Educators Should Be Able To Teach Stuff You Disagree With
Academic freedom is a crucial value. Unfortunately there is a longstanding American tradition of government interference with it.
America has a longstanding tradition of trying to prevent teachers from teaching. One of our canonical historical episodes, the Scopes Trial, was produced by a state legislature barring the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Since that time, state legislatures have continued to try and sneak Christian indoctrination back into biology class, through “balanced treatment” and “intelligent design” laws that have been struck down in court, because they were pretexts for religious indoctrination. (To be clear, there is no constitutional requirement that precludes teachers from talking about creation. Thanks to academic freedom, they can do this. What is unconstitutional is the state legislature coming in and trying to require a religious belief be taught in biology class.)
Social conservatives have not confined their objections to the teachings of the great biologist who called into question their beliefs about the centrality of humans in the story of the universe. They don’t like sex education much either, and routinely attempt to put limitations on students learning basic human biology.
Recently, conservatives have found a new part of the curriculum that they dislike- critical race theory. I do have to concede that, unlike objections to evolution and sex education, which are nothing more that conservatives being upset that reality conflicts with their ideology, critical race theory is a far more controversial area of study, one that I have my own critiques of. Nonetheless, the conservative response has not been simply to critique it, but to try and ban it from the classroom. State legislatures are proposing, and sometimes passing, laws that seek to prevent it from being taught. The Idaho State Legislature has passed a new budget that singles out critical race theory as something that must be cut from the Boise State curriculum.
Now, of course, both sides do, in fact, sometimes do try to step on academic freedom. Liberal student groups have called for Professor Amy Wax, a very controversial professor who espouses theories that I and many others find to be racist, to be fired. And there have been a rash of attempts to discipline or fire professors for such things as putting a censored version of the n-word in an exam hypothetical or describing an expression apparently common among Chinese businesspeople which sounds too much like a racial slur in English. There are also the examples of academics who faced extreme harassment and defamation campaigns for publishing theories that left-wing activists did not like, described in Alice Dreger’s excellent Galileo’s Middle Finger. To be clear, this isn’t good either. Everyone, of all political stripes, should care about academic freedom.
But its the conservatives who seem to like to go to the state legislature. And this is particularly bad. At least Prof. Wax’s fate is held in the hands of her colleagues, who are themselves educators and have a vested interest in preserving a norm of academic freedom so they can do their own work. State legislators, on the other hand, can let their anti-intellectual flag fly and not worry about the consequences.
But I do. Darwin himself could have never completed his work if he had been American, employed at a public university, and a 19th Century state legislature had gotten wind of what he was doing. We take our incredible research and development capacity (most recently on display in the development of coronavirus vaccines) for granted, but it’s the product of academics who feel free to go wherever the facts take them. We should zealously guard this freedom, and oppose any efforts by legislatures to take it away, no matter what we think about the curriculum.