Takeaway: Our unions are mounting a joint effort to defend academic freedom and our public university.
Dear colleague,
We are living in dangerous times. From Florida to West Virginia, from UPenn to Harvard, academic freedom, one of the pillars of education and research, is facing a level of attack today that we have not seen in 75 years. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are initiating an “investigation” into the Center for Security, Race, and Rights here at Rutgers. Outside the classroom, too, the First Amendment rights of faculty and students to free speech, assembly, and association are being challenged.
A whole cadre of politicians and anti-intellectual activists seek to limit what we can say and teach. In the words of renowned historian Dr. Ellen Schrecker, speaking last week at a webinar our unions cosponsored, these politicians and activists are “trying to divert attention from [their] real agenda of shrinking the government, ending the welfare state, rewarding the corporate sector, and empowering right-wing Evangelical white nationalism. And [they are] doing this in part by disseminating a…false narrative about the repressive institutions of higher education staffed by Marxist professors who were indoctrinating their students and weak administrators who are capitulating to demanding and supposedly antisemitic students.” Click here to watch a video of Dr. Schrecker’s presentation.
Professor Schrecker sees the current campaign of right-wing attacks on academic freedom as even more dangerous than the campaign of attacks during the McCarthyism era in the 1950s because it’s more far-reaching in its targets. Not only are faculty members losing their jobs, but the role of higher education as a place of free inquiry and the exchange of ideas is threatened. And the right wing, which has been planning this offensive for decades, is having some success. The war in Gaza is just the latest pretext in an attack that also targets diversity programs, race and gender studies, and other programs and disciplines.
In response, our unions have chartered Committees on Academic Freedom to defend our members, our students, and the institution of public higher education. Last week, we wrote to Rutgers-New Brunswick Chancellor Conway to urge that she include our unions in the “chancellor advisory groups” she is convening to, in her words, “help address, among other issues, the extremely troubling rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia on our campus and more broadly,” by developing “policies and procedures.” Believing that these new policies may impact academic freedom, we wrote, “We realize that university administrators are under intense pressure from politicians and interest groups. Our organizations can—and will—provide a counterweight to that pressure.” Academic freedom is most effectively defended when the scholarly community and the administration stand together.
If you believe your academic freedom has been threatened, contact your union at ptl@rutgersaaup.org or aaup@rutgersaaup.org.
In solidarity,
Academic Freedom Committee, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Academic Freedom Committee, Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union