Last week, I wrote about the most recent dust-up between the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), two organizations that understand their shared commitment to academic freedom in somewhat different ways. The inciting incident was a post on X in which the AAUP’s official account responded to charges of liberal bias in academe by insisting that “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review.” To many of its critics, the post seemed symptomatic of an AAUP that values academic freedom only for those it favors politically. As the Baylor University sociologist George Yancey tweeted, “No one, other than those on Bluesky, cares what you have to say @AAUP. You were not there when nonprogressive academics needed support. So your howling now looks just like what it is — partisanship instead of principle.” The Princeton historian David A. Bell’s response to the AAUP was even harsher:
In my essay about this controversy, I mentioned in passing a 2021 open letter criticizing the University of Michigan music professor Bright Sheng for having shown a 1965 film of Othello starring Laurence Olivier in blackface. The letter, and the conversation surrounding it, are worth revisiting.
First, the letter itself. According to the authors — faculty members at Michigan — Sheng’s screening of Othello is an instance of irresponsible pedagogy that “does more than create a hostile learning environment. It normalizes racism, rendering it invisible and closing the door on critical engagement.” Sheng might not have intended anything sinister, but “an act can be racist without intent.” Although the authors do not quite call for mandatory content warnings, they strongly imply that Sheng should have issued one: “In our experiences, when students ask for content warnings or pedagogical care in classrooms, they do not expect a lack of challenging material. Rather, they are asking that we respect the experiences of our students, many of whom encounter racism and sexual violence in their daily lives.” In what did Sheng’s pedagogical misdeed consist if not in his failure to issue a warning? Among the letter’s other prescriptions: “Effective antiracism training must be better integrated into the university’s regular service and professional-development offerings and expectations.” The subject line of the letter aims to dispel any notion that such training might violate academic freedom: “anti-racist practice is fundamental to pedagogical excellence & consistent with academic free speech.”
That’s how people talked back then. Jennifer Ruth, a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom, posted the letter to the AAUP’s Academe blog and endorsed it as “a wonderful model for how we should be thinking about, and working through, incidents that too often get simplified in both the mainstream and, sadly, also in the higher-ed press.” (Ruth told me that the post does not represent the AAUP’s attitude toward the Sheng incident, and that she was not writing as a Committee A member or on behalf of the AAUP.)
In the blog’s comment section, Hank Reichman, chair of Committee A then, pushed back a bit. “I agree with the thrust and spirit of this letter,” he wrote, but “I am disappointed that it fails to address a critical issue. … The key point absent from this letter is that in response to this incident Michigan not only did nothing to ‘evaluate and improve’ Sheng’s teaching, it moved quickly and unilaterally to punish him.” Ruth responded:
We do not know what [Sheng’s] conversation with the dean looked like, of course, but it seems plausible to me that it struck Professor Sheng that repairing the damage that had been done wasn’t going to happen quickly or easily and that if the students were going to be allowed to cover the course material within the term, this was more likely to happen by substituting a different instructor. If Professor Sheng had not shared in this plan and refused to be removed and/or insisted that his removal was an act of discipline, then due process would need to have happened in the form of review by a faculty panel. Given that he may have felt that the smoothest way to repair for all involved would be to remove himself and do some reflecting, as his letters suggested he wanted to do, I don’t think we can assume that any injustice or violation of academic freedom has occurred here.
(When she posted the letter, Ruth was under the impression that Sheng had left his class voluntarily. She told me that she didn’t think he should have been punished by involuntary removal.)
In a rejoinder, Reichman pointed out that “in effect, Sheng’s removal from teaching was a suspension, which the AAUP has repeatedly noted is ‘the severest of sanctions, whether resulting from dismissal or from potentially temporary suspension.’” Ruth remained unpersuaded: “Improving higher education’s accountability to racial justice can’t be put in opposition to either academic freedom or free speech over and over in every situation that arises. To do this is to play right into the hands of the ‘free-speech crisis’ which serves anti-regulation and libertarian interests not only in higher ed, but in relation to vaccinations, climate change, and a host of other issues.”
To what extent is the AAUP’s current general thinking about academic freedom reflected in Ruth’s assumptions here? We might summarize them thus: Academic freedom should not be invoked in ways that put it at odds with “accountability to racial justice.” The notion that campuses have become uncongenial places for free speech is mainly a delusion born of right-wing plotting; concerns about creeping illiberalism are attributed to “anti-regulation and libertarian interests.” Finally, due process is taken to potentially authorize punishing faculty members for things like showing the 1965 Othello; so long as there is “review by a faculty panel,” then academic freedom has not been violated.
It certainly seems true that the AAUP has in the last two years come to emphasize the corporate over the individual aspects of academic freedom, as in Committee A’s 2024 pronouncement that an “appropriate larger group, such as a faculty senate or a department,” can require DEI statements from faculty members for hiring or promotion. In a similar vein, the AAUP now believes that individual faculty members can be forced to conform to the terms of an academic boycott so long as “there was a democratic process followed” — or at least so Rana Jaleel, the chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom, told me in 2024. In both cases, academic freedom as an individual right is subordinated to one or another vision of social justice, so long as that vision has some kind of majority support. As Yale Law’s Keith E. Whittington, an expert on the law and theory of academic freedom, wrote last year, “Some in the AAUP increasingly conflate academic freedom with majoritarian decision-making. That will not end well.”
Read “Two Champions of Academic Freedom Go to War.”
