This week, the remaining forces of free minds and free inquiry began fighting back against academia’s thought-crushing leftist orthodoxy. In this intellectual, all-out war, the rebels merit massive support.
The new initiative comes via a group called the Academic Freedom Alliance, a collection of college faculty that quite legitimately spans the ideological spectrum but that unites against efforts to limit free expression and pedagogical liberty.
Crucially, the AFA will serve not just to publicize and argue against attacks on academic freedom but also to provide legal support when instructors’ rights are threatened or violated. Its members range from noted liberals Lara Bazelon, Randall Kennedy, Cornel West, and Peter Singer to conservatives of various stripes such as Robert George, Ilya Somin, and Victor Davis Hanson.
“The AFA’s defense of faculty members’ academic freedom does not depend on viewpoint, nor does it endorse the content of what they express,” they write. “What we defend is members’ right of expression.”
This isn’t just about invited speakers being shouted down. This is about professors themselves who are disciplined for doing exactly what professors are hired to do, which is to challenge students to think. By now, the complaint about speech codes and college “cancel culture” is so familiar that we often tune out the particulars. We shouldn’t tune them out. Consider just two stories as recounted in the past six weeks by the online publication Campus Reform.
For 10 years, reported correspondent Benjamin Zeisloft, University of Illinois at Chicago law professor Jason Kilborn had used the same exam question involving a hypothetical employment discrimination case. In it, he referred to “profane” words used to describe black men and women and identified them not by spelling them out but by writing the words’ first letters, “n” and “b,” followed by blank spaces for the other letters. Isn’t this what we are all taught to do: When referencing the “N-word,” indicate it without spelling it out?
Suddenly, even that euphemistic way of referencing the objectionable words, even in a context making clear they are indeed objectionable and subject to legal action, even for the purpose of an exam question about employment discrimination, is considered forbidden. More than 400 people signed a petition condemning Kilborn. In response, the university canceled his classes for the entire semester, barred him from campus in the interim, suspended him from his elected position on the school’s tenure committee, and — get this — subjected him to a three-hour mental examination by university doctors.
The university’s treatment of Kilborn is a new species of evil. Its awfulness was exceeded, though, by the experience of St. John’s history professor Richard Taylor. Taylor was fired after a five-minute Zoom hearing because, in teaching about the entirety of the Columbian exchange — “the transfer of plants, animals, disease, people, and culture following Christopher Columbus’ voyages” — he asked students to consider whether “the positives justify the negatives.”
The question was about the whole gamut of issues and never even mentioned slavery, nor did it suggest that the answer was “yes.” Taylor merely asked the question. Yet a student group said that because he “forced students to formulate a pros and cons list concerning the topic of slavery,” a false allegation, this meant that Taylor was a “racist predator.”
Rather than tell the spoiled students that what Taylor did is called “education,” the school fired him.
The reasonable mind reels. Alas, horror stories like this abound across the land. It’s time for a focused effort to fight the insanity. Here’s hoping the Academic Freedom Alliance doesn’t just fight but wins. The thought-totalitarianism on college campuses is a vicious pandemic. It must be vanquished.
