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Monday, October 28, 2024

Stop Defending Amy Wax: Academic Freedom Doesn’t Authorize Unprofessional Conduct

Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  Stop Defending Amy Wax: Academic Freedom Doesn’t Authorize Unprofessional Conduct, by Richard Amesbury (Arizona State) & Catherine O'Donnell (Arizona State; Google Scholar):

Wax (2024)Last month the University of Pennsylvania sanctioned Amy Wax after a faculty-hearing board concluded that the tenured law professor had engaged in “flagrant unprofessional conduct” and had “a history of making sweeping and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.” While some observers felt the sanction, which included a one-year suspension at half pay and the loss of her named chair, did not go far enough, others saw in Penn’s decision an assault on academic freedom.

Robert P. George, director of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and a member of the Academic Freedom Alliance’s Academic Committee, called it “a flagrant case of hypocrisy and double standards.” Citing the Chicago Principles on Free Expression, the Heterodox Academy opined that “Wax’s statements may have been offensive to many in the academic community. But academic freedom cannot survive where professors cannot express controversial views on contested issues.” Joshua T. Katz, writing in The New Criterion, acknowledged that “Professor Wax says things that make me squirm,” but held that “a bit of squirming is good for the soul.” And in The New York Times, John McWhorter wrote that, although “Amy Wax loudly espouses views that most reasonable people find repellent,” that “does not justify punishing her for expressing them.”

Within hours of Penn’s announcement, the influential Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which has advocated on Wax’s behalf for years, weighed in: “Faculty nationwide may now pay a heavy price for Penn’s willingness to undercut academic freedom for all to get at this one professor. After today, any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook.”

Some critics of Penn have found it troubling that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), long the United States’ academic-freedom watchdog, did not defend Wax. Len Gutkin, writing in these pages, suggested that the organization’s advocacy may be “determined by prior political commitments, rather than a content-neutral approach to faculty-speech rights.”

We have a few questions. Are faculty truly at risk if we can’t disparage our students and discuss their grades as a function of their race or ethnicity, after being repeatedly warned that doing so violates university policy? Are we genuinely prevented from pursuing knowledge if we can’t invite Jared Taylor, a self-described “white advocate,” to speak in our classes? Should we feel thwarted as teachers if we can’t repeatedly make false statements that lead our students to conclude we will treat them unfairly? And is it surprising that the AAUP, whose near-century-old conception of academic freedom specifies that “faculty should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matters which are unrelated to their subject, or to persistently introduce material which has no relation to the subject,” did not condemn the faculty committee and administrators who applied that very standard, among others, to Wax?

The answer to these questions is no. Why, then, the rush to insist that Penn’s decision to sanction Wax was an end run around academic freedom? Why the determination to lash the ideals and future of the academy to Amy Wax?

The defense of Amy Wax lays bare a consequential confusion between academic freedom and freedom of speech. That confusion is entangled with disapproval of hiring and evaluation practices that one way or another take race, ethnicity, and gender into account, as well as with the fear that criticism of those practices will lead to censure. Institutional policies and practices must indeed be open to debate, but it does not follow that faculty should be empowered to say anything they want, no matter how unsourced, irrelevant, or — yes — unprofessional. No slope is that slippery. Far from an attack on academic freedom, Penn’s action, however belated, is precisely the sort of judgment academic freedom is meant to safeguard. ...

The organizations and faculty who defend Wax are often the same ones who criticize students as fragile snowflakes who must be taught to withstand the heat of vigorous debate. Students should not, they sternly declare, expect to be coddled. We agree. Nor, however, should students be understood as simply the backdrop to professors’ romantic self-conceptions. When Penn’s students make clear they reject the authority of a professor who has been found to offer groundless disparagement as scholarship, they are not demanding to be coddled. They’re demanding to be taught. When a defender insists Wax be given deference not because her work pursues truth but because “she believes what she is saying,” he is demanding she be coddled.

The Wax affair does offer lessons, but they are not the ones the self-appointed guardians of academic freedom would like the public to draw. Were the public to become convinced that faculty members have the right to say whatever we please, irrespective of its merits, it would be hard to see what reason they would have to support colleges, or to attend them. Academic freedom is not a natural right. It is a condition of doing the modest job with which we have been entrusted. Colleges are, in the end, workplaces, and the nature of the job is the vetting of ideas. If there is a slippery slope to be avoided here, it is not, as FIRE alleges, that “any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook,” but that institutions seeking to move up FIRE’s ranking of colleges will have little incentive to rein in faculty who reject the disciplinary pursuit of knowledge. The risk is not that we lose our jobs, but that we render meaningless our profession.

FIRE has produced a video on academic freedom, in conjunction with New York University, as part of a series of videos that colleges are meant to share with students. The video aptly describes a scholar’s right, within the paradigm of academic freedom, to teach in a way that is not beholden to external influences such as donors. So far so good. The video makes the point that students cannot disrupt class with emotional outbursts and cannot thwart the processes of scholarly teaching. Also fine. What is missing is any discussion of what academic freedom demands of the faculty. In the new conception held out by Wax’s defenders, the rights accrue to faculty and the obligations to our students. The effect of this approach, made clear in the response to Wax, is to feudalize the relationship between students and faculty: The former must live within whatever classroom worlds the latter makes. This is not a brave defense of freedom. It is self-indulgence.

New York Times, Professors in Trouble Over Protests Wonder if Academic Freedom Is Dying:

Universities have cracked down on professors for pro-Palestinian activism, saying they are protecting students and tamping down on hate speech. Faculty members say punishments have put a “chill in the air.”

As protests unfolded at scores of college campuses last spring, students were not the only ones punished for participating. Faculty members also faced consequences for supporting the students in their protests or for expressing views that were construed as antisemitic or, less commonly, for pro-Israel activism.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has intensified what many faculty members and their allies believe is part of a growing assault on the ideals of academic freedom, a principle that most American colleges and universities hold dear.

Visiting scholars, adjuncts and lecturers without tenure have had their contracts terminated or not renewed. Some had their classes suddenly canceled. Faculty members say they have been publicly criticized in ways that have trampled on their reputations and hurt their careers.

Faculty members have been affected at more than a dozen major universities, according to unofficial records being kept by faculty union activists.

Attempts to discipline scholars have been rising, to 145 a year in 2022, from four a year in 2000, as education has become more polarized, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit that monitors free speech violations.

“There’s a chill in the air,” said Peter Lake, a law professor and director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University in Florida.

The disciplinary actions have followed a movement to ensure that students feel safe on campus. In the last year, many Jewish students have said protests and classroom discussions about the war have threatened that feeling of safety, sometimes intimidating them from expressing their views and making them nervous about revealing their Jewish identity.

Academic freedom is also not absolute. It does not protect “propagating wrongheaded ideas” in teaching or research, said Nadine Strossen, a former head of the American Civil Liberties Union. And it does not put faculty members above the law or above campus rules meant to make sure protests, whatever their point of view, do not disrupt learning.

But it means that academics are broadly allowed the First Amendment right to express opinions or to speak beyond their area of expertise outside the classroom, including on social media.

Yet that is where many faculty members are getting into trouble, Ms. Strossen said.

Professors have been criticized for creating hostile environments in classrooms and stifling the speech of students who might not agree with them, taking on the role of activists instead of teachers. And some say faculty members are professing views that could cross legal lines requiring universities to protect students from discrimination.

Much of the pressure to crack down on faculty has come from external sources, including alumni, lawmakers, advocacy groups and donors. ...

In many cases, however, the pressure to crack down on faculty speech has illustrated the enduring power of the tenure system.

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