The AAUP Targets CUNY
Responding to real and imagined threats to academic freedom played a role in several contested races this past spring for the AAUP’s governing council. Defining the concept as chiefly a tool for protecting the professoriate’s dominant ideological faction, a successful slate of candidates headed by Yeshiva’s Ellen Schrecker ran on a platform of resisting outside scrutiny of the academy and limiting publicly available information about academic matters. Schrecker, whose scholarly works have focused on McCarthyism, is particularly quick to play the “McCarthyism” card when attacking critics of the academic majority; she has even written about Internet-related “virtual McCarthyism.” The Schrecker viewpoint accurately reflects the approach of Joan Wallach Scott the current head of the AAUP’s “Committee A” (which handles academic freedom and tenure issues). Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a figure more representative of the contemporary academic mainstream than Scott, a highly regarded specialist in women’s history and gender theory.
As yesterday’s Inside Higher Edreports, Scott, Schrecker, and the AAUP are now targeting CUNY, expressing “grave concern” about the state of academic freedom in the City University system. CUNY’s offenses against academic freedom? The non-reappointment of two adjuncts (Susan Rosenberg and Mohamed Yousry) convicted of terrorist acts; and what Scott termed CUNY’s unwillingness to resist “outside pressures” in the recent withdrawal by Brooklyn professor Timothy Shortell of his bid to be Sociology chairman.
According to an AAUP press release on the issue, these three events suggest a “pattern of failure to safeguard the university from political interference in matters of academic appointments.” As I’ve noted previously, adjuncts have no right of reappointment under the current CUNY contract. (The AAUP has vehemently opposed such provisions, not just at CUNY but nationally.) Surely, however, the AAUP cannot seriously contend that being indicted for or accused of a criminal act—even if that act was associated with political causes that enjoy disproportionate support in the academy—should confer upon an adjunct an “academic freedom” right to reappointment that adjuncts with clean criminal records do not possess.
As for Shortell: after he wrote a series of essays and blog postings that could only be described as calculated to inflame opinion among wide elements of the Brooklyn community, both on campus and beyond, he pronounced himself shocked—shocked(!)—when his postings did inflame opinion. But in the end, he was not “denied” anything—he withdrew his candidacy in the face of widespread public outcry. His withdrawal email condemned the Brooklyn and CUNY administration for not issuing statements in his defense (I’d say I could count on one hand the number of public college administrators who would publicly state that department chairs should be able to call all religious people “moral retards”). But the Shortell e-mail focused most of its attention not on academic freedom but on unsubstantiated attacks against the professionalism of his colleagues. It’s hard to make an “academic freedom” claim for someone who, in the end, wasn’t even willing to fight for it himself.
Perhaps Joan Scott and her colleagues might want to take a look at the Torch, the fine blog maintained by FIRE; and in particular at tworecent postings by FIRE president David French. As French notes, “Censors are, almost by necessity, individuals with power.” Given this reality, it is unsurprising that 80 to 85% of FIRE’s cases involve censorship from the left. “On campus, the self-identified left has more power. It is the majority. This is, of course, not true in larger society.” Threats to academic freedom, of course, can also come from outside the university, where most often the right is the driving force. But, French continues, “since the larger political culture pays only sporadic attention to campus events—usually arousing itself only when the speech at issue is perceived to be particularly sensational—the vast majority” of FIRE’s cases involve threats to academic freedom from within the academy itself. Today’s Inside Higher Ed has a good example of the kind of issue about which French spoke--the kind of issue that seems to be of little concern to today's AAUP.
In the reality of Scott, Schrecker, and the AAUP, the internal threats to academic freedom that represent the majority of FIRE’s cases don’t seem to exist. Instead, their view of academic freedom is like LBJ’s grandmother’s nightgown—covering everything a professor might do or say, provided that the professor’s attitudes are acceptable to the current academic majority.