the Koch Foundation State Policy Networks (SPN). In this case, state organizations were created, rightwing politicians were supported for key administrative posts in universities, particularly university presidencies, and Boards of Trustees representing huge corporations and banks acted more assertively to destroy the rich diversity of educational experiences that had been inspired by the 1960s.

With the rise of the far-rightwing forces around former President Trump, combining corporate elites, religious fundamentalists, extreme free market advocates, and military contractors, the attacks today on education, K through university, have become fierce.

Now political puppets have launched attacks on education in state houses and the halls of Congress. Critical Race Theory, rather than being a short-hand description for a body of scholarship, has been redefined as ideology. Politicians running for office talk about the Civil War without mentioning slavery as a root cause.

Charges of antisemitism are being used to challenge expressions of intellectual and political points of view on campuses.

Presidents at our most prestigious universities, women and persons of color, are attacked for defending academic freedom.

The whole edifice of what John Stuart Mill described a long time ago as “the marketplace of ideas” is under assault. To borrow from a book title about the 1950s by Marty Jezer, we are returning to a new “Dark Ages.”

It is time for those who oppose racism, exploitation of workers, patriarchy, environmental spoilation, and other social ills to stand up in defense of freedom of speech, education, and the celebration of diversity and debate.