About 200 scholars nationwide have created a nonprofit to protect college educators’ from an “attack on academic freedom everywhere” and from fear of suppression or retaliation for sharing their perspectives.
The idea for the nonprofit Academic Freedom Alliance, which launched Monday, emerged when Princeton University faculty members began talking about how to fight back against what they see as an intolerance of certain viewpoints and to counter pressures on employers to punish staff who have beliefs, statements or teachings they disagree with.
“It is clear, on the one hand, that this is a long-term difficulty, that this is a constant struggle we’ve been through in higher education for decades,” said Princeton’s Keith Whittington, chairman of the alliance’s academic committee. “Certainly, some of these issues aren’t new although the details of the controversy are somewhat new. Although I do think there are emerging threats that do make this a more challenging environment than it once was.”
“Academics can find themselves easily isolated amidst these controversies. Universities are sometimes tempted to want to cut faculty loose in order to try to protect the reputation of the larger institution,” said Mr. Whittington, a politics professor. “We’re hoping to push back against that, to really encourage universities to stand up for the principles they are committed to which include protecting the academic and speech rights of their faculty.”
The nonprofit says its members will defend faculty members’ freedom of speech in their research work and as citizen writers, freedom to design and teach courses using “reasonable pedagogical judgment” and freedom from ideological tests and oaths.
It also says it will help provide legal support to faculty, staff and students and relies on its legal advisory council to determine cases in which members’ rights have been violated.
The organization, which claims to be nonpartisan and nonpolitical, includes members from a range of political backgrounds including Harvard University’s Cornel West, who backs Sen. Bernard Sanders, and retired Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, according to The Associated Press.
“We wanted to make sure we were building a broad coalition and included people across the political spectrum as part of the group,” Mr. Whittington said, adding that the nonprofit will provide protection for people across the board regardless of their views.
Mr. Whittington, who has written a book titled “Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech,” referred to two recent examples of threats to academic freedom and why protection is needed.
Officials at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are facing calls to fire or discipline anthropology professor Sarah Parcak over her now-deleted tweet about last month’s death of conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. She called him “scum who caused immeasurable harm to millions.”
The university’s president issued a public statement condemning the tweet, calling it “unprofessional and blindly inhumane and cruel” and the school was “reviewing the matter.”
The second incident involved Jesse Goldberg, an English professor at Auburn University who posted a profane tweet in response to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, saying “The police do not protect people. They protect capital. They are instruments of violence on behalf of capital.”
Auburn officials responded by saying Mr. Goldberg’s tweet was “inexcusable and completely antithetical” to the university’s beliefs and transferred him from the classroom to a research position since they didn’t have the legal authority to fire him.
“I certainly think there is a lot of overlap between the kinds of things people characterize as ‘cancel culture’ and these kinds of immediate threats to academic freedom, free speech on college campuses,” Mr. Whittington said.
• Shen Wu Tan can be reached at stan@washingtontimes.com.
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