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Keith Whittington
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Professors speak and write in a wide range of contexts, in all of which they receive, however unevenly, some level of protection under college policies, traditional academic-freedom principles, and First Amendment doctrine. Those First Amendment protections just took a hit in a newly issued opinion by a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
A professor in the College of Education at North Carolina State University claimed that he had been punished by his employer as a result of his constitutionally protected speech. He had on various occasions complained in faculty deliberations that the program with which he was associated had become too focused on “social justice” at the expense of its intellectual integrity. He was sanctioned for raising those concerns. A majority of the court disagreed that such speech is constitutionally protected.
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Faith in higher education continues to plummet, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—the nation’s leading organization representing faculty interests and a longstanding voice on academic freedom and university governance—has decided to train its guns on the growing movement to establish civic education centers at public universities. The AAUP’s objections amount to a single, unlovely demand: we get to decide what students learn, and nobody else gets a vote.
Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.
Since faculty voted in may to proctor in-person exams, national news outlets and some alumni have decried the end of Princeton’s 133-year-old tradition of unsupervised testing, but students, faculty, and recent graduates say the conversation within the campus community has been mild.
