Report on the Current State of Academic Freedom in US Education (Fall 2022)
This report was written by the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities. The Executive Council approved it in February 2023.
In each of the past two years, the MLA has issued statements condemning efforts to subvert academic freedom and shared governance. This fall’s report—the first in a continuing publication—is prompted by efforts, ongoing since 2020, to censor what can be taught and discussed in classrooms, included on syllabi, and known by students at every educational level in the United States. These endeavors—now adopted law in fifteen states—represent the most serious, most comprehensive assault on academic freedom in recent memory. Notable in this vein, too, was the AAUP’s call for the University of Idaho to rescind its order that faculty members remain neutral on the subject of abortion, a move that likewise constitutes a clear violation of academic freedom. The MLA strongly supports that AAUP call and, by means of this report, registers its grave concern about the continuing and active erosion of academic freedom and shared governance through the proliferation of bills in state legislatures—generically, “gag orders”—that remove both specific materials and entire topics from classrooms and syllabi.
These “state legislative attempts to restrict teaching, training, and learning” at all levels (elementary, secondary, and postsecondary) add up to a “legislative war on education,” in the words of PEN America. PEN America’s general charge is to protect and defend authors, artists, and their constitutional right to free speech. Now, however, PEN finds itself essentially consumed by defending the rights of an entirely different constituency: teachers and academic freedom. Since January 2021, over two hundred such bills have been advanced, and nearly twenty have become law in fifteen states. These gag orders censor what is teachable to and learnable by students—on everything from race and ethnicity to gender and sexuality to issues of national origin—and they make educators vulnerable to lawsuits.
The bills passed to date are largely similar in content and argumentative strategy. Given the overlapping language, they appear to take as ancestor Executive Order 13950, signed into law by President Donald Trump in September 2020 and rescinded by President Joseph Biden moments after he took office in January 2021. The gag orders brought to state legislatures since that time generally assert that certain concepts may not be advocated or taught, and that others must be proclaimed and taught. Their erroneous, and mostly unstated, assumption is that the obligatory topics are “neutral” topics. For example, Florida’s bill HB 7, passed in March 2022, states that education “subjecting individuals to specified concepts under certain circumstances constitutes discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin.” The “specified concepts” include race, sex, and class, and a critical evaluation of United States history. HB 1557 and HB 7 exclude any discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity from K–3 classrooms, limit sex-education instruction in higher grades to topics dubbed “developmentally-appropriate,” and give parents extensive rights to sue teachers and districts. Tennessee’s HB 2670 prohibits the teaching of “divisive concepts” in the state’s public colleges and universities, the label “divisive” being illustrated by a grab bag of terms including race, sex, and class, together with “the violent overthrow of the United States government.” In Georgia, since the passing of HB 1084, the teaching of “divisive concepts” in K–12 classrooms is forbidden, and “obscene materials” are to be removed from school libraries. In Kentucky, SB 1 announces permissible premises and conclusions on United States history, criminalizing classroom references to the persistence of racial and gender inequalities; Mississippi’s SB 2113 and South Dakota’s HB 1012 similarly restrict content that touches on race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, and national origin.
The strategy of these bills is to conjure a threat—be it “divisive concepts,” “racial scapegoating,” “Critical Race Theory,” or the “grooming” of future victims by “encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity”—and to promise to defeat it by excluding certain topics from discussion and imposing certain conclusions. The common thrust of these education bills, passed in states with a history of persistent inequalities, is to turn the very diagnosis of structural racism and other forms of bias into instances of racial discrimination. No student is to be made to feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress” when learning about the American past (Tennessee, SB 2670).1 For example, it is permitted, according to Kentucky’s education bill, to teach the history of the Civil War and segregation, but only if the teacher affirms throughout “the understanding that, regardless of one's circumstances, an American has the ability to succeed when he or she is given sufficient opportunity and is committed to seizing that opportunity through hard work, pursuit of education, and good citizenship.” Under this rubric, the teaching of American history must be ideological: rather than teach history, in fact its function is to affirm and uphold the dubious notion of the American Dream, the untested presumption underlying such a statement being that the doctrine is evidence-based and unbiased. Likewise, American history “shall be defined… as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” (Florida, HB 7)—erasing the presence of slavery and the slave trade as well as the displacement and colonization of First Peoples. Any other version of American history, any questioning of these ideological assertions, shall constitute an attempt to “indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view” (Florida, HB 7). It is nowhere ceded that the curriculum now made mandatory in fact “indoctrinate[s] [and] persuade[s] students to a particular” view.
The radically impoverished curricula these laws aim to construct, having barred the study of history, culture, and identity outside quite restrictive parameters, does not give faculty members room to teach the human condition accurately, factually, or properly; to teach history, to teach sociology or literature or art. The American history teacher will have little alternative but to parrot the state-approved textbook with its preordained conclusions and with all of what is left out of such a text. The restrictions threaten the authority of English teachers to choose the texts they bring to the literary studies classroom. For literature teachers, it is difficult to contemplate the number of novels, plays, and poems effectively banned by the gag orders. To remove from the list of teachable works every piece of literature in which Black, Asian, or LGBTQ characters are centrally present is quite literally to architect an apartheid curriculum. Moreover, the new laws in fifteen states threaten to shut down entire research fields and subfields—MELUS, Black studies, Asian and Latino/a studies, gender studies, to name only a few—and to ban the work of scholars with long-standing academic careers teaching and publishing on these topics. Perhaps more concerning—it is hard to imagine BIPOC teachers or gay and lesbian teachers or female teachers complying with the gag orders without experiencing personal “discomfort . . . anguish, or another form of psychological distress” in endeavoring to achieve compliance (Tennessee, SB 2670). In other words, the laws in question not only undermine the spirit of academic freedom in the classroom but have especially deleterious impacts on colleagues whose teaching explicitly focuses on newly banned subject matter.
The issues outlined thus far are, however, only a start toward understanding the full extent of the problem. The criteria teachers are to attempt compliance with are so vague and partisan as to make both their implementation and their enforcement extremely challenging and, worse, entirely selective. Moreover, works of fiction or historical epochs that do not center on issues of race, sex/gender, or class are rare; with some hypocrisy one could construe a novel built around white characters as being racially “neutral,” but the cost of such hypocrisy would be to deepen the morass of “white privilege.” Novels focused on white, male, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied characters are absolutely "about" race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ableism—by exclusion. Therefore, how are teachers to comply with such state edicts? Since there are essentially no texts free from the themes being censored or curtailed, it would appear that all texts end up censored, that nothing is teachable.
Nevertheless, even where laws against teaching “divisive concepts” hold sway, individuals retain their personal (and constitutionally guaranteed) right to freedom of expression. Such laws seek, however, to abridge academic freedom, which is the power conferred on teachers and scholars to lead students in ascertaining facts, testing assumptions, and assigning values. Whereas freedom of expression is an individual right, academic freedom is a collective undertaking. (See CAFPRR’s “toolkit” for an expanded definition.) It was defined by some early critics of apartheid as an academic body’s autonomy in deciding “who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.”2 Such matters are rightly decided by those who have earned the credentials that permit them to teach. The standard for academic speech is not that of a public forum—“viewpoint neutrality”—but engagement with the best-supported current research on a subject. Debates will occur in any teaching situation; that is, in short, how knowledge is made. Controversy is not to be suppressed but taken as the first stage of inquiry. Instead, the new education laws of Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, South Dakota, and several other states seek to prevent serious debate and to mandate a “groupthink” approach to education.
For legislators to stipulate what may not be taught and what must be taught, and with what goals, negates both the education acquired by the teacher and the education being acquired by the students. “Academic freedom” designates an environment for intellectual inquiry where ideas ought to stand as true or false based on the scrutiny of attested fact and where inquiry can set forth conclusions without fear of retaliation. The AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure offers a precedent for this—that academic freedom upholds not the absolute freedom of utterance of any individual academic but the freedom of inquiry, of discussion, and of teaching held by the academic profession as a whole. Academic freedom deserves the protection not only of those who benefit from it immediately—teachers and especially students—but of all who value an informed society.
In these ways, state representatives, posing as victims of “racial stereotyping,” have asserted their right to control what is taught in public schools. The result, if successful and as shown above, would be a massive deplatforming. The concerted attempts to shrink, surveil, and manipulate the content of education in the United States demand a large, committed response on the part of teachers, administrators, and concerned citizens in defense of academic freedom and student rights.
The MLA shares this and future reports with the academic community as a means to raise awareness about relevant pressing issues and to advocate for both faculty rights and for the good of education at large. The organization will continue reporting on academic freedom for as long as is deemed necessary by conditions on the ground, at state and federal levels.
Notes
1. For a concrete illustration of the sort of history produced by an unwillingness to offend those least affected by racism and structural inequality, see Mary U. Rothrock, This Is Tennessee: A School History (Knoxville: Rothrock, 1963), pp. 310–11: “The Ku Klux Klan started in May 1866 . . . The declared aim of the order was ‘to protect the innocent, the weak, and the defenceless’ . . . Other aims were to support the United States Constitution, and to aid in the execution of all constitutional laws. . . . The Klan had a restraining influence on the excesses of the Loyal Leagues, and of extremists in the Freedmen’s Bureau.” (Document kindly communicated by Bryan Eric Simmons.)
2. These words are often credited to Justice Felix Frankfurter in his concurring opinion in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957), but they are quoted from The Open Universities in South Africa, a 1957 manifesto by representatives of the universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand defying the South African government’s demand for separation of the races in higher education.
Further Reading
MLA, AAUP, and PEN America Webinar on Educational Gag Orders: Registration (gotowebinar.com)
PEN America’s General Report on Educational Gag Orders: “America’s Censored Classrooms”: America's Censored Classrooms - PEN America
PEN America’s Index Tracking Distinct Aspects of the Ongoing Educational Gag Order Strategy (Six Google Sheets): PEN America Index of Educational Gag Orders - Google Sheets
Mary U. Rothrock’s book This Is Tennessee: https://181.library.nashville.org/Record/CARL0000061433?searchId=57964599&recordIndex=4&page=1
Donald Yacavone’s book, Teaching White Supremacy: https://www.harvard.com/book/teaching_white_supremacy/