The End of Academic Freedom

In Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967) SCOTUS reviewed a New York law that required public employees, including college faculty, to be fired for “utterance of any treasonable or seditious word or words or the doing of any treasonable or seditious act.” For the first, and only time, SCOTUS clearly embraced the idea of academic freedom as a First Amendment value. It declared that “The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas’” and academic freedom “does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.” It struck down the New York policy requiring that all faculty sign a loyalty oath that they had never had a negative thought about the U.S. government ever. In this decision, SCOTUS accepted that sometimes the duty of college faculty is to unsettle accepted norms and present controversial ideas. Or just to present basic reality that some in society don’t like. Sadly, Texas A&M representing 12 college campuses has decided that academic freedom is to be eliminated in favor of education as conservative indoctrination.

This all began two months ago when an English class on children’s literature presented a discussion of transgender inclusive children’s literature. This is a perfectly normal discussion to have in such a class as in the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in trans-inclusive children’s literature and, thus, any course on the subject should consider the topic. A student, however, took it upon themself to claim that this was illegal under President' Trump’s moronic declaration that sex is fixed at conception (when all fetuses are female) and trans people, thus, cannot exist. The professor handled the interaction well and in line with how all of us who are lucky enough to teach controversial subjects, like trans people exist, strive to respond to such idiotic criticism. This did not stop the professor from being fired, her superiors being demoted, and ultimately the university president being shoed out for not firing the professor more quickly.

Texas A&M has now adopted a policy declaring that no course “will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” without approval of the university president. Race ideology is defined as a “concept that attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity, accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy or conspiracy” or assigns “them intrinsic guilt based on the actions of their presumed ancestors or relatives.” Gender ideology is a “concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing and disconnected from the biological category of sex.” As far as I can tell at the moment, the policy does not define advocacy clearly. However, the historical background of this change makes clear that advocacy is any acknowledgement of the topic. The definition of race ideology is so stupid that I can’t even engage with it beyond noting the only people who assign intrinsic value to racial identity are white supremacists like Stephen Miller or Donald Trump.

The gender ideology* component is more interesting to me as I teach both LGBTQ specific courses (politics and history, though the history one is ending because Repulicans think that learning history is dangerous) but I also teach a slew of courses on modern American politics that has to interact with LGBTQ topics regularly because those topics are the subject of American politics. For example, in my constitutional rights course one of the topics is about the place of queer and trans people in the 14th amendment, this includes President Trump’s declaration that trans people doesn’t exist. Do I “advocate” anything? Not to my mind. After all, I teach about discrimination against Catholics, Jews, and Jehovah’s Witnesses without ever once advocating that those people exist. I simply assume that trans people (or Catholics) exist because they say they do. But to conservative Republicans my mention of trans people fighting against cross-dressing ordinances in the 1970s and ‘80s is gender ideology. Under the Texas A&M policy I would have to submit that lesson to a university president for their approval; a university president that has no expertise or perhaps even basic knowledge in my area. And no president is going to give it after the last one who didn’t fire a faculty member quickly enough was himself forced out.

So where does that leave us? It transforms higher education into nothing more than a mouthpiece for conservative Republican ideology. I can’t mention trans people existing because a mentally infirm president has decided to just declare that they don’t exist. This means that we cannot even touch upon the legal battle over discrimination against trans people but reaches much further. A medical school cannot instruct upon either trans existence or the many intersex realities facing real people because it does not rely upon the idea of “sex” as binary. Therapy programs cannot mention trans existence as part of the training of future mental health professionals. Evidence shows that trans people are far more likely to be homeless or housing insecure but a social work program cannot mention that because it means they are advocating gender ideology.

Or that is the natural outcome of this policy. The policy is designed to force faculty to shut the fuck up and just ignore disfavored topics. We are not to teach about racism and the fact that it still exists. America is a land of eternal justice and equality. Queer and trans people don’t really exist, they are simply confused. America is a land of men who are men and women who are objects of sexual conquest for those men.

For these Republicans, education means nothin more than indoctrination in these lessons of conservative ideology. Anything addressing the experience of nonwhite, non-Christian, women, and/or queer people is dangerous activism. The experience of straight, white, Christian men is neutral and justified. Faculty are nothing more than mouthpieces of this lesson. Our expertise and research is irrelevant to our purpose. Indoctrination is the new normal and academic freedom is dead. Republicans believe that they must “cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”

*I’ll leave aside the fact of my own transness. My very existence in the classroom would seem to violate this policy but it is no secret that for Republicans elimination of trans people has always been the goal.