An Instructor Showed a Graphic on White Supremacy. Did She Break the Law?

In late September, Jessica Adams, an instructor in Indiana University’s School of Social Work, showed a slide to her class that listed acts of “white supremacy” in the form of a pyramid. At the tip of the pyramid were “overt,” socially unacceptable acts, like “hate crimes” and “swastikas.” Below that were “covert,” socially acceptable acts, like the phrase “Make America Great Again” and the celebration of Columbus Day.

Soon after, Adams was removed from the class, “Diversity, Human Rights, and Social Justice,” while the university investigates whether she violated the state’s controversial intellectual-diversity law, known as SEA 202. The law, passed last year, called on the state’s public campuses to develop disciplinary procedures for faculty who fail to foster cultures of “free inquiry” and “intellectual diversity” within the classroom, among other things. It also forced colleges to develop systems through which students could submit complaints against instructors.

A student did complain about Adams’s pyramid, but didn’t submit it through the campus’s process, Adams said. Instead, according to the instructor, the student had sent it to U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, a Republican, setting off a chain of events that has left Adams confused about what part of the law she is alleged to have violated, and what process the university is using to investigate her.

Adams is part of a growing cohort of professors nationwide who find their teaching scrutinized by laws that regulate what can be said in college classrooms. For Adams, it has been an unsettling experience. As she wrote to her dean after her removal, “I am feeling VERY uninformed, unsupported, and uncertain.”

A university spokesperson told The Chronicle in an email: “Indiana University is committed to academic freedom, following policies that uphold due process for faculty and provide a framework to best serve our students. IU cannot comment on individual personnel matters.”

‘I Felt Very Tricked’

On September 25, a few days after Adams showed the pyramid in class, she received an email from the School of Social Work dean, Kalea Benner. “I’d like to meet this morning re: some reported student concerns,” the dean wrote. (Benner did not reply to The Chronicle’s request for comment.)

Adams said Benner relayed to her the contents of the complaint, which alleged that she “spoke on white supremacy and showed a graphic that listed Make America Great Again (MAGA) as worse than police killing people of color and stated that MAGA is socially unacceptable white supremacy.”

Adams said she was at first caught off guard by the complaint because her instruction had proceeded without issue — she explained and contextualized the pyramid, saying that naming things as manifestations of white supremacy is important.

She said she shared her slides with Benner, under the impression that they’d work through the complaint together.

But on October 6, Adams received an email informing her that she was being removed from her classroom because an SEA 202 complaint had been formally filed against her. Not only that, but her dean, Benner, was listed as the primary complainant.

“I felt very tricked,” Adams said, adding that Benner “used my slides as evidence to support her complaint, and I willingly offered those to her because I thought she was on my team. I wouldn’t have just offered my materials to her if I would have known she planned to use them against me in that way.”

One of the law’s provisions states that professors must refrain from stating opinions unrelated to their discipline or course material. Adams said teaching about white supremacy is appropriate to the curriculum, because discussions of racism are relevant to her field. “The social-work profession explicitly names their values of social justice, of eradicating racism, poverty, and things like that. The 202 legislation does provide protection for teaching within your discipline and I naïvely thought I would be immune to a report because of that, but I wasn’t.”

Laws intended to legally mandate intellectual diversity can be tricky, said Graham Piro, a fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He said their vagueness can often create a “chilling effect,” and cases like Adams’s are concerning for that reason. The Chronicle has previously reported that instructors across the state have felt restricted in what they can say because of the law.

The Republican state senator behind the bill, Spencer Deery, said in an interview that the vagueness of the bill is key to its efficacy because it relies on “on-the-ground, peer guidance” to determine what an appropriate curriculum is. He added that he hoped the law would keep students from complaining to elected officials, because they had been doing that for “decades.”

“I wanted the ability for me to go back to them and say, ‘Thank you for bringing this to my attention. There is a mechanism in law and in the institution policy for you to flag this. Here’s how you do it.’”

When Adams learned the dean was the primary complainant, she reached out to the university chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The chapter helped her arrange a news conference, and has alleged that the university is violating its own policies in how it has conducted the investigation, as well as Adams’s due-process rights.

Joseph Varga, a labor-studies professor at IU-Bloomington who helped Adams with her case as an AAUP member, called the entire investigation a blatant violation of due process. “In my opinion, they seem to be kind of making it up as they go along,” Varga said, adding that the social-work school has its own policy for handling complaints under the law, but the university doesn’t seem to be following it here.

Sonia Lee, another professor associated with the AAUP who has been involved in Adams’s case, said she has no doubt that the graphic could have made someone in the classroom uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean its use should be banned. Lee said many faculty and community members thought SEA 202 might end up being benign, but cases like this make her think otherwise. The student who might have been uncomfortable could have just raised their hand, she said, but the introduction of this bill gives them a nuclear option.

“I think the student could have had a genuine conversation, an intellectual debate about the validity of this pyramid,” Lee said. “But instead of actually talking and thinking about this on an intellectual level, the student knew about SEA 202 and they probably also knew about Senator Jim Banks being somebody that would probably listen to a student who did not like discussions about white supremacy. And so then they filed this complaint.”

In retrospect, Adams said that she doesn’t regret including the graphic in her lesson, as she believes it was fundamental to the lesson and to the larger mission of social work. The only thing she might have changed is facilitating more discussion about the graphic and its contents.

“I can understand that if you have a differing viewpoint, that it can be hard to speak up, but I think that’s an important part of learning, right?” she said. “Because I think what the student has learned in this instance is, ‘I was presented something that made me feel, that made me have a reaction that I was uncomfortable with, and I can run and sort of tattle about this and watch this course be completely shut down instead of engaging in a conversation that’s going to challenge me, that might challenge others, that will enrich my education and education of those around me.’”