I mentioned in a comment that last week, we released a new collection of essays on academic freedom: In the Spirit of H. Chandler Davis: Activism and the Struggle for Academic Freedom. (Shameless plug: available here.) This is a book I edited with three others at the University of Michigan: Michael Atzmon, John Cheney-Lippold, and Melanie Tanielian. 

The book celebrates H. Chandler Davis, a truly heroic individual who was one of three faculty dismissed from U-M during the McCarthy Era for refusing to testify to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). Davis stands out not just among the three but nationally as well for basing his defense solely on the First Amendment protection of free speech (as opposed to the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination). His goal was to risk imprisonment in order to challenge the constitutionality of HUAC’s actions. Sadly, he failed and spent time in prison for contempt of Congress. But he helped pave the way for our enlarged understanding of free speech and of academic freedom. (Davis’s story is recounted in an excellent book by Steve Batterson, The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis: McCarthyism, Communism, and the Myth of Academic Freedom.)

At our book launch event, historian Ellen Schrecker, author of the definitive study of universities in the McCarthy Era, gave a reading from her contribution to the volume, “No More Chandler Davises! Academic Freedom Needs Collective Action, Not Heroes” – which she updated to address the events of the last 11 months. Her reading was both sobering and hopeful. Sobering for several reasons:

• Long before Trump’s assaults on higher education, academic freedom at universities had become more precarious. The privatization of public universities — a 30-year trend of decreased public support for the core educational functions of universities — had pushed universities toward more reliance on donor funding, with all of the complications that can bring, and toward a more corporatist mentality. Along with that also came what she called the “adjunctification” of the faculty: now often 75% of teaching at universities and colleges is done by “contingent faculty” — lecturers and graduate students — rather than the tenure-track professoriate. Contingent faculty are paid low wages, generally have little job security, and do not have the academic freedom protections that the tenure-tracked do. Along with corporatization also came a shift of authority away from faculty governance and toward administrative management. Schrecker writes:
• Because of this transformation, impoverishment and insecurity characterize much of the professoriate. . . . Adjunctification takes a psychic and educational toll on the entire campus. Contingent instructors, if they are not ignored, are treated as second- class citizens. Disrespected with no prospect of advancement, they are often deprived of the institutional support needed for their teaching and research. This situation ultimately undermined the standing of the professoriate as well.
• Then, she said, “COVID and the outbreak of the Israeli–Hamas war have only exacerbated these inequities. The former, by encouraging the powers that be to intensify their investment in a technological fix that will only undermine their institution’s educational quality, and the latter, by imposing repressive measures on their campuses that threaten to squelch whatever freedom of expression their students and faculties still retain.”
• Trump’s assault on universities has been unprecedented, she noted, and goes far beyond anything that occurred during the Red Scares. Those assaults were directed against a relatively small group of individuals under the misguided notion that universities were hotbeds of Communist ideology and that by definition a person who had ever been a member of the Communist Party (or supposedly affiliated organizations) was incapable of independent thought and was necessarily engaged in proselytizing students. Today, the assaults target the entirety of higher education. And although we have not yet seen anything close to the hundreds of firings of faculty and dismissal of graduate students that occurred in the McCarthy Era, we have seen a much more broad-based attack on almost all aspects of universities, in the name of fighting DEI and anti-semitism.

However, she is also hopeful for several reasons:

• While it was slow to start, universities are now standing up more and more to the administration. It’s not a perfect record by any means, but when Harvard finally sounded the alarm, the tide began to turn. Others have followed suit, and the administration has had to change tactics, offering its “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education” — i.e., preferential funding in exchange for elements of government control. Sevon out of nine universities who directly received the offer have outright rejected it. We could hope for more, but at least there is a genuine collective resistance.
• She also points to increased collective faculty action, with faculty governance groups often getting out ahead of their university administrations.
• She also noted the significant involvement of students and faculty in the No Kings and related protests.

All of this contrasts sharply with the McCarthy Era, when universities were almost universally complicit with the government, firing faculty who refused to testify and ultimately doing the government’s dirty work for it. At that time, it was only a few heroes, like Chandler Davis, who stood up. The collective action she called for when she wrote the essay (pre-election) may actually be taking hold!