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By William Barnett
Medium
Excerpt: The attacks on academic freedom in Florida and elsewhere have pernicious effects on higher education for faculty and students alike.
When I taught courses on religion and public policy, controversial issues arose frequently. Since I was teaching at a Jesuit college, abortion and social justice concerns became the focus of many discussions online and in class. In these courses, I made sure to include resources and discussion about official Catholic teachings (the tradition is rather complex and historically varied) along with material about other religious and secular positions. In today’s educational climate, I would likely be prohibited from including such materials and discussion in my courses in Florida, Texas, and several other states.
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The 80+ scholars who gathered at UC Berkeley for HxA’s West Coast Regional Conference didn’t come to vent or to mourn a lost university. They came to get organized and lead their campuses in reform. Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier set the tone from the first minutes of his keynote about what must be done for change in the academy to occur.
“There used to be times when it took just a letter to get a speaker disinvited,” he said. “This is not the case right now.” Institutional neutrality is gaining ground. Diverse speakers are being welcomed on campuses where they once weren’t. On these things, “we look back and things are moving in the right direction.” But Diermeier was clear that acknowledging progress is not the same as declaring victory. Much work remains.
The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law has brought a new meaning to the heckler’s veto. Some of us criticized the law school for its failure to hold students accountable for disrupting a recent Federalist Society event featuring James Percival, general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security.
While the law school administration does not appear interested in holding the protesters accountable, it has threatened the Federalist Society that it could face discipline if it identifies any of the students who disrupted the event. This perfectly surreal position was stated in a letter from Bayrex Martí, UCLA’s assistant dean for student affairs.
Some 15 years after the No Child Left Behind Act promised to close the racial achievement gap, it looked as if charter schools were making real progress toward that goal. Using data from 2015 to 2019, Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes reported that more than 200 charter networks were closing or even reversing racial disparities in reading, math, or both.
Then, just as the charter sector was posting striking results, many school networks strayed from their commitment to academic excellence. Staff-led demands for social justice convulsed the schools. “Anti-racism” and “equity” displaced effective instruction as their top priority.
