The Fragility of Academic Freedom

I have a new column up on the Hill, about increasing threats to academic freedom in the U.S. Here is the gist:

THE HILL

 The fragility of academic freedom

 BY STEVEN LUBET, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 12/01/21

 “Educational gag orders” have become distressingly common across the country, as too many university administrations claim to support academic freedom while weakening it in practice.

At the University of Florida, three political science professors were recently denied permission to provide expert testimony in a lawsuit challenging the state’s restrictive voting law. In an initial ruling from university administrators, the faculty members were barred from testifying because a “conflict of interest to the executive branch of the State of Florida create[s] a conflict for the University of Florida.” Under that diktat, the results of faculty research were effectively suppressed – by prohibition from presentation in a courtroom – because they are contrary to the current governor’s political views.

Florida is not the only state where academic freedom is on increasingly shaky ground. Administrators at the University of Texas have ordered researchers to suspend recruiting subjects for a study on the effectiveness of anti-racism training for white children. The project planned to involve up to 200 pairs of white-identified children – ages four or five, and not yet in kindergarten – along with their caregivers, who would watch professionally produced videos and follow discussion guides. It was approved by the university’s institutional review board and passed a peer review process for internal funding.

In other words, one over-hyped complaint, magnified on various websites, and the extraordinarily unlikely prospect of OCR intervention, were sufficient to disrupt previously approved faculty research that the administration should always have defended.

You can read the entire column here (not paywalled).

Comments

[A non]

"...as approved by the university’s institutional review board and passed a peer review process for internal funding."

For the cognoscenti about how peer review actually works (let alone administrations), how is one supposed to take this legitimization effort seriously? Do you fail to see the irony in worrying about the academic freedom to advance, and to propagandize in furtherance of, a totalitarian brainwashing tactic for children? Why didn't the proposal for this project fail an ethics review?

Will you, moreover, stand up to defend anti-anti-racism scholarship generated in your university?