CONTEMPORARY THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Harry Targ

 In the 1970s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed by wealthy conservatives and corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and AT&T which invested millions of dollars to organize lobby groups, support selected politicians in all 50 states, create “think tanks,” and in other ways strategize about how to transform American society to increase the wealth and power of the few. ALEC lobbyists and scholars developed programs and legislation around labor, healthcare, women’s issues, the environment, and education that were designed to reverse the progressive development of government and policy that social movements had long advocated.

ALEC legislative programs included lobbying for charter schools, challenging teachers' unions, revisiting school curricula to include materials that deny climate change and more effectively celebrate the successes of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history.

 The conservative Bradley Foundation awarded $400 million to organizations supporting school vouchers, right-to-work laws and traditional marriage laws, and global warming deniers.

Associations which lobbied for restricting academic freedom in higher education included David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the National Association of Scholars, funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations among others. NAS sought to bring together scholars whose work opposed multiculturalism, affirmative action, concerns about climate change, and the “liberal” bias in academia. 

 The then NAS president Peter Wood, contributed a blog article in the Chronicle on Higher Education on July 18, 2013, claiming that “a governor worth his educational salt should be calling out faculty members who cannot or will not distinguish scholarship from propaganda, or who prefer to substitute simplistic storytelling for the complexities of history.”

Howard Zinn’s “A Peoples History of the United States” is a history of how social movements of workers, women, people of color, native peoples and others often left out of conventional accounts have made and can make history. This was a part of history that political and economic elites, influential organizations such as ALEC, the Bradley Foundation, and education-oriented groups like NAS did not want included in course curricula; in middle school, high school, or university.

But if education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view. It is in an environment of discussion and debate that rigorous and critical thought emerges. Efforts to expunge certain scholars such as Howard Zinn from educational curricula have contradicted the spirit of free and rigorous thought.