Academic Freedom Requires Job Security
The Real Assault on Academic Freedom Is Not from Students. It's Corporate.
There is a famous cartoon from the Reconstruction period that I sometimes show in my classes to discuss how images work as rhetoric. I always preface the discussion with an explanation of why I am showing it and a warning: It is graphically racist and it is not something I endorse. But it is part of the history of this country and can, if we engage with it critically, help us understand where the deep-rooted racism that still plagues us comes from.
The image, which you can find here, is described by the Encyclopedia of Virginia as a “racist 1866 political poster” that “demonizes a newly freed African American as being idle ‘at the expense of the white man.’” The cartoon uses a number of well-known tropes of the time — a lounging freed slave, dark against the largely white backdrop, drawn in the stereotypical manner. Smaller images are set around him — while men working the fields and chopping logs, with the legend “The White Man must work to keep his children and pay his taxes” and a second one in dialect and attributable to the freed slave: “Whar is de use for me to work as long as dey make does appropriations.”
I’ve taken o showing it along side a recent meme:
These images are separated by about 160 or so years, and they present very different kinds of images. And yet, both memes operate the same way and target the same audience: Resentful Whites who feel they’ve been left behind, and whose latent (or overt) racism can be activated and manipulated. Both weaponize the idea of work, tying it to Whites and positing a binary comparison. The cartoon is more overt, presenting in literal black and white an undeserving foil. The meme does it more subtly, asking the audience to imagine the foil — who obviously is not white, because the unseen foil has raised to specter of White Privilege.
Why bring this up? Because I am an adjunct and because each time I show this cartoon — or the anti-Japanese cartoons created by Dr. Seuss, or the early anti-Irish and Antisemitic images that regularly were printed in popular newspapers throughout our history, I could be inviting reprisal — despite the context I offer or that the schools at which I teach profess a commitment to academic freedom.
I wrote about this awhile back, when a friend and mentor — Laurie Sheck — was fired from her position at the New School for using the n-word in a discussion of James Baldwin’s essay on, yes, the n-word. But the issue is back on the radar thanks to Hamline University’s firing of an adjunct who presented a 14th-century painting by an Islamic scholar of Prophet Muhammad in a global art history class.
According to The New York Times, adjunct professor Erika López Prater warned in her syllabus “that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course.” She also says she went out of her way to make sure students knew what would be shown, while offering them a chance to leave the classroom. She says none did, but “a senior in the class complained to the administration” and “Other Muslim students, not in the course, supported the student, saying the class was an attack on their religion. They demanded that officials take action.”
Administration did, according to the Times, telling “López Prater that her services … were no longer needed.” In a co-signed email, Hamline President Fayneese S. Miller to students that “respect for the Muslim students ‘should have superseded academic freedom.’”
Respect is an important value, but the precedent this would seem to set could do lasting damage to the notion of academic freedom by opening up faculty and students to charges that they are being insensitive to their peers. The public debate over this is unlikely to reflect this — Fox News already is reporting on this as an example of “wokeness” run amok, and it would not surprise me if it shifts gears quickly to focus on the religious aspects of what happened.
This is not an “Islam” issue, however, nor is it purely a question of “wokeness.” There are intersecting and competing interests at play that made it easy for the administration at Hamline to sacrifice Lopez Prater to show “Muslim students, as well as all other students,” that they can “feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”
Lopez Prater is an adjunct, meaning she teaches on an as-needed basis and lacks the protections that a tenured professor would have in a similar circumstance. Adjuncts and non-tenured full-timers teach about two thirds of all classes nationally, a figure that has grown over the last four decades before leveling off in recent years. This is part of a corporate remaking of higher education, away from the public-service/learning model to a vocational/consumer-driven model that is disempowering classroom instructors who threaten their own employment every time they teach something controversial or uncomfortable.
The Right wants us to believe that this is the fault of liberalism, of ”wokeness,” but the conservative threats to the academy are more systemic and dangerous. Their “parents’ rights” legislation — “Don’t Say Gay” and the anti-woke bills in Florida and elsewhere — ostensibly is aimed at younger public school students but it will have ripple effects for high school and college classes, which is the point. They cheer on the dismantling of unions and the assault on tenure. They see gigification — of the academy and of the entire economy — as an opening to the free markets.
This is bad for higher education. Every instructor at every college and university needs protections against complaints like those made against Lopez Prater, but also real job protections and security, a livable wage, health care, and fair treatment. These are the issues driving higher ed workers to strike. Addressing them is the only way to protect and enhance the mission of higher education.