Month: February 2019

The Effect of the Financial Crisis on Tenure-Track Jobs

The economic shock of 2008 has cast a long shadow over the job prospects for doctoral students who aspire to academic careers. A decade on, instead of signs of recovery, departments and the modern language disciplines continue to assess the latest damage. Much of what we see in two- and four-year institutions in the United States seems a fresh intensification of stresses evident from the 1990s and even further back, from the 1970s—especially institutions’ decades-long turn to non-tenure-track, especially part-time, teaching appointments and the consequent emergence of a majority contingent academic workforce to keep pace with the growth in student enrollment in higher education (fig. 1).¹

The steep post-2008 plunge in opportunities for new PhD recipients to enter full-time and especially tenure-track academic employment has been much discussed and is clearly reflected in the trend lines for the number of jobs advertised in the MLA Job Information List (JIL) since the 2007–08 academic year. The years since 2011–12 have seen the number of jobs in the JIL drop to historic lows, below even the trough years of the 1990s (MLA Office of Research 7; fig. 2). The long-standing, chronic imbalance of PhD production and career-sustaining academic job opportunities, which has dogged doctoral education since the 1970s, has once again reached a crisis level, with no sign of improvement in the offing.

Figure 2

Plotting the trend line for jobs in the JIL’s English edition against the trend line for new doctorate recipients in English—drawn from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED)—makes apparent what Louis Menand has described as the pain-inducing pincer effect that results when academic job opportunities contract but the production of PhDs does not (29; fig. 3). Since 2007–08, we’ve seen a steep decline in English positions announced in the JIL but an increase in doctorate recipients.

Changing Trends in Faculty Positions

These trend data for the number of jobs advertised and the number of doctorate recipients prompt questions about how the balance of tenure-track and non-tenure-track, full- and part-time faculty positions has been changing; whether the absolute number of tenure-track appointments is declining; and what the available data sources tell us about trends in hiring and the institutional demand for new faculty members, especially tenure-track faculty members. The record of JIL ads certainly points to a sharply reduced level of hiring to tenure-track positions in English and the other modern languages. Is the situation of the modern languages representative? Are tenured and tenure-track positions, and tenure itself, disappearing from the landscape of the disciplines and higher education? Are there data that can help us understand the level of institutional demand for tenure-track faculty members and its relation to the supply represented in the annual production of new doctorate recipients?

The Fall Staff and Employees by Assigned Position (EAP) survey components of the federal government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) provide the most comprehensive time series information about the faculty and other categories of higher education employees.² Figure 4 shows the trend in the number of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members documented in the Fall Staff survey for 1995 and the EAP surveys for 2005 and 2016 (the EAP survey was introduced in 2003). Between 1995 and 2016, the absolute number of faculty members holding full-time tenured or tenure-track positions at two- and four-year public and private nonprofit institutions grew by 10.7%. In 1995 the Fall Staff survey counted 394,973 tenured or tenure-track faculty members employed by 2,265 two- and four-year public and private nonprofit institutions. The number grew to 414,363 in 2005 and to 437,226 in 2016; but the number of institutions employing tenured and tenure-track faculty members decreased, from 2,265—or 70.7%—of 3,204 institutions in 1995 to 2,083—or 63.2%—of 3,294 institutions in 2016 (fig. 4).³

Figure 4

As figure 4 also shows, 95.9% of the growth in the number of tenure-track faculty members occurred between 1995 and 2005, while all the growth in the tenured faculty ranks came between 2005 and 2016. Between 1995 and 2005 the number of full-time tenure-track faculty members grew by 20,786, from 110,298 to 131,084; in 2016 the EAP counted 131,971 full-time tenure-track faculty members, a mere 887 (0.7%) more than a decade earlier, in 2005. Between 2005 and 2016 the tenured faculty added 21,976 members, growing to 305,255 from 283,279. But in 1995 the IPEDS counted 284,675 tenured faculty members, 1,396 more than in 2005. One infers that a wave of tenured faculty retirements lies behind the 0.5% contraction in the tenured faculty ranks between 1995 and 2005, whereas movement into the tenured ranks of the 20,786 tenure-track faculty members added between 1995 and 2005 seems likely to account for most of the 21,976 (7.7%) increase in tenured faculty members the IPEDS surveys document between 2005 and 2016.

Over the same twenty-two years, 1995 to 2016, when the tenured and tenure-track faculty grew 10.7%, the portion of the faculty in full-time non-tenure-track and part-time appointments nearly doubled, an expansion in the contingent portion of the academic workforce more than eleven times greater than the increase in the corps of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members. Overall, the ranks of full-time non-tenure-track faculty members grew by 208,914 (138.4%) and the ranks of part-time faculty members grew by 284,864 (76.6%; fig. 5).

Figure 5

Putting these numerical changes together, we see that the 10.7% growth in the absolute number of faculty members with full-time tenured and tenure-track appointments implies a 30.0% (or nearly 13-percentage-point) decline in the segment of the faculty holding tenure or on the tenure track (fig. 6 and fig. 7).

Figure 6

Figure 7

The shift in the ratio of tenure-track to non-tenure-track positions has been especially dramatic in four-year institutions. Since 1995 the share of the faculty holding tenure or on the tenure track has fallen 18 percentage points, or 34.5%, from 52.2% to 34.2% of the faculty population by head count, whereas the share of the faculty with full-time non-tenure-track and part-time appointments expanded to 27.4% and 38.4%, respectively (fig. 8). Faculty members in contingent, part-time appointments now constitute the largest of the three segments of the academic workforce, even in four-year public and private nonprofit colleges and universities.

Figure 8

Two-year institutions saw a modest increase in the share of the faculty in full-time non-tenure-track positions and a corresponding decrease in the portion holding full-time tenured or tenure-track appointments. In 1995, public and private nonprofit two-year colleges already had 64.6% of their faculty members in part-time positions, and across the twenty-two years from 1995 to 2016 part-time faculty members have consistently made up close to two-thirds or more of the two-year-college academic workforce (fig. 9).

The Effect of the Economy on New Hires

The Fall Staff survey includes a component that counts new hires to full-time positions in each of the occupational categories the IPEDS tracks, including (until 2013, when the categories underwent extensive revision) executive, administrative, managerial, and other professional positions as well as full-time tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track faculty appointments. The record of new hires makes clear how the economic shocks of 2001 and 2008 curtailed hiring across postsecondary education (fig. 10). Across all occupational categories, new hires counted in fall 2003 were 18.5% below the level of 2001, while those counted in 2009 were 27.4% below the level of 2007.

The “New Hires” section of the Fall Staff survey also illuminates the level of demand for full-time tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members in relation to other (nonfaculty) professionals. The economic boom of the late 1990s fueled a significant upturn in hiring across all three categories of professional positions between 1995 and 2001—but the strongest gains were in nonfaculty positions, and the weakest were in tenure-track faculty positions. The shocks of 2001 and 2008 led to sharp drops in new hires across all occupational categories, followed by recoveries that were successively larger and more pronounced for the nonfaculty professionals and successively smaller and more muted for the tenure-track faculty (fig. 11).

Figure 10

Figure 11

Figure 12 shows the change from survey to survey in percentage terms within each of the three occupational categories. After new hires to tenure-track faculty positions plunged 25.8% and other (nonfaculty) professional positions dropped 24.6% from 2007 to 2009, new hires of nonfaculty professional rebounded by 27.3% in 2011, while new tenure-track faculty hires increased by only 6.5%. It is not possible to develop comparable data for nonfaculty professionals after 2011 because of revisions the IPEDS implemented in 2013 to the occupational categories used for the human resources surveys.

Figure 12

Figure 13 shows how since 2001 the nonfaculty professional category has claimed a steadily increasing share of all new hires to full-time positions and the shares being claimed by hiring of full-time faculty members, both tenure-track and non-tenure-track, have been gradually declining, especially since 2009. Looking at new hires to faculty positions apart from the other nonfaculty professionals reveals a slightly downward trend since 2005 in the share of new faculty hires that are tenure-track and a corresponding slight upward trend in the share that are non-tenure-track (fig. 14).

Figure 13

Figure 14

New Tenure-Track Hires in Relation to Doctorate Recipients

Plotting new hires to tenure-track faculty positions against the number of doctorate recipients reported on the SED in the corresponding year affords a very rough indicator of the supply of talent qualified to enter tenure-track faculty posts relative to the readiness of postsecondary educational institutions in the United States to absorb those graduates (fig. 15). The indicator is especially crude because academic disciplines vary widely in the fraction of their doctoral students who enter academic careers. Across the 1995 to 2015 period, of new doctorate recipients who reported having a definite commitment to employment in the United States on the SED, 81.7% of PhDs in the humanities on average but only 15.4% in engineering said they were heading to an academic position, whether tenure-track or non-tenure-track, full- or part-time; the average across all fields is 50.7%. In addition, a significant number of foreign nationals who complete doctoral programs in the United States are not competitors for academic positions in the United States because they are not eligible to work in the country or because they have planned to return to their countries of origin.

Despite their limitations, the data summarized in figure 15 may nonetheless suggest how the substantial, and increasing, supply of doctoral talent stacks up against an aggregate institutional demand for tenure-track faculty members that, as measured through the record of new full-time tenure-track hires, appears static at best. Figure 15 divides each year’s production of new doctorate recipients by citizenship status and each year’s new tenure-track hires by institutional type (four-year or two-year) to underscore the uncertainty of specifying the supply-demand relationship in a circumstance where a substantial fraction of the supply may not be eligible for employment in the United States and only the four-year institutions may be seeking PhD talent actively and exclusively. Of course, documenting institutional demand is not an endorsement of it. It must also be emphasized that the demand represented in tenure-track faculty hires is a contingent artifact of institutional and social policies, economic and educational, that on many grounds, economic and educational, warrant challenge and change.

The supply-demand relationship can also be expressed as the changing ratio of new doctorate recipients to new tenure-track hires. This is shown in figure 16, which plots the ratio both for each year’s new doctorate recipients in total and for doctorate recipients who are United States citizens or permanent residents and therefore eligible for employment in the United States. From 1995 to 2015, there have been 3.3 new doctorate recipients for every new tenure-track hire by a four-year institution; the ratio is 2.2:1, on average, for United States citizens or permanent residents. Figure 15 also makes vividly apparent how the odds abruptly lengthened after 2008—and have remained long at 3.7:1 and 2.4:1, respectively, ever since. Figure 16 uses new tenure-track hires by four-year institutions to calculate the ratio, since only in four-year institutions is the PhD uniformly required to hold a tenure-track faculty appointment. These ratios doubtless understate the reality because they match only a single year’s cohort of new PhD recipients against the record of new tenure-track hires for that year.

Distribution of New Full-Time Faculty Hires across Institution Types

In the 2016 Fall Staff survey, the Carnegie research/doctoral institutions claim the largest share of new full-time faculty hires by far—45.1% of new hires to full-time tenure-track positions and 46.3% to full-time non-tenure-track positions. Carnegie master’s institutions come next with a 25.0% share of new tenure-track hires and 19.9% of new non-tenure-track hires, followed by the associate’s colleges (14.7% of tenure-track hires and 14.4% of non-tenure-track hires), baccalaureate colleges (9.4% of tenure-track hires and 8.8% of non-tenure-track hires), and special focus and tribal institutions (5.8% of tenure-track hires and 10.6% of non-tenure-track hires; fig. 17 and fig. 18).

Figure 17

Figure 18

Looking at the Carnegie research/doctoral, master’s, and baccalaureate institutions separately makes clear the predominance of the public, doctorate-granting universities in the hiring of new full-time faculty members, both tenure-track and non-tenure-track (fig. 19). Public Carnegie research/doctoral institutions claimed 43.5% of all new hires to full-time tenure-track positions and 41.3% of all new hires to full-time non-tenure-track positions in this subset of institutions. Overall, 68.2% of new hires to full-time tenure-track positions and 55.1% of new hires to full-time non-tenure-track positions went to public institutions.

The Ratio of Part-Time to Full-Time Faculty Employees

The “New Hires” component of the Fall Staff survey asks only about new hires to permanent full-time positions. As of 2016, in degree-granting, two- and four-year public and private nonprofit institutions, part-time employees made up only 28.6% of nonfaculty employees—but 47.5% of the faculty workforce (defined as instructional staff apart from research and public service). Two of the three categories of professional employees that touch students most directly and extensively—the faculty and student and academic affairs staff (librarians are the third)—have the lowest percentage of full-time employees, 47.5% and 34.1%, respectively, whereas the percentage of full-time positions in other categories exceeds ninety percent (fig. 20).

Figure 20

Confined as it is to full-time hires, the “New Hires” component of the IPEDS leaves shrouded in obscurity the hiring of the part-time teachers who have come to make up such a large fraction of the postsecondary faculty workforce and who deliver an increasing share of institutions’ undergraduate teaching effort. A bright light needs to be directed to institutional policies and processes that undermine the capacity and stability of the faculty, create conditions of work for it so disadvantageous and disparate from those that colleges and universities routinely provide for other categories of professional employees, and make the labor of providing undergraduate education an increasingly precarious enterprise.

Notes

1. For data on enrollments, see “Table 303.25”; the data in figure 1 and others on the faculty and on new hires are available in the complete data files for the 2005, 2015, and 2016 Employees by Assigned Position surveys and for the 1995–2016 Fall Staff surveys (nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx).
2. The Fall Staff and EAP surveys count the faculty as an institutional aggregate and not as broken out by discipline or broad disciplinary groupings like humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Changes in the way the IPEDS data are collected, categorized, and reported also make development of comparisons across time something less than a precise exercise. The 1995 Fall Staff survey, for example, which is used as a baseline here, categorizes the faculty as employees whose primary job is instruction, research, or public service—and offers no way to disaggregate the three components. The IPEDS human resources surveys for 2005 and 2016—used here as specimen years for tracking change since 1995—treat instruction, research, and public service as three separate variables; in its published reports on those surveys, the United States Department of Education specifies the faculty as employees institutions reported under instruction and apart from employees reported under research and public service. To align the three survey years as closely as possible, this essay applies the 1995 definition of the faculty across the three specimen years. The numbers given here thus differ from those published by the Department of Education. Also, partly for comparability and partly to focus on the subset of colleges and universities in the United States of greatest pertinence for MLA members, the institutional universe treated here has been limited to two- and four-year public and private nonprofit colleges and universities in the fifty states and the District of Columbia. Because the Fall Staff survey does not separate medical from nonmedical faculty members and provides tenure status only for full-time faculty members, both medical and nonmedical faculty members are included in faculty counts for 2005 and 2016; only full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members are counted when comparing the numbers of faculty members with tenure or on the tenure track in 2005 and 2016 with the number in 1995; and the small number of part-time faculty members with tenure or on the tenure-track are included in counts for the part-time category.
3. The 414,363 tenured and tenure-track faculty members reported in 2005 were employed by 2,229 of 3,313 institutions. In figure 4, only institutions with full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members are included in the institution count. In both 2005 and 2016 there are two institutions that reported part-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members but zero full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members. Thus, the number of institutions with tenured and tenure-track faculty members, whether full- or part-time, is 2,231 in 2005 and 2,085 in 2016.

Works Cited

Menand, Louis. “The PhD Problem.” Harvard Magazine, vol. 112, no. 2, Nov.–Dec. 2009, pp. 27+.

MLA Office of Research. “Report on the Modern Language Association Job Information List, 2016–17.” Modern Language Association, Dec. 2017, www.mla.org/Resources/Career/Job-Information-List/Reports-on-the-MLA-Job-Information-List. PDF download.

 “Table 303.25: Total Fall Enrollment in Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions, by Control and Level of Institution: 1970 through 2015.” Digest of Education Statistics, 2016, United States Department of Education /  National Center for Education Statistics, Feb. 2017, nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_303.25.asp.

Correction: An earlier version of figure 15 included incorrect labels for the counts of doctorate recipients who were citizens or permanent residents of the United States. The labels gave the number of doctorate recipients who were temporary visa holders or whose status was unknown.

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On 21 November 2018, Daniela Tejada, twenty-seven years old, watched, shocked, in an Abu Dhabi courtroom as her husband, Matthew Hedges, thirty-one years old and a PhD candidate at the University of Durham, was sentenced to life imprisonment (Parveen and Wintour; Rawlison). Hedges, who at that point had been in prison in the United Arab Emirates for more than six months, had gone to the country to research his thesis on United Arab Emirates security policy in the wake of the Arab Spring. That ended with his arrest and sentencing, which reportedly lasted less than five minutes, with no lawyer present.

Hardly the end of the story, Hedges’s sentencing raises a host of questions about academic freedom in an era of global higher education, as well as about the responsibilities of higher education institutions, associations, faculty, and staff when such incidents occur. How we answer those questions, and, perhaps more important, how we discuss those questions, will have profound impacts on higher education and on society generally.

Where Is the Line?

The academic exercise is the exercise of asking questions. And the seeking of evidence—measurements, calculations, documents, testimonies, experiences, demonstrations, and so on—that responds to those questions. And the production and dissemination of theories, arguments, and discourses that articulate the responses and pose further questions. And so on.

Within the Hedges case, as within all academic freedom incidents, is a challenge to this view of the academic exercise, to the academic identity, and indeed to the concept of what it is to be a university. Within these incidents are implicit and sometimes explicit (as in the Hedges case) assertions that some questions should not be asked. Some evidence should not be sought. Some ideas should not be shared. In other words, there is a line that academics must not cross.

At Scholars at Risk (SAR)—a network of over five hundred higher education institutions and associations, including the MLA, in thirty-nine countries—we work regularly with higher education scholars, students, administrators, and leaders who are accused of crossing the line. Accused by whom? Most often by states and their agents but also by nonstate militants, commercial interests, religious and cultural groups, and even other members of the higher education community. As a result, scholars regularly suffer intentional violence or coercion because of their research, teaching, speaking, or publishing. A political scientist is prosecuted for sedition after giving an interview to a newspaper. A geographer is imprisoned for research on drought that exposes flaws in government responses that led to famine. A professor of gender studies suffers death threats and physical intimidation for allegedly undermining traditional values.

Defending the Line

SAR’s core mission is to defend the academic freedom line, primarily by responding to threats against scholars with direct assistance. This assistance includes arranging temporary positions somewhere in our network for those most at risk, so that scholars may continue their work in safety. SAR staff members and member institutions help arrange more than one hundred such positions each year. SAR staff members also provide advisory and other services for over three hundred scholars each year, spearhead campaigns for wrongfully detained scholars like Hedges,¹ and conduct trainings for scholars and staff members at host campuses that help scholars identify next opportunities so that they might keep working until conditions at home improve and they can return safely, if they so choose.

Sadly, demand for this kind of help is growing rapidly. Over the last three years, SAR has seen record levels of requests for help from scholars fleeing Turkey, Syria, Venezuela, Ethiopia, and beyond. We have over six hundred scholars on our lists currently seeking help. We must do more—including creating more positions at more institutions. But at the same time we must do more to raise the visibility of the problem of attacks on scholars and academic freedom. Only then can we mobilize support and demand the kinds of accountability that will deter future attacks.

Mobilizing Action

SAR raises visibility about attacks on scholars through its Academic Freedom Monitoring Project and annual Free to Think report, through which volunteer monitors—including faculty members and students at network-member institutions—document and analyze incidents involving attacks on scholars, students, and universities worldwide.² SAR’s Free to Think 2018 analyzes 294 attacks in 47 countries (up from 257 in 2017 and 158 in 2016).³ These include ongoing severe pressures on the university space in Turkey; targeted attacks on scholars in Iran; pressures on student expression in Venezuela and Thailand; recent state-driven threats to institutional autonomy in Russia, Hong Kong, and Hungary, among others; and, for the first time, incidents of increasing tension and violence on campuses in the United States.

This increased visibility can make a difference. In individual cases, like Hedges’s, increased visibility may lead to a scholar’s release. Reports indicate that Hedges’s wife tried for months to get government officials to intervene on his behalf. She secured that help only days after bringing his situation to the world media.

Increased visibility can also help at higher levels, as seen in a recent report and recommendation of the European Parliament, inspired in part by SAR’s earlier Free to Think reporting. The recommendation, approved on 29 November 2018, calls for the explicit inclusion of the defense of academic freedom in the European Union’s external actions (i.e., foreign policy; “Texts”). This recommendation will have far-reaching effects, including possibly unlocking existing and potentially new European Union fellowship programs to at-risk scholars and students.

Lines, Line-Drawing, and Consequences

Providing assistance, such as securing a temporary position at another institution for the scholar, and attracting public attention to a case, will help individual scholars. But these case-based actions are not enough to respond effectively to the wider challenge posed by the Hedges case and others like it—the challenge to the academic exercise, the academic identity, and the university itself. The challenge posed by the assertion that there is a line that academics must not cross.

We see this assertion not only in the extreme cases involving violence or loss of liberty, like Hedges’s, and we see it not only in cases over there, on campuses in other countries. We see the assertion that there is a line that academics must not cross in our own countries, on our own campuses, and even in our departments and disciplinary associations. Take, for example, the recent incidents on campuses in the United States involving the surreptitious recording of faculty members and students; intimidation of disfavored speakers; online harassment and threats against faculty members; orchestrated disruptions of campus activities, often by well-funded actors outside the higher education community; and distressing threats by public officials, trustees, and donors to withdraw funding because scholars have asked disfavored questions or challenged prevailing orthodoxy.

Asserting that scholars shouldn’t be sanctioned for doing their jobs—for asking questions and sharing ideas—is of course not the same as saying scholars can do whatever they like, wherever and whenever they like. Academic freedom is not a get-out-of-the-provost’s-office-free card, let alone a get-out-of-jail card for egregious, fraudulent, or criminal acts.⁴ Nor should it be. There must be some line. But where is it? This is the question that scholars have been asking for generations, if not millennia.

Perry Link, a scholar of comparative foreign languages and Asian studies, addressed the question of line-drawing in an essay some years back. Link describes “a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier,” ready to drop on those below who cross the line, but without clearly indicating exactly where the line is. Link points out the utility of this arrangement to authoritarian structures: “Normally the great snake doesn’t move. It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions.”

Link’s description matches Scholars at Risk’s experience with thousands of threatened scholars from every part of the world. This body of experience reveals that questions about the scope of academic freedom—Where is the line?—may not be the right questions. Even better are questions about agency—Who decides where any line is drawn?

Regarding the anaconda, Link appears to answer the agency question: “‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, everyone in [the snake’s] shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments—all quite ‘naturally.’” Of course Link knows this is a false agency. In repressive states, scholars don’t decide where the real line is; the anaconda does. Scholars decide their own lines; that is, they decide how close they are willing to risk going toward a line that the anaconda intentionally obscures.

This leads to perhaps the best questions of all, beyond scope and agency: questions about consequences. That is, What happens to the scholar who crosses the line? In Link’s essay the consequences are clear, if unsaid: the snake drops, crushes, and devours. And this too is borne out by the cases, including many incidents involving killings, violence, or disappearances each year (Free to Think 4).

Academic Freedom Guideposts

These questions of scope, agency, and consequences are difficult, especially in the abstract, lacking facts and contexts. That said, experience from past cases can offer a few guideposts.

First is the principle, sadly proved true in the violations, that scholars should never suffer violence or coercive consequences for their legitimate exercise of academic freedom. Put bluntly, it is never OK for a scholar or student to be killed for asking a question or expressing an idea. Never. The corollary to this is that it is always suspect when a scholar or student is detained, prosecuted, or imprisoned in relation to their questions or ideas. Always.

Second, the only fully pro-academic-freedom answer to the agency question has to be academics themselves, according to the professional standards and methods of their respective disciplines and with due regard for not only academic freedom but other core higher education values, including equitable access, accountability, and social responsibility. Accepting the agency of any other actor—especially public officials or others outside the higher education sector—will always result in a diminished scope of academic inquiry and a diminished sense of the university.

Finally, with regard to the scope of academic freedom and the line, if any, to be drawn, we must abandon the fallacy that a clean line can be drawn between academic topics on the one hand and nonacademic or political topics on the other, with the implication that the former are protected and the latter are not. Many a dictator has drawn such a line, with the direct intent of crushing free inquiry and expression. At the same time, many a well-meaning defender of academic freedom has attempted to articulate such a line, ostensibly to establish a clearer and more easily defensible boundary, but in the end has lent legitimacy to those who wish to declare certain content off-limits. From a pro-academic-freedom perspective, the content of ideas is never the distinguishing element—it is rather the methods of inquiry and discourse that matter, in which academic freedom protects any engagement undertaken seriously, using the methods of the respective discipline, and with due regard for professional and social responsibility.

Responding to Incidents

Even with these guideposts, incidents related to academic freedom remain challenging.

As the Hedges case shows, preparing to meet challenges to academic freedom is more important than ever, as more institutions embrace partnerships with other institutions, scholars, and students in or from places where higher education values are not well understood or respected.⁵ Advance preparation is always the best course. By developing strong local practices for discussing values concerns among all stakeholders before incidents happen, institutions can build common vocabularies and trust away from the media or other pressures that often accompany incidents.

When responding to incidents, the most important thing is to expand the range of stakeholders consulted and responses considered. The latter especially helps to avoid false all-or-nothing choices. In response to an academic freedom incident in another country, for example, institutions with programs in that country are often called on to cancel or suspend their activities entirely. Since cutting off all activities generally involves significant costs, such all-or-nothing responses are implicitly biased toward “do nothing.” This can result in inadequate responses that may harm institutions, individuals, and core higher education values generally.

At the same time, there should be an overall bias against not responding—doing nothing—when assessments of the incident and interests involved suggest high levels of concern or importance. A corollary to this is a bias against only private forms of response—behind-the-scenes communications, for example—which might create the misimpression of inaction.

And finally, there should be a bias in favor of responses that increase dialogue and respect for core values. These might include, for example, public statements or events discussing academic freedom concerns and incidents. This bias in favor of dialogue might sometimes seem counterintuitive, because it might mean maintaining relationships or activities especially in places where challenging incidents have occurred, instead of cutting off dialogue by withdrawing entirely. But in such cases, maintaining contacts would only be appropriate if doing so offers genuine, ongoing opportunities to discuss and address values concerns. Ending programs and cutting off relationships might be cleaner and more satisfying, but doing so might also foreclose opportunities for future improvement.

Assessing Hedges

Regarding Matthew Hedges, where does this leave us? How would we assess his case?

Does it matter that Hedges’s research was formally approved by his academic program? Does it matter that the harm, life imprisonment, was very great? And how do the answers to these questions weigh against the fact that he is the sole victim? Or are there other, indirect victims? Who are the key stakeholders in this incident? Certainly Hedges, his wife, and family. Certainly scholars, students, and leaders at the University of Durham, his home institution. But what about other scholars, students, and leaders at other institutions in the United Kingdom, or other institutions with programs in the United Arab Emirates, or other countries where similar incidents have taken place? How should they have responded to the Hedges case? And how should they prepare for the next such situation?

The answers to these questions will depend on facts that can be reliably known only to those most intimately involved with the case. What we do know for certain is that if those directly involved fail to ask these questions, academic freedom will suffer. Each time a scholar is shouted down or denied a visa or arrested or killed because of the questions she or he might ask or the ideas and evidence she or he might share, the space for inquiry and expression shrinks. And when our academic leaders, associations, and institutions stand silent—or appear to stand silent—in the face of these violations, the likelihood of future violations increases.

Hedges’s sentencing is not the end of the story, for Hedges or for academic freedom. On 26 November 2018, five days after his sentencing, Hedges was pardoned “in response to a letter from the Hedges family bearing in mind the historical relationship between the UAE and the UK,” according to officials from the United Arab Emirates (Wintour and Batty). He quickly returned to the United Kingdom, where he reunited with colleagues.

But where is the pardon for academic freedom? Where is the happy reunion with core values? And will Hedges’s pardon be enough to remove the chill that the incident produced? We can’t know. But we can know this: speaking out about academic freedom doesn’t create the risk of such incidents. Silence about these risks won’t make them go away. And pretending the Hedges incident, and others like it, didn’t happen won’t do anything to strengthen academic freedom, our institutions, or society.

Notes

1. SAR Scholars-in-Prison campaigns include Ahmed Mansoor, who is still imprisoned in the United Arab Emirates. See “UAE”; see also Emmett, noting the problematic ethics of academics and authors from the United Kingdom protesting the detention of Hedges but not that of Mansoor.

2. Faculty members and students may participate through SAR-affiliated legal clinics, which prepare submissions to national and international monitoring or legal bodies, including, for example, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review, and SAR Student Advocacy Seminars, which provide students with the opportunity to develop human rights research and advocacy skills while taking on the cases of scholars facing unjust restrictions, prosecution, or imprisonment.

3. Since the inception of the project in 2011, SAR has documented over 1,091 incidents involving 1,533 attacks on higher education in 109 countries.

4. For example, see the stories about a professor who pled guilty of forging a job offer letter to secure a pay raise and a tenured professor who pled guilty of wire fraud for selling fake college certificates (Trager; “CUNY”).

5. Scholars at Risk has developed a set of resources that can help institutions navigate these challenges, leading to more inclusive, nuanced, and potentially productive responses. These resources include two companion publications, Promoting Higher Education Values: A Guide for Discussion (offering core content on academic freedom, its promotion, and defense, including over thirty-five possible responses to values-related incidents) and Promoting Higher Education Values: Workshop Supplement (offering sample exercises and questions for discussion), and Dangerous Questions, a free online course on academic freedom (including articles, videos, animations, exercises, and polls, produced under Academic Refuge, an EU-Erasmus+ project).

Works Cited

“Academic Refuge.” University of Oslo, www.uio.no/english/about/global/globally-engaged/academic-refuge/. Accessed 20 Dec. 2018.

“CUNY Medgar Evers College Lecturer Pled Guilty to Wire Fraud for Selling Fake College Certificates.” United States Attorney’s Office Southern District of New York, 31 May 2018, www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/cuny-medgar-evers-college-lecturer-pled-guilty-wire-fraud-selling-fake-college.

Emmett, Jonathan. “A United Front.” The Bookseller, 4 Dec. 2018, www.thebookseller.com/blogs/united-front-901871.

Free to Think 2018. Scholars at Risk, Oct. 2018, www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2018/. PDF download.

Link, Perry. “China: The Anaconda in the Chandelier.” New York Review of Books, vol. 49, no. 6, 11 Apr. 2002, www.nybooks.com/articles/2002/04/11/china-the-anaconda-in-the-chandelier/.

Parveen, Nazia, and Patrick Wintour. “Matthew Hedges: British Academic Accused of Spying Jailed for Life in UAE.” Guardian, 21 Nov. 2018, www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/21/british-academic-matthew-hedges-accused-of-spying-jailed-for-life-in-uae.

Promoting Higher Education Values: A Guide for Discussion. Scholars at Risk, Dec. 2017, www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/promoting-higher-education-values-a-guide-for-discussion/.

Promoting Higher Education Values: Workshop Supplement. Scholars at Risk, Dec. 2017, www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/promoting-higher-education-values-workshop-supplement/.

Rawlinson, Kevin. “Matthew Hedges Says UAE Asked Him to Spy on Britain.” Guardian, 4 Dec. 2018, www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/05/matthew-hedges-says-uae-asked-him-to-spy-on-britain.

“Texts Adopted: Thursday, 29 November 2018 – Brussels: Defence of Academic Freedom in the EU’s External Action.” European Parliament, 3 Jan. 2019, www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&reference=P8-TA-2018-0483&format=XML&language=EN.

Trager, Rebecca. “Disgraced US Chemistry Professor Will Not Face Jail Time.” The Royal Society of Chemistry, 17 Sept. 2018, www.chemistryworld.com/news/disgraced-us-chemistry-professor-will-not-face-jail-time/3009508.article.

“UAE: One Year On, Award-Winning Human Rights Defender Ahmed Mansoor’s Whereabouts Remain Unknown.” Scholars at Risk, 20 Mar. 2018, www.scholarsatrisk.org/2018/03/uae-one-year-on-award-winning-human-rights-defender-ahmed-mansoors-whereabouts-remain-unknown/.

Wintour, Patrick, and David Batty. “Matthew Hedges: Pardoned British Academic Arrives Back in UK.” Guardian, 27 Nov. 2018, www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/26/matthew-hedges-jailed-british-academic-pardoned-by-uae.

Managing a brief encounter with Campus Reform and observing how faculty members of color deal with attacks from the organization and its various supporters have me thinking not only about our specific vulnerability in this moment, when the humanities are under intense scrutiny, but also about pressures our students face in the classroom. So often faculty members of color specialize in subjects that, by their very design, challenge existing cultural narratives. And in this charged climate I fear there’s a tug-of-war that is as much about the work we do in literature classes—the analytic reading, interrogating language, playing with texts of all kinds—as it is about the politics ascribed to us. I worry that our students of all political stripes are growing up in a cultural moment when the point is to pick a side and defend it uncritically. Questions that were provocative fifteen years ago when I started teaching are now seen as a demand for political fealty that must be performed in class discussions and written work. Campus Reform seems to hover over us all.

Campus Reform describes itself as “a watchdog to the nation’s higher education system” whose purpose is to expose “bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses” (“Mission”). Boasting nine million viewers in 2015 and supported by the Leadership Institute (Schmidt), the organization is explicit about its goals:

Our team of professional journalists works alongside student activists and student journalists to report on the conduct and misconduct of university administrators, faculty, and students. Campus Reform holds itself to rigorous journalism standards and strives to present each story with accuracy, objectivity, and public accountability. (“Mission”)

The Web site offers headlines that, in a clickbait world, seem more sensationalist than serious. Recent ones include “University of Utah Showcases Anti-Trump, Anti-conservative Book Art,” “Temple U. Board Chair: Tenured Prof Marc Lamont Hill Would Be ‘Fired Immediately’ at Private Company,” and “Antifa Vandalizes Purdue College Republicans Adviser’s Home with ‘Nazi Lives Here.’”¹

The problem, however, isn’t just that these sensationalized headlines contribute to the general noise. Campus Reform’s reporting can lead to material consequences for the academics it targets—not just demeaning e-mails and death threats but career-altering or career-ending outcomes. I’m using the term target specifically because Campus Reform’s logo invites this description (see fig. 1). It pairs the design of a target with a broadcast signal, and the organization seeks to do both—to take aim at academics it sees as liberal and to amplify moments, usually taken out of context, to a conservative media network. The site’s articles are often the first step in a campaign to discredit scholars, and the work that scholars of color contribute to the academy is an easy target. The articles misrepresent and reduce the work of scholars and administrators by twisting the language of diversity and inclusion. In an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Schmidt notes a wall at Campus Reform’s headquarters where it keeps track of its progress, including how many articles it has published, appearances on television shows—Fox News particularly—and, most important, its victories. Victories, according to Schmidt, are those moments when a Campus Reform article forces colleges and universities to punish a faculty member or change a policy. This is Campus Reform’s goal: to police the academy, seeking out faculty members and administrators who work to make it more inclusive.

Fig. 1. Campus Reform’s logo

I know about Campus Reform because as the editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, a collection of essays and interviews by and about faculty members of color in the academy, I participate in several large communities composed of faculty members of color the news site often targets. I’ve also seen on Twitter and Facebook how these attacks unfold in real time and the amount of energy and restraint it requires to manage them. This is what I explained to an audience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in September 2017 for a lecture I gave titled “Diversity in the Public Arena.” Using information from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, I described how a comment made in one context is picked up by Campus Reform and makes its way through the right-wing distortion process until, through Fox News, it reaches a busy administrator suddenly asked to defend inflammatory language. Someone took a picture of one of my slides (see fig. 2) and innocently posted it on Twitter, and then I got an e-mail from Campus Reform politely offering me an “opportunity to comment” on the event with a list of three questions that, on their face, weren’t particularly problematic. Knowing the organization as well as I do, I didn’t respond to the request; I informed my dean and chair about the message, was thankful for the quick, polite response of encouragement, and moved on.

Fig. 2. Slide from September 2017 lecture at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

I’ve only been a bit nervous since that moment. My work and public profile keep me out of Campus Reform’s range, and I’m only mildly concerned that a student might take something I say out of context. What has stayed with me, however, is not just the ideology that informs Campus Reform but the guiding principle of the Leadership Institute, the organization that supports its efforts. Founded in 1979, the Leadership Institute is a conservative organization that specializes in training activists, particularly college-age students. One of its more striking characteristics is how it describes its goals: “The Institute doesn’t analyze policy; it teaches conservative Americans how to influence policy through direct participation, activism, and leadership” (“About”). As someone committed to teaching literary analysis and critical thinking I am almost as bothered by the emphasis on political influence over analysis as I am by the organization’s politics. And I’m worried that the former is crowding out critical inquiry in my classroom.

I teach at a public research institution and have been teaching my department’s introduction to literary theory course since I joined the faculty in 2003. It’s the course I’ve seen change the most, particularly in the last few years as national events have made their way to my class discussions. It began not with the 2016 election but with the murder of Michael Brown in 2014. The morning after the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, I was taken aback by how many of my students came to theory class visibly angry with me. In the days before Ferguson, these same students had gamely considered questions about race and representation, particularly in popular culture. The conversations weren’t easy, but they were possible, especially when leavened with self-deprecating humor on everyone’s part. The mood shifted the day after the Ferguson district attorney refused to file charges against the police officer who killed Brown. Students who had been wary but good natured arrived angry, aggressively so—quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., and defending police officers, furious about the destruction of property. Students of color, particularly those who are not black, made clear to me that they are not at all like Michael Brown.

My classroom has never returned to its pre-Ferguson state; each national moment has been reflected in student comments, regardless of the subject matter. After the 2016 election, as my Romanticism class discussed Mary Shelley’s Valperga, some students were in tears about the fate of the novel’s politically ambitious woman, seeing her downfall through Hillary Clinton’s loss. I had to end class early and watched as their classmates seemed quietly, perhaps bashfully, triumphant about the outcome. I keep getting caught flat-footed by these events and often have to find space in class in the aftermath to help us all find our footing again.

In response to Ferguson, I worked with colleagues to assemble a general information primer that is being used around the country; but, as I pointed out to a reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education, this work falls outside my training, and I worry about the pressure it puts on my students (Zamudio-Suaréz). Increasingly they come in with a Campus Reform state of mind, regardless of their politics. As Aaron Hanlon explains, one of the pervasive lies about the humanities is that our faculty members are trying to push “left-wing ideas on students,” and I worry about how that lie is getting in the way of the work we take on in my classes. I worry that for too many of my students there is a right and a left and their experience in the class relies too much on where they think the professor fits on the continuum. I worry that they feel like they need to calibrate to adjust to me or feel honor-bound to resist me because they think I’m radical (the truth is that I’m pretty personally conservative). I worry about the students who feel pressured to take a stand in a classroom that might be at odds with the opinions of the people they care about. I recall the student who, near the end of the semester, tentatively offered that she liked what she was learning about in class but she couldn’t say anything to her coworkers for fear of being ostracized. She was wrestling to fit what she was learning in my class with how she would behave in a tight-knit work environment. A white student in a diverse classroom,² she enjoyed talking with all her classmates, and I could see her carefully listening to her classmates of color talking about race and equity in the nineteenth century as opposed to where we are now. They wrote together in class and shared drafts of written work with one another. I was impressed with her bravery, even as I worried that she felt pressure to perform a kind of politics.

What I want for my students in the classroom is freedom to explore their ideas regardless of how the world might classify those ideas—freedom to ask questions free from fear of punitive judgment. I want them to feel intellectually challenged without feeling personally threatened. What I miss for them is the feeling that they can come to a sense of the world for themselves, one that doesn’t fall uncritically into camps before our work has even started. I feel this most keenly because I am currently the only black professor in my department. It has never been easy to be a black professor, even at an institution with a diverse student population, but being the only black professor in the department is a different kind of pressure. I’m not just managing stereotypes about race and feeling the burden of being the only black English professor some of my students will study with; I’m faced with students who have strong opinions about what they imagine my politics to be and a reflective defensiveness about what they think I want.

Even when my students’ assumptions about my politics and expectations align with my worldview, their assumptions make me uncomfortable. In the middle of a discussion about Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, for example, a student said to me casually, but not disrespectfully, that he got my point. He understood the “kind of radical left” thing I was doing, but it had limits in the real world, where he and his friends live. His entire posture was sympathetic to what he saw as my agenda; in other words, he wasn’t criticizing me or resisting me but was letting me know in a friendly way that here—on campus—is where my radical ideas exist. Some of his classmates nodded approvingly, signaling to me that they too understood the game. “Gender is a performance,” they were happy to say. I was struck by a kind of rote repetition and an almost complete lack of questioning or curiosity in the room. It worried me. I’ve spent my entire teaching career walking a fine line between, on the one hand, asking my students to see literary study as, among other things, a way to reconsider what they take for granted about language and representation and, on the other hand, promoting an explicitly ideological agenda. I never want to engage in the latter—in my estimation, that’s not teaching but proselytizing. No syllabus is neutral; but having taught primarily canonical classes and their less canonical counterparts, I know that the politics seem more pronounced in some courses than in others. It’s a delicate balance, and I’m especially mindful of all the roles it requires of me. While there are certain claims that brook no argument (I won’t entertain the idea that black people are genetically inferior to white people), sometimes my job is to help my students find ways to articulate ideas I don’t agree with so that we can think them through as a class. It also means advising confused students all along the political spectrum, not about what classes to take but about what else they might read.

David French, writing for the National Review, blames Herbert Marcuse’s essay “Repressive Tolerance” for the current political climate:

In the 1960s, the mob was the instrument of intolerance. By the 1990s, the mob had gained tenure. By the 2010s the mob and the mob’s children possessed enormous power and influence throughout the higher-education establishment, and that power and influence passed into Hollywood and into corporate America.³

I suspect that for some of my students I am the grandchild of the 1990s mob, what with my radical insistence that we study fiction in my Romanticism classes. In reality, I wrestle to neutralize my subject position in the classroom so that students can find their own way to learn the best questions to ask. I said during a talk at the University of Missouri that I believe if I teach close reading well students will find their way to truths that are inclusive. It irritated some people, perhaps because it sounds as if I’m hopelessly naive. My optimism says more about the students I get to teach than it does about me. They regularly write me later to talk about how they see the world differently because of our work together, or they seek me out after the semester is over to let me know how I changed their worldview. I think fondly of the student who came to me worried about my liberal agenda (those are my words, not his) and how relieved he was when I could help him frame his discomfort with no expectations that he choose a side. I’m not sure it’s my job to help him do that. I can only point him in the right (or left) direction and teach him which questions make sense and urge him to let go of dogma. I want that for all my students, regardless of their political leanings.

Mostly, I want them to read and write free from these misshapen culture wars. I want that for them because it leads to better reading and writing, but I also want that for the black faculty members I know who are charged with teaching classes that require students to confront ideas they’ve been encouraged to take for granted. I’m thinking specifically of Johnny E. Williams, a sociology professor at Trinity College who was targeted by Campus Reform over a comment he made about police shootings and race on Facebook. His college had to shut down for a day because of threats to everyone’s safety. He was initially chastised by his institution, and even when they affirmed his academic freedom they agreed a leave of absence would be better for him (Flaherty, “Trinity Suspends” and “Trinity Clears”; Mytelka).⁴ I saw it all happen in real time and was relieved when the matter seemed resolved, but a letter a colleague of his wrote to the Chronicle has stayed with me:

I’m ashamed to say that my first reaction was something like: “Holy cow! How could Johnny say something that stupid!” which, of course, was Campus Reform’s intended response. . . . Little of the coverage, for example, took seriously the fact that Professor Williams is a scholar of race in America who has written and taught extensively on how society organizes people into racialized categories. . . . What does it mean that faculty, students, alumni, administrators, and society at large . . . were so quick to assume the worst about our black colleague, yet willing to accept on its face the basic premise put forward by an organization like Campus Reform? (Kamola)

In my talks about diversity and academic freedom last year, I pointed to this moment as an example of an understanding I hope white academics will reach about the experiences of their colleagues of color, particularly in the face of increased hostilities in and out of the classroom. This honest response seems indicative of the deep ambivalence too many white academics have about ethnic studies, a carelessness when it comes to understanding what their black colleagues face in white institutions, and a curious detachment about their role in thinking through this particular political moment. At the forty-fifth Annual Shakespeare Association Meeting in 2017, Arthur Little, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, started his paper for a plenary panel focused on diversity in the field by recounting a conversation he overheard between two white scholars discussing the plenary panel session titled “The Color of Membership.” One said to the other, “I’m not very interested in that stuff.” That “stuff” must feel so far from that scholar’s world, even in the face of increasingly diverse student populations and regular calls for our work in the humanities to be more outward facing.

It turns out that the most radical moment in the class that started with Butler was not about gender performance. It wasn’t about postcolonial theory or even thinking about race and representation, though the class had to take a collective deep breath before we did so. The moment I felt the class shift was when we talked about surveillance and our university’s learning management system. We were reading “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and, in moving through Michel Foucault and Lennard Davis, the conversation turned toward the purpose of education right now, particularly in the humanities. In a trillion-dollar student loan crisis, my students are aware that college can be as much about a credential as an education. I turned to the student who had gamely noted my radical identity politics and said, “Really, the most radical thing I think I’m doing is asking you to challenge me, your professor, about what I think I’m teaching versus what I am actually teaching. You should always be asking us questions about what we teach and why.” Students were startled, and then we talked about accommodation culture and the material conditions of their learning. In thinking about classroom structure through Foucault we went from the simple (how seats are arranged) to the very local example of how the new business school classrooms are designed. We explored the surveillance culture of the college classroom, and students, whatever their political leanings, were shocked to find that our learning management system (even the label sounds eerie in this context) allowed me to see when they’d been online. This tool that they saw primarily as a convenience suddenly felt more invasive. And then, a student broke free. As a class we were thinking about Foucault’s claim that “stones can make people knowable and docile” (172). The student said to me quietly, “So do grades.” It’s an observation that ended up challenging all of us and invited all my students to think about language and their own education and, most important to me, their own writing—not as Democrats or Republicans, radical leftists or right wingers, but as students. I suspect this would make Campus Reform nervous if they knew it was happening.

I haven’t talked about Campus Reform with my students, but we have talked about learning in this particular environment. They know I’m writing this essay and are curious about how it will turn out. We know the challenge isn’t going anywhere. As James McWilliams notes, Campus Reform and its outrage ecosystem “advocate sticking to ‘the western canon’ and ‘the world’s best books’ while rejecting literature ‘that inject[s] progressive ideology and social justice frameworks into the classroom.’” That’s the wrong approach, one that pretends there was ever a time in literature that was ideologically pure. I will say here that along with Herman Melville we read Emily Dickinson in this class. My Art of Fiction class includes Charles Dickens. I teach a Jane Austen seminar, and my graduate seminar in Romanticism might seem radical but only if you subscribe to the rather bizarre idea that only six poets are worthy of serious inquiry, even if they weren’t all white. The point isn’t actually the texts but the teacher and how we guide our students through the readings not as passive recipients of narrative, poesy, or politics. French asks what must be a rhetorical question: “Will the age of Trump give the radicals an even longer list of grievances and an even greater sense not just of moral certainty but of moral urgency?” He’s framing the first part of the question wrong, but that’s a topic for another essay. What he doesn’t seem to understand is that it’s not just the radical faculty members who have a sense of moral urgency. Our students do too, all along the political continuum. Our shared moral agenda is not, I would submit, a byproduct of leftist politics; it’s about empty resistance to leftist politics with critiques that can’t stand against careful scrutiny. My hope is that my students will want to embrace a diverse world that honors personal choice. I understand that the first step toward that is asking careful questions in a space where they don’t feel like they need to take a rigid stance, pass a political purity test, or agree with their professor. I’m hopeful. After carefully laying the groundwork about what I saw as radical and responding to the challenge that grades make students docile and knowable, I was thrilled to see the same students asking one another questions about their ideas and interpretations, even when the questions weren’t easy ones. Some of them have let me know their personal politics (they range from conservative to radical), and I watched as students of all stripes pointed one another to our last primary text, Tsitsi Dangerembga’s Nervous Conditions, and wrestled with ideas about assimilation, the body as a war zone, and how gender is performed, free from restrictive labels. It looked like the honest intellectual wrestling I want for them. I couldn’t wait to read their final essays. I gave them the choice to write whatever they wanted and urged them not to worry about length. I asked them to write papers they themselves would want to read. The finals were, overwhelmingly, compelling, well-written, and thoughtfully argued. For their part, my students gave me a reading assignment (Watchmen), explaining its significance and why they thought it would be worth my time. They were so excited to give it to me, and it felt like an invitation to continue our conversations as we all try to make our way through. I have to be optimistic about what this invitation promises and trust that they will find their way.

Notes

1. Collected 4 December 2018 from a simple Google search for “Campus Reform.”
2. In any given class, regardless of the subject material, at least half the students are people of color, a mix of African American, West Indian, African, Asian, Asian American, Hispanic, and Latino/a. In 2016 Montclair State University was designated a Hispanic-Serving Institution.
3. Although I read French’s article, James McWilliams’s reporting led me to it.
4. In the aftermath of the Campus Reform attack, Trinity lost funding and students; see Blair.
Works Cited

“About the Leadership Institute.” Leadership Institute, www.leadershipinstitute.org/aboutus/. Accessed 21 Dec. 2018.

Blair, Russell. “Trinity Loses Donations, Students after Facebook Posts.” Hartford Courant, 1 Aug. 2017, www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-trinity-johnny-williams-backlash-20170731-story.html.

Flaherty, Colleen. “Trinity Clears Threatened Professor.” Insider Higher Ed, 17 July 2017, www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/17/trinity-connecticut-clears-johnny-williams-wrongdoing-he-remains-leave-now-voluntary.

———. “Trinity Suspends Targeted Professor.” Insider Higher Ed, 27 June 2017, www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/06/27/trinity-college-connecticut-puts-johnny-eric-williams-leave-over-controversial.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prisons. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Pantheon, 1984.

French, David. “Malign Marcuse.” National Review, 17 Apr. 2017, www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/04/17/campus-radicalism-leftists-college/.

Hanlon, Aaron. “Lies about the Humanities—and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 Dec. 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Lies-About-the-Humanities-/245261.

Kamola, Isaac A. “Crashing the Academic Conversation.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 July 2017, www.chronicle.com/article/Crashing-the-Academic/240562.

Little, Arthur. “What’s Shakespeare to Him or He to Shakespeare?” The Color of Membership Plenary Panel Session. Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting, 7 Apr. 2017, Hyatt Regency Atlanta.

Matthew, Patricia A, editor. Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. U of North Carolina P, 2016.

McWilliams, James. “Conservative Media Is Waging a War on the Humanities, and It’s Succeeding.” Pacific Standard, 16 July 2018, psmag.com/education/conservative-media-is-waging-a-war-on-the-humanities-and-its-succeeding.

“Mission.” Campus Reform, www.campusreform.org/about/. Accessed 21 Dec. 2018.

Mytelka, Andrew. “Trinity Professor Whose Comments Drew Threats Is Put on Leave.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 June 2017, www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/trinity-professor-whose-comments-drew-threats-is-put-on-leave/119157.

Schmidt, Peter. “Higher Education’s Internet Outrage Machine.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 8 Sept. 2015, www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Educations-Internet/232879.

Zamudio-Suaréz, Fernanda. “Her Students Asked about Police Shootings. So She Created a Guide for Them.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 Nov. 2016, www.chronicle.com/article/Her-Students-Asked-About/238277.

It will have escaped no one’s notice that the vast majority of controversies over academic freedom and professorial speech over the past decade have involved extramural speech rather than research or teaching. Doubtless this is because social media now pervade practically every aspect of human interaction, such that we are only belatedly beginning to realize that Facebook and Twitter are exceptionally useful devices for stirring up primal antagonisms and generating instantaneous mass festivals of outrage. Moreover, recent years have seen renewed right-wing initiatives to harass and intimidate controversial left-leaning faculty members, usually with the object of pressuring university administrations to fire them. It is therefore urgently necessary to understand how the principles of academic freedom apply to extramural expression, not least to disentangle academic freedom from First Amendment rights to freedom of expression in the United States.

The relation between academic freedom and extramural speech is not well understood, so I will start by trying to clear up some possible confusion. In May 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an essay by Judith Butler, “The Criminalization of Knowledge: Why the Struggle for Academic Freedom Is the Struggle for Democracy.” It is an eloquent essay—excerpted from her keynote address at the 2018 Scholars at Risk Global Congress in Berlin, an ideal occasion for her argument—and its subtitle is exactly right. But it is also a curious essay, for its passionate defense of academic freedom and freedom of expression runs directly counter to American traditions of academic freedom as enunciated and elaborated by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Since Butler was not purporting to speak on behalf of the AAUP, it is not that she misstated anything; she was simply offering her interpretation of the relation between academic freedom and extramural professorial speech (in short: there is no such relation). Her defenses of both are robust and necessary. But her absolute distinction between the two is problematic, as I will try to show.¹

Drawing on the work of Joan Wallach Scott, Butler distinguishes academic freedom from freedom of expression—an entirely necessary move, made more urgent by recent debates about free speech occasioned by the reemergence of the white nationalist right and its campus acolytes. “Academic freedom,” writes Butler,

belongs to faculty members within universities who have been appointed for the purpose of teaching and pursuing knowledge. Political expression is the right of citizens to expound upon political viewpoints as they please. They converge when academics who speak “extramurally” suffer retaliation or punishment within the university or are threatened with the loss of their positions. Thus the rights of academic freedom and extramural political expression require institutional structures and support within the university, and they require an explicit and enduring commitment from universities. Indeed, the task of the university is undermined when either of those freedoms is imperiled.

There is nothing to quibble with here. But later in the essay the rigidity of this distinction becomes more troublesome, as Butler takes Scott’s distinction and runs with it:

Academic freedom and freedom of expression are not the same. The professional activities pertaining to one’s academic position should be protected by academic freedom. The extramural utterances any of us make about the world we inhabit, the institutions in which we work, or any matter of public concern should be protected by rights of free expression.

Thus, Butler derives from Scott’s distinction between academic freedom and freedom of expression the conclusion that the former pertains only to activities within the scope of one’s academic position (and, presumably, to one’s academic expertise, though this is a thorny question to which I will return) whereas the latter is properly protected by the state, as it is by the First Amendment.

This is a reasonable account of academic freedom—one that would be recognizable in many countries, including, notably, the countries to which Butler is implicitly (and sometimes explicitly, as when she names Turkey, Brazil, and Iran) appealing in this address: countries that do not have strong protections for freedom of expression. But her account is at odds with the American elaboration of academic freedom, which since 1940 has included extramural speech as an aspect of academic freedom specifically, quite apart from any First Amendment considerations:

College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution. (“1940 Statement”)

There is some problematic language in there, to be sure, and I will return to that in a moment. But the general point is clear: extramural speech is one of three aspects of academic freedom; the other two pertain to research and to teaching. Like the Holy Spirit of the Christian Trinity, extramural speech is the most mysterious and the most elusive of the three.

One reason it is worth trying to clear up potential confusion about extramural speech is that the AAUP did, and does, lay claim to academic freedom for utterances Butler would leave to protection by the state; another reason is that the AAUP definition of academic freedom has profound implications for what it means when one is or isn’t speaking from a position of credentialed intellectual expertise.

Scott’s distinction between academic freedom and freedom of expression rests on the claim that the former is tied to some form of credentialed scholarly expertise. In this she is aligned with theorists such as Robert Post, who argues that academic freedom and tenure are based on a social contract whereby the legitimation of free scholarly inquiry by specialists in a discipline ultimately serves the common good in an open society. But Scott’s reliance on the idea of disciplinary expertise is complex, for she takes a notably generous approach to scholars who challenge disciplinary norms. In her recently published book, for example, she cites a 1986 Committee A statement that suggests “in many instances a show of disrespect for a discipline is, at the very same time, an expression of dissent from the prevailing doctrines of that discipline.” Too reverent a conception of disciplinary expertise, according to this statement, “may end by barring those most likely to have remade the field” (52). The immediate context for this statement had to do with critical legal studies, but anyone familiar with Scott’s career knows that such a principle would resonate for someone who had to argue forcefully for many years against disciplinary norms in which gender was generally not regarded as a useful category of historical analysis.

The relation between disciplinary expertise and academic freedom is therefore unstable, and matters are rendered still more complex by the fact that the meaning of extramural speech, and the AAUP’s understanding of the relation between extramural speech and disciplinary expertise, has changed considerably over time. To simplify the issue somewhat, over the years the AAUP has tended to deemphasize the notion that a professor should exercise “appropriate restraint” and “show respect for the opinions of others” in his or her public remarks (American Association of University Professors), on the grounds that those norms come dangerously close to upholding a standard of “civility” that the AAUP otherwise rejects as a precondition for academic freedom. Furthermore, as John Wilson argued in the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, the 1960 Leo Koch case at the University of Illinois represented a turning point in the AAUP’s understanding of extramural speech, which eventually precipitated the 1964 Committee A statement that “a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness to serve” (American Association of University Professors). That principle, in turn, was challenged by the former AAUP president Cary Nelson in the Steven Salaita case (also involving the University of Illinois), who argued that Salaita’s tweets about Israel’s incursion into Gaza in 2014 did demonstrate his unfitness to serve precisely because they were related to his area of scholarly expertise.

Nelson’s essay on Salaita, published in the same issue of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom as Wilson’s essay on Salaita and Koch, opens with this statement from Matthew Finkin and Robert Post’s book For the Common Good: Principles of Academic Freedom:

The most theoretically problematic aspect of academic freedom is extramural expression. This dimension of academic freedom does not concern communications that are connected to faculty expertise, for such expression is encompassed within freedom of research, a principle that includes both the freedom to inquire and the freedom to disseminate the results of inquiry. Nor does extramural expression concern communications made by faculty in their role as officers of institutions of higher education. Freedom of extramural expression refers instead to speech made by faculty in their capacity as citizens, speech that is typically about matters of public concern and that is unrelated to either scholarly expertise or institutional affiliation. (qtd. in Nelson)

Thus, for Nelson, Salaita’s comments, though made on Twitter, did not properly constitute extramural speech and therefore had implications for his scholarly work. Note that this is rather different from the claim that Salaita’s tweets would have a chilling effect on any Jewish students who might enroll in his classes, a claim that was made in response to the argument that Salaita had, to that point, nothing in his teaching record to suggest he would be problematic in the classroom. Rather, Nelson’s argument is that Salaita’s tweets deserved less protection under principles of academic freedom than, say, a series of tweets suggesting that the Apollo moon landings never happened because they concerned a subject about which Salaita had also written and taught as a disciplinary expert.

I edited the issue of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom in which Nelson’s and Wilson’s essays appeared, and in my introduction I noted that although this debate about the parameters of extramural speech was legitimate and necessary, there is something disturbing in Nelson’s argument. It is, I acknowledged, “unquestionably a plausible argument.” And yet it has

a nasty corollary, as we have discovered in the wake of Garcetti [v. Ceballos (2006)]. In Pickering v. Board of Education (1968), and again in Connick v. Myers (1983), the US Supreme Court held that if an employee’s public speech were a matter of personal grievance rather than a matter of public concern related to his or her employment, then that speech is protected by the First Amendment. The Pickering-Connick test therefore turns largely on whether an employee is discussing matters about which he or she is well informed, and paradoxically affords employees less protection from retaliation for statements in their area of expertise than for statements about matters unrelated to their work. For this reason, I call the Pickering-Connick test a Crank Protection Plan, insofar as an employee who mouths off about matters in which he has no credibility is granted more of a hearing in the public square than an employee who actually knows what she is talking about. That logic underlies the Court’s finding in Garcetti, and it underlies Nelson’s argument here.

The potential applications of these cases to academic freedom and extramural speech are troubling; they establish an inverse relation between academic freedom and scholarly expertise and redefine certain forms of extramural speech as intramural. In other words: it is arguably more damaging to one’s intellectual and professional legitimacy for a historian to deny the Holocaust than for a professor of electrical engineering to do so (and I am of course referring to Arthur Butz of Northwestern University) because one expects that the disciplinary protocols of history departments would militate far more strenuously against Holocaust denial than the disciplinary protocols of electrical engineering; Holocaust denial would seem to offer prima facie evidence that one is unfit to be a professional historian. By that token, a series of tweets from Salaita about faked moon landings could not possibly be taken as evidence of professional unfitness; it would merely be evidence that Salaita subscribed to a belief associated with a fringe of conspiracy theorists. And yet the form of Salaita’s statements was undeniably extramural precisely because the statements were tweets, and there are chilling consequences to the argument that the more informed a professor’s tweets may be, and the more they involve his or her area of scholarly expertise, the less protection they deserve as a matter of academic freedom.

The relation between scholarly expertise and extramural speech was also at issue in a less celebrated but equally challenging example from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where in 2017 the assistant professor Damon Sajnani offered a course called The Problem of Whiteness, drawing the ire of Republican state legislators, who demanded his firing. The course should never have been controversial and would not have been if not for the fact that the phrase “the problem of whiteness” is a problem for some very fragile white people. Sajnani’s Web page for the course clearly cites W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous question from The Souls of Black Folk, “How does it feel to be a problem?,” as well as Richard Wright’s remark, “There is no Negro problem in the United States. There’s only a white problem.” The university defended the course, as well it should have, since it draws on a century and more of black critical thought on whiteness and white supremacy; and one could argue, as did one intrepid (white) student writing for the student paper, the Badger Herald, that the backlash against the course demonstrates nicely why the course is necessary (Niehans).

But there was a complicating factor. The Wisconsin state representative Dave Murphy, who led the campaign against Sajnani, cited a pair of Sajnani’s tweets from July 2016, when five Dallas police officers were killed by a sniper. One consisted of a photo of CNN’s coverage of the shootings accompanied by the remark, “Is the uprising finally starting? Is this style of protest gonna go viral?” (Wootson). The other read, “Watching CNN, this is the song I am currently enjoying in my head,” and linked to “Officer Down,” by UNO the Prophet (Savidge). Now, it might be remarked that black critical thought in popular culture has included many such protests against police brutality, from Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” and N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” all the way back to that revolutionary West Indian figure who admitted he shot the sheriff (in self-defense) even though he did not shoot the deputy. And yet there is arguably something discomfiting about the spectacle of a college professor apparently cheering on the murder of police officers, all the more so when the statements he makes have a nontrivial relation to his work as a scholar and teacher. The course, The Problem of Whiteness, is not the problem; the people who tried to make it a problem are the problem. But the tweets are problematic and might deserve a formal reprimand by administration—though certainly not firing or suspension.

In closing, I want to turn to a different kind of murky case, one involving extramural speech that was construed as intramural. Courtney Lawton, a forty-six-year-old graduate student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, dominated the state news for much of the 2017–18 academic year after she heckled a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, Kaitlyn Mullen, who was working a table and handing out materials for Turning Point USA, the right-wing group that maintains a “professor watchlist” to harass and intimidate liberal and left-leaning professors. The heckling, which involved name-calling, cursing, and the use of the middle finger, did two things: it made Mullen cry, and it went viral when her cell phone video of the incident was publicized by Turning Point USA, which advises students to do precisely this when they find handy evidence of liberal-left professors behaving badly. As in Wisconsin, Republican state legislators called for Ms. Lawton’s firing, and the university responded by canceling her classes (though not by revoking her stipend). The administration claimed that this action was taken not as retribution for Lawton’s tirade but merely out of concern for her safety. It is hard to square this, however, with the university’s subsequent decision not to assign Lawton any online courses for the year. (For an admirably thorough account of the affair, see Kolowich.)

As with Sajnani’s tweets, a critical aspect of Lawton’s protest was its staggeringly poor judgment. But that is not why I cite it here. Rather, what seems remarkable is that in the firestorm that ensued, everything proceeded—and this was largely, though not entirely, the doing of the three Republican state senators who made the incident their cause célèbre for the remainder of the academic year—as if  Lawton’s behavior was dispositive evidence of how she (and presumably other instructors who share her beliefs) treats conservative students in her classes, or as if Mullen was Lawton’s student in some general sense insofar as Mullen was an undergraduate at the university, even though the incident had nothing to do with in-classroom behavior. Indeed, Lawton declared that she had undertaken her protest in the belief that Mullen was not a student (she was) and Turning Point USA was not a registered student organization (it was not). Perhaps some commentators operated in bad faith, treating Lawton’s exchange with Mullen as if it occurred in a classroom even though they knew otherwise; but for the most part, the drama unfolded the way it did because many people, on campus and off, are unsure about what policies and expectations are relevant to a situation in which a graduate student (or a professor, though Lawton’s status as a graduate student is yet another complicating factor) interacts with a student who is not her student.²

In cases such as Salaita’s, Sajnani’s, and Lawton’s—and I am sure we will see many more of them in the coming years—I don’t think we are seeing a full-blown crisis for academic freedom. Rather, I think the real crisis at hand is our broader national crisis, the crisis precipitated by the ascendancy of a fascist and white nationalist to the highest office in the land and the erosion of the fragile norms of democracy. But I do believe we need to realize that the foundations for academic freedom with regard to extramural speech, and the very definition of extramural speech, are shifting beneath our feet. That they are doing so in the midst of the crisis of liberal democracy is all the more reason for faculty members and graduate students to immerse themselves in the intellectual legacy of debates over the parameters of academic freedom.

The stakes really could not be higher. Conservatives’ support for and trust in American universities has eroded significantly in recent years, though it was never very strong at any point in my lifetime (see Jaschik), and Donald Trump’s ascendancy, enabled by so many members of his party, has brought the nation’s most reactionary impulses to the forefront, working them into the threads of the social fabric so deeply that openly racist and anti-Semitic speech and violence are once again a daily fact of life in these United States. Now is not the time to leave the protection of extramural speech exclusively to the state. Now is the time to insist that the extramural speech of university professors is vitally important to the functioning of a free society, especially when it involves academic expertise in things like climate change, colonialism, race relations, gender and sexuality, ethnocentrism, poverty, medicine, technology, urban planning, ecology . . . and, among many other things, theories of justice. Now is the time to insist that extramural speech is a vital aspect of academic freedom—precisely because the struggle for academic freedom is the struggle for democracy.

Notes

1. I was advised by a colleague not to respond to Butler’s argument because any counterargument I offered would inevitably be read in the light of the debate over Israel and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. The argument was that since Butler is a leading proponent of BDS in academe and I have made known my opposition to academic boycotts in principle (mine is, essentially, the position of the AAUP—I am fine with other forms of boycott), any disagreement about academic freedom and extramural speech would be understood in terms of our disagreement about BDS. I think this is probably true; I know that I have made statements in the past that had nothing to do with BDS but were interpreted in terms of BDS nonetheless. But the irony here is that my position on academic freedom and extramural speech holds that Butler’s advocacy of BDS—indeed, any scholar’s advocacy of BDS—is covered by the principle of academic freedom.

2. This became especially apparent in one of the more curious developments of the case, in which the Nebraska state senator Steve Erdman insisted that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) be brought in as an adviser to the conflict. As Kolowich reported: “Adam Steinbaugh, an investigator for the group, was troubled by what he saw in Nebraska, but not for the reason the senators expected. Yes, colleges can make and enforce rules for how faculty members should conduct themselves in the classroom, Steinbaugh later explained. Outside the classroom, they can protest however they want within the law. Things might have been different if Mullen had been a student in Lawton’s class, but the women were just two adult strangers expressing their political views in the public square. . . . ‘Penalizing students or faculty for falling short of this laudable goal,’ wrote Steinbaugh in a report, ‘grants administrators unfettered discretion to censor speech that offends others, or offends administrators, legislators, or distant internet commentators.’ Lawton hadn’t been a perpetrator of sins against free speech, according to FIRE. She had been a victim. Later the organization told the university to reinstate her as an instructor—much to the consternation of the three senators, who responded with an op-ed arguing that the free-speech experts didn’t know what they were talking about.”

Works Cited

American Association of University Professors. “Committee A Statement on Extramural Utterances.” Policy Documents and Reports, 11th ed., Johns Hopkins UP, 2015, p. 31.

Bérubé, Michael. “Editor’s Introduction.” Journal of Academic Freedom, vol. 6, 2015, www.aaup.org/JAF6/editors-introduction#.W-dOQnpKgdV.

Butler, Judith. “The Criminalization of Knowledge: Why the Struggle for Academic Freedom Is the Struggle for Democracy.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 May 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/The-Criminalization-of/243501.

Jaschik, Scott. “Why Republicans Don’t Trust Higher Ed.” Inside Higher Ed, 17 Aug. 2017, www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/17/new-data-explain-republican-loss-confidence-higher-education.

Kolowich, Steve. “State of Conflict: How a Tiny Protest at the U. of Nebraska Turned into a Proxy War for the Future of Campus Politics.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 Apr. 2018, www.chronicle.com/interactives/state-of-conflict.

Nelson, Cary. “Steven Salaita’s Scholarly Record and the Problem of His Appointment.” Journal of Academic Freedom, vol. 6, 2015, www.aaup.org/JAF6/steven-salaitas-scholarly-record#.W-dRg3pKgdV.

Niehans, Aly. “Why ‘The Problem of Whiteness’ Is an Essential Class at the University of Wisconsin.” University of Wisconsin Badger Herald, 18 Jan. 2017, badgerherald.com/opinion/2017/01/18/why-the-problem-of-whiteness-is-an-essential-class-at-the-university-of-wisconsin/.

“1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.” American Association of University Professors, www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure. Accessed 20 Dec. 2018.

Post, Robert C. Democracy, Expertise, and Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State. Yale UP, 2013.

Sajnani, Damon. “The Problem of Whiteness.” University of Wisconsin-Madison African Cultural Studies, african.wisc.edu/content/problem-whiteness. Accessed 20 Dec. 2018.

Savidge, Nico. “Legislators Criticize UW-Madison Professor’s Course on Race, Tweets about Shooting of Officers.” Wisconsin State Journal, 21 Dec. 2016, madison.com/wsj/news/ local/education/university/legislators-criticize-uw-madison-professor-s-course-on-race-tweets/article_b09c432a-6e83-5c96-8cbf-3599503f093c.html.

Scott, Joan Wallach. Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom. Columbia UP, 2019.

Wilson, John. “Academic Freedom and Extramural Utterances: The Leo Koch and Steven Salaita Cases at the University of Illinois.” Journal of Academic Freedom, vol. 6, 2015, www.aaup.org/JAF6/academic-freedom-and-extramural-utterances-leo-koch-and-steven-salaita-cases-university#.W-dRQ3pKgdX.

Wootson, Cleve R., Jr. “A Professor Wants to Teach ‘The Problem of Whiteness.’ A Lawmaker Calls the Class ‘Garbage.’” The Washington Post, 28 Dec. 2016, www. washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/12/28/a-professor-wants-to-teach-the-problems-of-whiteness-a-lawmaker-calls-the-class-garbage/?utm_term=.

One afternoon in March 2017, the first semester after the election of Donald Trump, a first-generation Indian American student in my Asian American literature course confided to me after class that while he was walking home alone the previous night a group of young men attempted to run him over with their car as they yelled racial slurs. This incident followed a string of violent anti-immigrant hate crimes against South Asians in Kansas, Washington, and Pennsylvania after the passage of Executive Order 13769 (Mishra). The Southern Poverty Law Center recorded 1,863 hate crimes across the United States between November 2016 and March 2017 (“Update”; Bauman). Of these 1,863 hate crimes, 330 occurred on university campuses. Coincidentally, the incident with my student occurred during the week we were studying Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories depicting Indian American experiences in the United States. The connections were ripe for the picking. As a graduate student at that time, though, what protection did I have to invite discussions of potentially contentious social justice issues in my classroom? For those without institutional protections, the university structures governing academic professionalism make responding to such issues a difficult project.

Undergraduate opportunities to engage in critical inquiry and community building depend on graduate students’ capacity to access academic freedom. To begin this conversation, I shed light on the ways that a growing number of graduate students are put into precarious positions professionally when addressing issues of racial violence with their students, which not only impedes their development as scholars and educators but also has the potential to hinder the quality of education that undergraduates receive and to foreclose mentorship pathways at times when students (and especially minority students) need them most. In response, I propose that departments institute more targeted intradepartmental training in critical pedagogy, which would help prepare all instructors to handle controversial contemporary sociopolitical issues in the classroom. In addition, departments should expand mentorship networks by promoting interdepartmental collaboration between academic departments and, for example, on-campus cultural centers that serve underrepresented undergraduate student populations. This would open new lines of connection between graduate student instructors and undergraduates. By systematizing critical pedagogy and expanded mentorship networks as forms of institutional and professional value, departments can create a more inclusive and egalitarian institutional climate among graduate students, revise institutionalized professional norms that have disproportionately affected underrepresented minority scholars in the humanities, and improve the kinds of education and community-building initiatives offered to undergraduates within a contemporary landscape beset by racial violence.

Academic Freedom and the Changing Academic Workforce

Tenure has been a common focal point for discourses on academic freedom because it established the terms under which professors could satisfy their professional educational responsibilities during the highly politicized wartime years of the early twentieth century. The institutionalization of tenure set the conditions for academic freedom to align with the professional norms that would define academic labor. At first, academic freedom was most associated with the free exchange of ideas in the classroom. Teaching was the chief labor of professors leading up to the mid–twentieth century, especially with the passage of the GI Bill in 1944. When research gained prestige during the Cold War, academic freedom extended to the circulation of knowledge in research initiatives, scholarly publications, and academic journals.

Recently, academic freedom has taken into account faculty mobility (i.e., free movement across national borders), funding acquisition for controversial research ventures, federal support for historically marginalized disciplines like ethnic studies, and even decisions to deny letters of recommendation for students studying abroad (see Rana; Palumbo-Liu; Tiede). Although graduate students perform many of these same professional activities—teaching, researching, publishing, journal editing, presenting at and attending conferences, acquiring funding, and writing recommendation letters—they do not maintain the same relation to professionalism that would enable them to access rights to academic freedom. As universities increasingly rely on contingent labor for undergraduate teaching assignments, graduate students are called on to lead the classroom despite having little to no institutional protection. Without systematic institutional protections in place, graduate students are ironically most at risk professionally during the very moments when they have the opportunity to make the biggest impact on their students by confronting racial violence in classroom discussions. If teaching controversial subjects is a precarious activity for faculty members, then it is no less than daunting for graduate student instructors who professionalize without the same rights to academic freedom.

Graduate student labor is steadily on the rise, meaning the problems involving graduate student professionalization increasingly affect undergraduate education. Research into departmental staffing over the last two decades corroborates these claims. In 2001, the Coalition of the Academic Workforce surveyed data from the United States Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics and found that graduate students constituted 22.2% of the instructional staff for English departments at PhD-conferring universities (Summary, table 1). Since 2001, that percentage has gradually gone up. According to MLA records from 2015, 23.9% of undergraduate English courses at PhD-conferring universities are taught by graduate students (English Departments). Often in response to intensifying budget cuts, humanities departments rely on cheap graduate student labor. By creating this market for graduate students to take on teaching roles, English departments would appear to be providing more opportunities for graduate students to gain valuable teaching experience and to establish meaningful connections with undergraduates. This shift to emphasize graduate student instruction might suggest, then, that graduate students enter the ranks of the professoriat more prepared to succeed in their professional duties. However, since graduate students do not have the same rights to academic freedom because of the occupational constraints inherent to their position as graduate students, they discuss controversial subject matters in the classroom at their own risk and thus might be more averse to taking pedagogical risks than tenure-track faculty members would be. What this means is that the turn to graduate student instruction, while seeming to provide opportunities for graduate students to professionalize, actually preserves (and possibly even intensifies) the institutional conditions that inhibit their professional development and, as a result, places limitations on undergraduate educational experiences. If departments value the education of their undergraduate students, then departments need to reassess the kinds of institutional support offered to graduate student instructors as they professionalize.

The English department at my home institution, for instance, provides tremendous support for graduate student professionalization by offering writing workshops, teaching seminars for rhetoric and composition courses, conference training, departmental mentorship cohorts, opportunities to sit in on departmental faculty meetings, and job-market preparation to develop graduate students into successful members of the profession. Ironically, though, it is this very commitment to professionalization that can also deter graduate students from confronting contentious sociopolitical issues. In weighing their own professional future alongside the institutional norms that regulate their professionalization, graduate students are often compelled to assimilate to the peace and stability of their departments and, by extension, their disciplinary fields.

This assimilatory imperative is particularly evident in the ways that graduate students approach classroom pedagogy. In general, graduate students have a limited number of opportunities to teach upper-level literature courses before graduation. For minority graduate students working in historically marginalized disciplines with fewer course offerings, the number of opportunities is even smaller. To have a shot at a tenure-track job, graduate student instructors must ensure that their teaching experience yields positive results. Graduate instructors do not want their undergraduate students complaining about their political leanings to department heads because they need good course evaluations for the job market. They cannot afford to risk losing their already meager stipends, either. Moreover, graduate students know that they should be spending most of their time researching and publishing, not teaching, if they want to be competitive for tenure-track jobs. Graduate student instructors can thus feel persuaded to shy away from or alter the ways that they speak on contemporary sociopolitical developments with their students because there is no standardized institutional incentive to privilege this type of pedagogical approach—an unfortunate circumstance for minority scholars like myself who work in minoritized disciplines with cultural histories rooted in social, political, economic, and racial violence. As university instruction continues to fall to graduate students, English departments (intentionally or otherwise) preserve structural inequalities that prevent this labor force from capitalizing on its teaching opportunities, which, in turn, affects the quality of education that they provide undergraduates.

If academic freedom remains dependent on tenure, in other words, it will become an illusory right that may never be realized. For graduate students, the possibility of accessing academic freedom is in many ways regulated by the job market. While the production of PhDs in universities in the United States continues to rise (“Table 13”), the number of tenure-track jobs in English declined by 43% from 2008 to 2014, making it hard to place faith in professionalization as a pathway toward tenure (Birmingham). To put this into perspective: recent data from the MLA Job Information List show that in the academic year of 2016–17 there were 354 tenure-track assistant professorship openings listed in English but well over one thousand graduating PhD candidates in the field (MLA Office of Research). In addition to the obvious disparity between job openings and graduate student job applicants, it is safe to assume that many of these assistant professorships did not go to freshly minted PhDs. Instead, the jobs likely went to other assistant professors through lateral hiring.

For minority graduate students, access to academic freedom can remain deferred even after landing a tenure-track job. Promotion is difficult and, although the tenure evaluation process is sometimes regarded as meritocratic, tenure-denial cases disproportionately affect minority faculty members. Recent publications by women of color in the profession, such as those in Patricia A. Matthew’s Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, have boldly shed light on this phenomenon through candid personal accounts of the tenure evaluation process and through independently organized data collection. Jane Junn, in her longitudinal study on tenure acquisition rates across gender and racial demographics in the humanities at the University of Southern California from 1998 to 2012, found that 92% of white male assistant professors were awarded tenure while only 55% of female and minority assistant professors earned tenure. Looking only at race, 83% of white junior faculty members received tenure, whereas 53% of minority faculty members did. Women of color appear to be most affected by tenure denial. For Asian American women, the success rate was 40%, among the lowest of the demographics measured. While Junn’s research provides only a small window into the academy, the data nevertheless reveal how the rights to academic freedom hinge on a broader system of professionalization.

Supporting Critical Pedagogy

Departments must address the issues involved with graduate student professionalization to mitigate their precarity in the university and to improve undergraduate learning. To do this, English departments should consider promoting critical pedagogy more visibly as a departmental initiative. By enculturating critical pedagogy as a departmental endeavor and training graduate student instructors, departments will not only enable those instructors to be better poised to engage in and manage controversial discussions in the classroom but also create a more collaborative institutional culture where graduate students from all backgrounds are expected to participate in discussions on the sociopolitical violence that affects minorities, instead of having these kinds of pedagogical expectations continue to fall on minority graduate students.

My Asian American literature course was in high demand after Trump’s election, experiencing a roughly two hundred percent increase in student enrollment in comparison with previous years. Despite the high demand, on a campus of forty thousand students there was only one course per year with Asian America as a primary critical subject area. In teaching it, I felt that I needed to do justice to my students’ educational and personal expectations, especially as my unit on Japanese internment coincided with Executive Order 13769 (i.e., the Muslim travel ban); my week on Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist started a day after Trump’s authorized strike on South Asia with the MOAB bomb; and my section on Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies occurred during the deadly assaults on South Asian immigrants. The overlaps were remarkable, to say the least.

For me, teaching as a graduate student (of color) in rural central Pennsylvania in the Trump era—where conservativism is hypervisible and representatives of political watchdogs like Turning Point USA encourage undergraduates to surveil university classrooms through anti-left Web sites such as Professor Watchlist—can feel especially precarious.¹ Despite being trained to offer critical readings about Asian American literature and culture, I felt palpably restricted in my freedom to capitalize on those professional skills even as recent events brought the histories of racial violence against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans front and center.

If critical pedagogy were more visible as an institutional value, graduate instructors might feel more comfortable approaching teaching as an opportunity to participate in mutually informed dialogues with students, allowing them to be more prepared to navigate students’ myriad worldviews, challenge previously held convictions, and criticize government policies. Departments might thereby turn a potentially vulnerable situation—having a graduate student of color teach a semester-long course on racial politics in a predominantly white rural area—into a more pedagogically positive outcome. The graduate instructor’s classroom would be more open to radically different viewpoints, an atmosphere that supports developing skills in critical thinking and critically engaged debates. As an added benefit, such institutional reforms might even expand the types of critical work that graduate students produce in their research initiatives because they would be able to test a range of critical viewpoints more frequently and with a wider audience throughout their graduate careers.

Additionally, by promoting critical pedagogy oriented around contemporary social politics, departments have the potential to foster a renewed awareness of the value and influence of classroom pedagogy. Academic freedom in the classroom can be more than overt critique; it can also encompass effective course planning and teaching performances. For example, in response to the anti-immigrant labor ideologies that define Trump’s political platform, I focused my course on Asian American labor in contemporary labor economies instead of opting to offer a general survey course. Planning the order of the readings was crucial to illuminating the ways that Asian American experiences have historically been governed by state-sponsored narratives of race. For this reason, I purposely began the course with Jack London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion” to ask my students to reflect on what it meant to start such a marginalized course within the university through the perspective of a non–Asian American imperialist writer. By beginning the course in this way, I put pressure on their understanding of Asian Americanness as a cultural formation, provoking questions about narrativity, cultural representation, and racialization. Pedagogical labors like course planning and teaching performances configured spaces of possibility to expand academic freedom’s temporal and material registers (i.e., its immediacy as a speech act and its institutional formations).

By placing value on these pedagogical labors, departments might be able to redress the evaluative standards of professionalization, making teaching a more nuanced, creative, and valued form of labor on the job market and during reviews for hiring and promotion. Often, when graduate students express a strong investment in teaching under the current system of professionalization, they become coded as teachers who lack serious dedication to research. This categorization positions them to be interpreted as individuals more suited for teaching-centered jobs—in other words, adjunct faculty members (Kelsky 89). For minority graduate students working in historically marginalized disciplines, where the classroom feels like a crucial space to have an impact on undergraduates, the love of teaching can quickly become coded as a “minority thing” that puts such graduate students on the path to perpetual contingency. By situating critical pedagogy as a kind of labor more intricately aligned with academic freedom, departments could be more attuned to seeing the value in the work of undergraduate educational experiences. Reevaluating the subjects and objects of academic work has never been more imperative. Capitalizing on the value of classroom pedagogy may be one way to reassess the work we do in the academy, the impact that we make on our students, and the types of publics that we reach.

Greater institutional support for graduate student instructors opens up more opportunities for graduate students to create meaningful connections with undergraduates. In addition to motivating discussions in the classroom, institutional support would allow graduate students to feel more comfortable in taking part in on-campus sociopolitical movements. Already, at universities like Penn, Hunter, Northwestern, and Dartmouth, among others, minority students in historically minoritized fields such as Asian American studies have openly criticized the lack of institutional support provided by their universities, composed social media campaigns and public syllabi in response to the cultural erasures that they have experienced, and distributed petitions to raise awareness of these issues.² Many politically active graduate students, though, participate in these institutional labors at the risk of their own professional futures. Moreover, their commitments to political activities outside of research and teaching demonstrate how the fight for institutional recognition—let alone the possibility of academic freedom—often falls on marginalized minority populations as forms of hidden labor. Therefore, in addition to generating intradepartmental initiatives to promote critical pedagogy as a professional imperative, departments would do well to provide greater support for graduate students by facilitating interdepartmental professional development pathways across university institutions. By interdepartmental, I do not simply mean connections between academic departments; instead, I mean connections between academic departments and, for instance, on-campus cultural centers that serve underrepresented undergraduate student populations.

Before teaching my Asian American literature course, I (along with another graduate student colleague at the time from my small Asian American studies cohort) communicated with administrators at our on-campus cultural center, and they eagerly put me in touch with socially active undergraduate students of color who happened to work on the university’s student-of-color magazine. These connections helped me—a graduate student looking to publicize minoritized course offerings in the English department and to initiate mentorship networks for undergraduates—and helped those undergraduates who were looking to broaden both the scope of their on-campus activities and their institutional support pathways. My experience with the cultural center and its student body reaffirmed how cultivating institutional visibility for minority undergraduates gets placed on minority graduate students as hidden labors that fall outside the normative conceptions of professionalization. If departments were to assist in opening up and managing these networks for their students across different institutional arenas in the university, the result could be a more unified, engaged, and tolerant classroom where student populations feel more aligned. Departments would do well to expand the parameters of professionalization, then, by implementing training programs that teach graduate students how to foster sustainable relationships with undergraduate on-campus cultural centers for minority students. In doing so, departments could create more opportunities for graduate students to establish important connections with undergraduates, which would result in more visible forms of institutional support for minority student populations and would alleviate some of the burdens that befall minority graduate students in their efforts to build communities for minoritized student populations.

As much as some might suggest that the danger of the current political climate lies in its pervasive bigotry and anti-intellectualism, I argue that a crucial unforeseen danger of this moment is the self-censorship, silence, and even fear experienced by graduate student instructors who must increasingly engage students in contentious contemporary political ideologies, yet who have little to no institutional protection to do so. As an educator of color teaching in a minoritized field like Asian American literary studies in rural Pennsylvania, I am unfortunately not surprised when students of color open up to me about their experiences with racism. Handling these hidden labors has become just another part of the job. Sadly, though, one of the hardest aspects about dealing with these situations is figuring out how to respond carefully so that I do not get in trouble for communicating something that could be construed as controversial. What does this say about how we value the well-being of our undergraduates? What does this reveal about the quality of support that our undergraduates are (or are not) receiving when they are most vulnerable? And what does this expose about the efficacy of the humanities in our present moment? Until the university makes concerted efforts to reassess the institutional support that it offers graduate student instructors, it will continue to hinder the intellectual and personal development of its undergraduate and graduate student populations as well as risk appearing inadequate at tackling “real-world problems”—or, more specifically, at showing students how the purported “real world” is always part and parcel of their university experience. Now, as universities rely on graduate labor amid budget cuts to the humanities and amid the racial violence affecting minority students, we can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to our graduate student instructors.

Notes

I would like to thank Tina Chen, Michelle N. Huang, Christine “Xine” Yao, and my fellow panelists on the roundtable Precarity and Activism, at the 2018 MLA Annual Convention, who, at various stages of the project, influenced me and the making of this essay through their mentorship, generosity, professionalism, and editorial insight.

1. A week after Trump’s election, Turning Point USA opened a new chapter on campus at Penn State. In an interview with the university’s newspaper, The Daily Collegian, the chapter vice president Aidan Piombino-Marris—an undergraduate majoring in medieval studies—claimed that he had started the chapter for those who “have been silenced by the mainstream media and professors who may be liberally biased” (Navas). Already, Peter Hatemi—distinguished professor of political science at Penn State—appears on Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist as a professor who “discriminate[s] against conservative students and advance[s] leftist propaganda in the classroom” (“About Us”).

2. Though many of these kinds of on-campus movements are at different stages of development, for some insight see Ferrarin; Penn Asian American Studies Undergraduate Advisory Board; Coalition; Sananes.

Works Cited

“About Us.” Professor Watchlist, Turning Point USA, 2018, www.professorwatchlist.org/about-us/.

Bauman, Dan. “After 2016 Election, Campus Hate Crimes Seemed to Jump. Here’s What the Data Tells Us.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 Feb. 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/After-2016-Election-Campus/242577.

Birmingham, Kevin. “The Great Shame of Our Profession: How the Humanities Survive on Exploitation.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 Feb. 2017, www.chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Shame-of-Our/239148.

Coalition for the Revitalization of Asian American Studies at Hunter College. “Petition for an Asian American Studies Major/Department at Hunter College.” The Action Network, actionnetwork.org/petitions/petition-for-an-asian-american-studies-majordepartment-at-hunter-college. Accessed 22 Dec. 2018.

English Departments in United States Institutions of Higher Education. Modern Language Association, 2015, www.mla.org/Resources/Research/Surveys-Reports-and-Other-Documents/Staffing-Salaries-and-Other-Professional-Issues/Data-from-the-MLA-Survey-of-Departmental-Staffing-Fall-2014. PDF download.

Ferrarin, Gianna. “Students and Faculty Are Fighting to Keep Asian-American Studies Alive. They Say Administrators Aren’t Helping.” The Daily Pennsylvanian, 23 Sept. 2017, www.thedp.com/article/2017/09/students-and-faculty-are-fighting-to-keep-asian-american-studies-alive-they-say-administrators-arent-helping.

Junn, Jane. “Appendix B—University of Southern California Analysis of Data on Tenure.” Matthew, pp. 269–77.

Kelsky, Karen. The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your PhD into a Job. Three Rivers Press, 2015.

Matthew, Patricia A. Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. U of North Carolina P, 2016.

Mishra, Sangay K. “An Indian Immigrant Is Murdered in Kansas. It’s Part of a Spike in Hate Crimes against South Asians.” The Washington Post, 7 Mar. 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/03/07/the-kansas-murder-of-an-indian-immigrant-is-part-of-a-spike-in-hate-crimes-against-south-asians/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0b430ad27cdc.

MLA Office of Research. Report on the MLA Job Information List, 2016–17. Modern Language Association, Dec. 2017, www.mla.org/Resources/Career/Job-Information-List/Reports-on-the-MLA-Job-Information-List. PDF download.

Navas, Emeling. “Turning Point USA Opens a Chapter at Penn State, Aims to Bring Awareness to Impact of Capitalism.” The Daily Collegian, 2 Dec. 2016, www.collegian.psu.edu/news/campus/article_b1b1349a-b841-11e6-8565-3f442bc54ada.html.

Palumbo-Liu, David. “Why and How Is Academic Freedom Important for Ethnic Studies?” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2016, pp. 101–03.

Penn Asian American Studies Undergraduate Advisory Board. “Stop Killing UPenn’s Asian American Studies.” Change.org, www.change.org/p/to-dean-fluharty-president-gutmann-provost-price-who-killed-upenn-s-asian-american-studies. Accessed 22 Dec. 2018.

Rana, Junaid. “The Academic Freedom of Social Movement.” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2016, pp. 111–16.

Sananes, Rebecca. “A Fight for Faculty of Color at Dartmouth and Beyond.” New Hampshire Public Radio, 24 May 2016, www.nhpr.org/post/fight-faculty-color-dartmouth-and-beyond#stream/0.

Summary of Data from Surveys by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce. Modern Language Association, American Historical Association / Modern Language Association, Mar. 2001, www.mla.org/Resources/Research/Surveys-Reports-and-Other-Documents/Staffing-Salaries-and-Other-Professional-Issues/Summary-of-Data-from-Surveys-by-the-Coalition-on-the-Academic-Workforce. PDF download.

“Table 13: Doctorate Recipients, by Subfield of Study: 2004–2014.” National Science Foundation, 2016, www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsf16300/data-tables.cfm.

Tiede, Hans-Joerg. Letter to Dr. Mark S. Schlissel, President, University of Michigan. American Association of University Professors, 16 Oct. 2018, www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Michigan-Cheney-Lippold.pdf.

“Update: 1,094 Bias-Related Incidents in the Month Following the Election.” Southern Poverty Law Center Hatewatch, 16 Dec. 2016, www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/12/16/update-1094-bias-related-incidents-month-following-election.

Dedicated defenders of precarious ground ask themselves how to bring more people into museums, libraries, concert halls, and theaters. This is a life-and-death question for many institutions. How can we safeguard the intrinsic value of the arts and humanities when the general public has lost a taste for the unhurried pleasures of doubt and discussion?¹ It’s time to make the case for culture—indeed, to make cases for culture, cases that can be used to demonstrate how the humanities benefit the public and why society should invest in its practitioners. Today, our responses to urgent challenges, which include inequality, violence, climate change, and migration, should include care for people and for the planet. Sustainable care will depend on the sociability promoted by the arts and humanities.

The case method is common in practically every field of academic research. Cases identify a problem and then evaluate intervention techniques. If we dared, we could use this method to respond to humanistic worries by designing hybrid essays that combine approaches from the humanities and social sciences. A case for culture might include the following stages:

• 1. Identify a social challenge.
  2. Study its causes and context.
  3. Speculate on possible interventions.
  4. Implement an intervention.
  5. Design ways to measure impact and reflect on results.

One advantage of this format over existing essays in the humanities is that it would be more convincing to people outside the field. In addition, the cycle of study and informed intervention would help scholars use their research to effect change, especially in fields where scholarship often uncovers the causes and conditions of abusive power dynamics (Sedgwick). Of course, intervention is risky. Perhaps it has felt safer for scholars to avoid engagement and to build careers on researching problems rather than finding solutions (Chan). It’s time to move on if we want to project a future for the humanities and if we hope to add value to cases beyond academic fields. Humanist participation in public intervention would benefit society and heighten interest in academic disciplines.

Scholars of business, law, politics, engineering, public health, and education have already pioneered the case method and stretched its reach. Some even test conventional boundaries between artistic expression and quantifiable data. At the Harvard Business School, for example, a vanguard case examines the innovative leadership of Miles Davis; another tracks the extent to which public performances by Antanas Mockus, the former mayor of Bogotá, saved water during a drought in city; and still another computes civic benefits of classical music lessons for impoverished youth in Venezuela (Austin and Stormer; Dust and Prokopoff; Khanna et al.). Such hybrid research between arts and economic development work is possible and productive. As humanists, we should add our part to the mix. To put in plain terms what Friedrich Schiller proposed as nonviolent responses to terror during the French Revolution: The name of change is art. John Dewey, Viktor Shklovsky, Jacques Rancière, and many others inherited this broad definition from enlightened pedagogies. Art means making something new, something that surprises and engages groups of people to reflect together (Sommer 135–56). Humanistic writing about the aesthetic dimension of change promises to demonstrate that thinking like an artist is a condition for confronting social, economic, ethical, and political challenges.²

We don’t yet write cases for culture, and our reticence to do so signals skepticism between the humanities and almost any other field. A few artists, however, have been taking steps across the divide between qualitative and quantitative evaluations (see Animating Democracy).³ In fact, proposals for funding and required reporting may be the genres that come closest to conjuring new humanist cases for culture, though most applicants still consider the granting process to be a necessary evil that endangers or deforms art’s value.⁴ Humanists have traditionally had less access to grant funding for public-engagement projects than have artists, and we have focused less on public accountability.⁵ So humanist interpretation lags behind the place where art meets public commitments. Adding the critical edge of humanist analysis would open the way to deeper understanding and broader opportunities.

The objective of a new humanistic approach that involves case studies would be to learn what works, what doesn’t, and why. Simply put, it would be to learn. This is as relevant for humanists as for everyone. A couple of years ago, Danielle Allen addressed a group of undergraduate “engaged scholars.” She began by affirming that the work of universities is to pursue research and to learn new information. Then she paused to ask, “How does that happen?” Her question returned attention to engagement as an essential element of scholarship; without it, research can remain derivative or academic in the narrow and unengaging sense. Good public humanities programs already move in the direction of service (in prison education, voter registration, after-school programs), though a nagging resistance can prevent humanists from putting their academic work to use when they leave campus. Are standard demands for academic publications to refer to canons and to sample theory in fact incurably elitist and possibly damaging to a public mission (Kester)? Until now we have chosen to explain that the effects of art are practically ineffable and certainly unquantifiable, that instruments for measurement miss the magic of art by reducing aesthetic effects to numerical values. The concern is real only if we remain uncreative about what and how we measure. Designing the standards and methods of measurement is part of the challenge for innovative essays in the humanities. We can learn from artistic practice to be indirect, to ask unanticipated questions, and to elicit fresh responses.⁶ There are masters of this method; one is Mockus. Featured as a lead artist at the Berlin Biennial in 2013, Mockus was recognized for turning Bogotá into a stage for civic reform—replacing traffic cops with mimes, for example.⁷ He managed to cut traffic deaths nearly in half in his first year in office (Murrain). Emboldened by the statistic, he multiplied risky moves and measured their impact on reducing homicide, corruption, and waste of resources.

Mockus, a mathematician and philosopher, formulated surprising questions for broad-based surveys that disarmed skeptical citizens. Instead of asking citizens to identify troublemakers, he would ask why people obey the law. Statistics showed that respondents invariably credited themselves with lofty motivations of morality while they assumed that others obeyed out of fear. Citizens saw the numbers and got the point; they became self-critical about their assumptions of moral superiority and learned to admire lawful behavior in others (Mockus). Admiration became an index for citizenship. Can we in good faith, like Mockus, do anything less than measure what we do? As humanists, we claim to improve human lives by enhancing imagination, understanding, and judgment. How do we sustain that claim in an increasingly skeptical society? How do we confirm even our own assertion that art and interpretation are essential for human development? A strong self-referential strain of scholarship in the humanities has, ironically, generated a kind of scholasticism. Scholarship can cede to a new humanism if we step beyond convenient and conventional limits. From a critical distance, we may see that arts and culture have something to learn from the so-called professional schools, though humanists have often said those words with condescension, as if the professions were too goal-oriented to be intellectual.

Making cases for culture is an invitation to suture the rift between imagination and reason. To do so, we need to break down stigmas that separate humanists and our potential partners.⁸ We must add our own scholarly approaches to speculating and tracking aesthetic effects and must advance in a pas de deux with professional partners who are willing to spend time with us to explore twists and turns.

Measurement assumes a desired outcome—that is, a purpose. Many humanities scholars may feel that creativity needs freedom from purpose of any kind, finances, fame, and so on. On the other side, most decision-makers consider the creative arts practically irrelevant for policy. Why should this be? It is not a rhetorical question. In fact, the arts provide essential elements for making good decisions, including judgment and artifice. Judgment considers the value of unfamiliar phenomena, events, and objects that don’t conform to reasonable patterns. Progress depends on the exercise of judgment to evaluate ever-changing opportunities and obstacles from the vantage points of particular people. Making something new—an artifice that channels creativity—is a corollary to judgment in the changing environment of modern times; it invents unpredicted but intentional interventions. In developing our skills in judgment and artifice, we provide a framework to explore how conditions can change.

A general term, culture includes the range of inherited and intentional responses to environmental challenges. The very breadth of the word perplexed Raymond Williams when he returned to Oxford after four years of military service in World War II. He puzzled over culture, among other key words, because the English language had changed so much during so short a time that he literally could not follow a conversation. The most vexing word represented his own field of expertise. Interviews, study, deliberation all led him to conclude that culture had two different, almost opposite meanings. For social sciences, culture amounts to patrimony: a set of shared things, beliefs, and practices, a mechanism of convergence and preservation. It is certainly not a promising arena for change and development but rather a collective mind-set that resists change. Culture poses dangers for decision-makers who worry about offending whole groups of people who pray differently or eat, marry, dress, and talk differently. For artists and humanists, on the other hand, culture points to a field of divergent risks, trial and error, experimentation, often unhinging the very paradigms that patrimony defends. “Try again; fail again; fail better” (Beckett). Artists and scientists understand one another, as Schiller knew when he called them the daughters of freedom. Both play with materials and explore their potential effects without necessarily projecting an outcome (Edwards). The work is process driven, not product oriented.

Decision-makers are not stupid. Understandably, they want to see results from investments, whether the goal is making money or getting elected. If they cut funding for culture in favor of technology or homeland security it is probably, among other possible reasons, because they have been trained to be minimalist regarding culture, to do just enough to avoid conflict with groups of people. As social scientists, they certainly do not learn to identify culture’s processes as ignition for social, economic, or political progress. Artists experiment freely, while decision-makers worry about recklessness and the future impact of their choices.

We have opportunities (that means responsibilities) to suture the divide in culture with projects that assume a double bottom line, a term I learned from the Social Innovation Studio at the Harvard Kennedy School for Government and that has been broadly adopted in business and government.⁹ The newly coined bilateral goal is both to generate income and to effect social change. The objectives support one another: money sustains good projects, and social projects ensure that money does some good. Requiring both fiscal and ethical responsibility is a decision that we humanists can make too. It would overcome the nagging double-binds that have for decades paralyzed engagement. An appropriate response to puzzling over a Gordian knot, such as the tangle between thinking and acting, is to cut with bold moves.

The concept of double bottom line conjures for me a particular case for culture, called Pre-Texts. It is a teacher-training program that sustains itself through honoraria and provides a social good. In the process, it sutures the divide in culture between patrimony and experimentation. With Pre-Texts, teachers learn to offer challenging texts as raw material for making art and then for reflecting on the activity. In reflecting and identifying the actions carried out during activities, participants can better understand how they have been affected by the experience. The combination of using texts as prompts to paint, dance, draw, act, sing, and so on and closing with the question, What did we do?, amounts to a protocol for developing high-order reading, innovation, and citizenship—the long-term purpose, or measurement, of Pre-Texts. It works for all ages and tastes, generating endless opportunities for scholarly analyses and theory (reader response, intertextuality, identity construction, filters, multilingual layers, etc.). The steps that practically anyone can master are these: listen to a text, ask it questions, create artistic responses, and think about the process. Participants play freely with texts, but art-making sessions are governed by consistent rules. Irreverently, individuals pull and poke at texts but inside a protocol that obliges everyone to participate in a shared civic culture. Here, culture as divergent art meets culture as convergent practice. Personal expression advances together with shared reflection; emotional intelligence drives and is driven by cognitive development (it’s a mistake to isolate them). An important dividend of this double bottom line for pedagogy is a generalized feeling of admiration for everyone in the group because each artist contributes original work and unscripted reflection. Admiration, we learned from Mockus, is the fundamental sentiment of citizenship. It responds to other people’s particularity and anticipates their valued contributions, unlike feelings of tolerance, respect, or even empathy, which keep speakers at the center of their sentences.

Humanists have resources like Pre-Texts to direct the interpretive work of literary studies toward engagement and accountability. The move assumes responsibilities that we can confirm through cases for culture. To claim, for example, that the case study protocol delivers a holistic pedagogy requires some proof in measurable results. Humanists may be persuaded by the concept that the invitation to use texts to make art can achieve educational acupuncture. Creative processes press on academic material to fire the pleasures of creative autonomy. It makes sense to us that cognitive and emotional learning go together here; the prompt to play with complex texts fuels critical thinking, enjoyment of one’s own particularity, and admiration for others. But dedicated teachers will also want to know if the claim bears out. Therefore, our next invitation is to colleagues who know how to measure cognitive and socioemotional development. Together, we develop indicators and approaches to evaluation. Then we gather results and learn from them how to improve our practice. This would be the case model that identifies problems and evaluates interventions comparable with those in business and social science. A case for culture is under way now, to report on Pre-Texts in Boston Public Schools. It will represent my collaboration with the distinguished Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, Paul Tritter (director of professional learning for Boston Teachers Union), James Noonan (project director for school quality measures with the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment), James Quane (associate director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy of the John F. Kennedy School of Government), and Jahnvi Singh (a cultural agent at a nongovernmental organization). Thanks to their training and interpretive capacity, Pre-Texts can be captured now in a theory-of-change chart (fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Change in education, and in any other field of human development, relies on thinking like an artist and then thinking together with scientists. Anything less leaves us on one side of culture’s divide between heritage and creativity, to choose and lose.

Notes

1. Alba Aragón, assistant professor of comparative literature at Bridgewater State University, noted in March 2018 that, to revive this taste, especially with first-generation students who do not imagine that literature is important: “‘Art as Technique’ de Shklovsky es un ensayo que incluyo en casi todas mis clases de literatura, porque me sirve mucho para trabajar con mis alumnos ‘first-generation’ de clase trabajadora, que no traen una apreciación innata de la literatura. Pero entienden el extrañamiento, y llegan a entender que eso que ellos llaman ‘relatability’ no es tan valioso como creen al principio, pues de la mejor manera que puedo les explico la premisa de tu Proceed with Caution…, y les hago tomar conciencia de los placeres de las lecturas difíciles. La respuesta de una alumna: ‘Yo aprendí que un buen cuento te hace pensar, debe ser difícil, que debes pelear con el cuento, debe ser frustrante, que te den ganas de darte por vencido pero al mismo tiempo te den ganas de vencer. Un buen cuento no puede ser fácil porque si es fácil te mata. Matan las ganas de saber más y eso no es lo que Cortázar quiere, sino que te despiertes y veas la realidad, conocer, saber lo que está pasando en el mundo afuera. Tener el conocimiento para luchar contra la injusticia en la sociedad’” (“‘Art as Technique’ by Shklovsky is an essay I include in practically all my literature courses, because it’s so useful for working-class ‘first-generation’ students who haven’t yet acquired a love for literature. But they understand estrangement and come to question the value of ‘relatability.’ I share the premise of your Proceed with Caution and invite them to acknowledge the pleasures of difficult texts. One student commented: ‘I learned that a good story makes you think, that it needs to be hard, to frustrate you and make you struggle with the reading, like a challenge that makes you give up but at the same time makes you struggle harder and get it. A good story can’t be easy; that kills it. It kills your desire to know more than that’s not what Cortázar wants; instead he wants to wake you up to see reality, to know and ask more about the world outside. This is training to take on social injustice’”).

2. Tarun Khanna of the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School regularly teaches SOCWORLD 47, Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Problems, where undergraduates and graduate students from the range of schools learn “thinking like an artist.”

3. Also, as described in its Amazon editorial review, Counting New Beans, edited by Clayton Lord, is “[t]he final report on the landmark two-year intrinsic impact theater study from research firm WolfBrown and authors Alan Brown and Rebecca Ratzkin. Contains over 20 interviews with artistic leaders, executive directors, and patrons about the changing relationship of artists and audiences. This research—a comprehensive and expansive attempt to understand and quantify the impact of a piece of art on an individual (and the impact of that individual on the art)—is a clarion call for a new way to measure and talk about the arts experience.” See also Finkelpearl; Walker-Kuhne and Wolfe; Tepper and Ivey; Korza and Bacon; Borwick; Lerman and Borstel.

4. See Korza and Bacon: “Some [artists] find it simply overwhelming because they lack evaluation expertise. Others ask: How do you measure such intangible results as ‘transformation,’ ‘community building,’ or ‘social justice’? They may resist the idea of applying empirical approaches that they believe are ill suited to art and social change. Yet, others see usefulness and necessity in getting ‘more concrete.’ They want to know if they are meeting their aspirations and goals and why or why not” (12). See also the reluctance to quantitative analysis highlighted in Duncombe et al.

5. An exception is Danielle Allen’s HULA (Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment) project at Harvard, which “identifies and illuminates internal logics of humanistic craft in order to develop appropriate tools to assess, evaluate and further develop projects and pedagogy in the humanities” (“Humanities”). See also “Assessing the Practices of Public Scholarship” from Imagining America. Thanks go to Vialla Hartfeld-Mendez for her work here. The “cases” would frame many recommendations here in a simple protocol.

6. Existing measurement of art’s impact tends to be direct; e.g., questions of increased understanding or empathy. See Korza and Bacon 7.

7. See “Bogotá,” especially minutes 16–18.

8 Brandt writes on stigma as a major obstacle to public health. He observed, during a lecture for Rx: Arts for Global Health at Harvard College in fall 2018, that the arts are also the object of stigma, which limits the range of possible interventions in public health.

9. Thanks to Julia Battilana and Brittany Butler.

Works Cited

Amazon. Editorial Review for Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art, www.amazon.com/Counting-New-Beans-Intrinsic-Impact/dp/098514520X. Accessed 2 Jan. 2019.

Animating Democracy. Americans for the Arts, www.animatingdemocracy.org/. Accessed 2 Jan. 2019.

“Assessing the Practices of Public Scholarship (APPS).” Imagining America, imaginingamerica.org/initiatives/apps/. Accessed 2 Jan. 2019.

Austin, Robert D., and Carl Stormer. “Miles Davis: Kind of Blue.” Harvard Business School Case Collection, Nov. 2008, www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=36538. Case 609-050.

Beckett, Samuel. “Westward Ho.” Genius, genius.com/Samuel-beckett-worstward-ho-annotated.

“Bogotá Improving Civic Behavior Cities on Speed.” YouTube, uploaded by Eduardo Lόpez, 3 Apr. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lOkLNIT3gI.

Borwick, Doug. Building Communities, Not Audiences: The Future of the Arts in the United States. ArtsEngaged, 2012.

Brandt, Allan. Rx: Arts for Global Health. Fall 2018, Harvard College, Cambridge, MA. Class lecture.

Chan, Paul. “Fearless Symmetry.” Artforum, vol. 45, no. 7, Mar. 2007, pp. 260–61.

Duncombe, Stephen et al. Assessing the Impact of Artistic Activism. The Center for Activism, 2018, culturalresearchnetwork.org/september-2018/.

Dust, Fred, and Ilya Prokopoff. “Designing Systems at Scale.” 1 Jan. 2009. Harvard Business School case study.

Edwards, David. Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation. Harvard UP, 2010.

Finkelpearl, Tom. Dialogues in Public Art. MIT P, 2000.

“Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA).” Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2016, www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/humanities-liberal-arts-assessment-hula. Accessed 2 Jan. 2019.

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Khanna, Tarun, et al. “El Sistema.” Harvard Business School Case Collection, Oct. 2017, www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=49848. Case 816-052.

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