Academic Freedom is a Necessity
If we are to create the next generation of critical thinkers, college instructors need the freedom to say what needs to be said.
If we are to create the next generation of critical thinkers, college instructors need the freedom to say what needs to be said.
It was an anonymous call. A parent in one of my classes called the dean and, without identifying herself, lodged a complaint. I was being too political. She was worried that I was preaching and that her daughter would be graded based on whether she agreed with my politics.
The dean was gracious — she was just letting me know. She wasn’t asking me to change anything. She backs up her instructors. Intellectual and academic freedom were core values.
I’m grateful for that, but also somewhat irked (not at her) that it even has to be stated. But these are the times in which we live. We can blame the current president — and it is certainly true that Donald Trump has made an already difficult environment worse — but college instructors have been battling against these kinds of accusations for several decades.
David Horowitz in 2003 — after several decades of various right-wing assaults on the academy and individual professors — created whaT is now called the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which takes as one of its missions an effort to call out left-of-center scholars for intolerance. Horowitz has encouraged students not only to challenge professors — which should happen more in classrooms rather than administratively — but to rat them out, to make public their political disagreements in such a way that it left the instructors unable to work. It was all about public shaming and a public relations trial, and it was designed to pressure administrators to clamp down on academic freedom.
Horowitz justified this by claiming conservative voices were being silenced on campuses, a claim that has risen to the level of accepted wisdom but that lacks anything more than skewed anecdotal evidence to back it up.
This effort was happening mostly out of the limelight, but it has left its mark, making it acceptable for students on both sides of the political spectrum to call out instructors. My former creative writing professor Laurie Sheck was caught up in this kind of attempted silencing at the New School for using the N-word while quoting James Baldwin’s use of it. The complaints against her ultimately were found to lack merit, but she still spent several months in limbo.
These kinds of complaints do not protect students and, instead, create a chill on campuses. I realized, for instance, that I hedged on a political point the other day, a rather innocuous one, because the complaint crept into my mind. That, I think, did my students a disservice. Classrooms need to be vibrant laboratories for ideas, and efforts either to limit what instructors can say or to mandate some kind of equal time rule do little more than shut down the very debate they are meant to encourage. This harms students’ growth as individuals, as thinking, critical human beings.
But it is of a piece with the direction in which public and private universities have been moving. On some level, college has always been about preparation for future employment, though it also has always been the best place to transition from teen to adult, to develop the intellectual skills needed to think for one’s self.
As colleges have skyrocketed in cost, and students have taken on more and more debt — which is happening partly because state and federal agencies have shut the funding spigot — students are finding it more difficult to use their four years in college to develop a sense of themselves. The only goal is a job — one that pays enough to cover the accumulated debt.
This is happening against a shift in workload from tenured instructors to adjuncts and part-timers, from those with institutional protections to instructors like me who teach at the pleasure of the college and have few protections.
As Todd Wallis writes in Inside Scholar, a ‘2011 study from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)” found that “an estimated 56 percent of college professors are part-time or full-time, non-tenure track faculty members” and that “Newer reports reveal that roughly 75 percent of instructors teaching in classrooms today are off the tenure track.” Fifty years ago, the numbers were almost exactly reversed. “In 1969,” he writes
roughly 78 percent of faculty members at colleges and universities in the U.S. held tenure or tenure-track positions. Non-tenure track or adjunct roles accounted for only about 22 percent. Back then, the majority of students at schools in America were educated by tenured or tenure-track professors. Now, many students might take a class from a tenured professor just once a semester, or only in an upper-level course.
The impacts on students are mixed: Adjuncts have less time to interact with students, but also may have real-world experience that tenured professors may lack.
But our existence as instructors is precarious. We are paid significantly less, meaning we end up teaching multiple courses at multiple institutions — I’ve taught as many as seven in a semester at three colleges, which equates to about 21 in-class hours and often twice as many out-of-class hours grading and preparing for class. This does not take into account the time I spend in my car. I followed that semester by teaching just four classes, and watching my pay get cut by more than 60 percent. These swings in pay are common for adjuncts and freelancers, who also have to rely on spouses for health insurance or have to buy coverage on the market.
We also are more vulnerable to complaints from students and parents, which is what bothers me so much about this anonymous parent’s phone call. I’ve been teaching 11 years now, writing for 40 and working as a writer for 30 years. I am not shy about who I am or what I believe. I don’t preach, especially in the classroom, but I’m not shy. I believe it would be intellectually dishonest of me to try and hide something that a simple Google search would show.
Self-awareness demands that I not ignore the power imbalance that exists in all classrooms. While I know that no student will be punished in my classroom for disagreeing politically or morally with me, I also must acknowledge that most students need assurance of this. They know who holds the power, and many assume because of experience in other classes or at the low-level jobs they’ve held that cow-towing to power is to their benefit. They understand that this is how politics works in its rawest form.
As instructors, we have a responsibility to work against this dynamic, to make clear that they have a responsibility of their own to speak up, speak out, disagree, argue — as long as they do so in a matter that recognizes the humanity of everyone in our classroom. I have the power as the instructor to set parameters of behavior — show up on time, turn in your work, act like an adult — but that power does not extend to my forcing my point of view on politics or morality on them. I could hide my opinions, but that would be dishonest given that I ask them not to hide theirs.
This means, I think, being careful to distinguish between my being critical of someone’s opinion and being critical of their use of evidence, of their support for their opinion. It’s way I give my students a simple rule: Opinions are only worth the evidence marshaled in their support. Put another way, “I don’t care what your opinion is; I only care if you can support it.” This does not mean opinions are bad or that students should eschew expressing their beliefs. On the contrary. Opinions matter, as a starting point, but do the work, the research. Support arguments with evidence and sound reasoning. Avoid dogma. Be open to counter arguments. Challenge beliefs. The writing process is about discovery.
The other thing I tell students, which contradicts what I think they are learning in high school, is that their goal can not be changing their readers’ minds. That is too high a bar, even for the best writers. All we can aspire to is making our ideas and beliefs clear to others, to get them to take our positions seriously, to get and keep the conversation going.
I don’t begrudge this parent her concerns. She believed — probably based on past experience — that she was protecting her daughter. I also understand why she would not raise this with me directly. She doesn’t know me, so she could not know how I would respond. I can appreciate this.
But I also can be worried that these kinds of complaints can lead to a chill on political discourse, both in the classroom and outside. Such a chill does no one any good, because it leads to a kind of ideological purity, which is the converse of what our classroom goals should be. We — instructors and all academics, parents, students, administrators — should be striving for intellectual rigor and curiosity. Critical thinking is a fast disappearing skill, one that is being pushed aside by confirmation bias the farther we retreat into our ideological bubbles and read and watch only what confirms our biases, encouraged by the fragmenting illusion of freedom being sold to us by social media.
We are losing the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion, which has left us susceptible to charlatans and demagogues, reality-show hucksters, carnival barkers, and naked emperors playing as two-big mobsters.