One measure of the fragile state of many democracies is the way in which public universities have come under attack around the world. A new monthly podcast series, produced as part of the Global Democracy Commons project, seeks to address the myriad forces seeking to foreclose public universities as spaces of critique and democratic protest across the globe.
The series explores diverse trends such as related to the defunding of higher education; its redefinition as a private not a public good; the increasing authoritarian nature of university management; the use of culture wars and discourses of civility to police classrooms; the waves of layoffs and closures of departments and programs; and the attempts to delimit academic freedom, free speech, and rights of assembly and protest.
We hope our conversations with those who work in higher education around the world will allow us to consider the degree to which the university has become the canary in the coal mine for the fate of democracy.
Episode 1: Understanding Academic Freedom: Interview with Hank Reichman
To mark the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, and the introduction of new restrictions on protests at the University of California and at over a 100 campuses across the U.S., our first podcast explores the relationship of free speech and academic freedom to the fragile history of democracy in America over the past century.
James Vernon, Director of the Global Democracy Commons, talks to Hank Reichman, Professor Emeritus at Cal State East Bay and a former AAUP vice-president who chaired its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure for almost a decade, from 2012-2021. A new edition of his last book, Understanding Academic Freedom, will be out in Spring 2025.
Podcast Transcript
WOMAN’S VOICE: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
JAMES VERNON: Hello, my name is James Vernon. And I’m a Professor of History and Director of the Global Democracy Commons at the University of California, Berkeley. Welcome to the first of a new series of podcasts on democracy and the public University.
These podcasts will explore how universities around the world are increasingly being targeted as spaces of debate, critique and protest. We hope our conversations will allow us to understand why universities have become the canary in the coal mine for the fragile state of democracy in so many continents and countries.
And I’m really thrilled today to start this podcast series in conversation with Professor Hank Reichman. Hank is a Professor Emeritus of History at the California State University East Bay. He’s also a former AAUP vice president, and chaired its committee A on academic freedom and tenure for almost a decade between 2012 and 2021.
In the last few years, he’s been busy in retirement and has published no less than two books about academic freedom, The Future of Academic Freedom, that came out in 2019, and two years later, Understanding Academic Freedom, a revised edition of which he’s just finishing up and will be out, hopefully, this coming spring.
It’s a particular pleasure to begin this podcast series with Hank because he received his PhD at Berkeley where he worked with my former and much missed late colleague Reggie Zelnik. Reggie arrived in Berkeley 60 years ago in 1964.
And in his very first semester as a junior, an untenured faculty member, became an active supporter of the free speech movement which had begun that fall 60 years ago this very week. So welcome, Hank, and we should welcome Reggie wherever he is looking down on us for this conversation.
HANK REICHMAN: Thank you, James that very kind welcome. And, yes, I think of Reggie almost every day, particularly in these difficult times.
JAMES VERNON: Indeed. Well, let’s start then with talking about the free speech movement. It seems like the obvious place to start this conversation. It’s an odd time right now to be celebrating its 60th anniversary, when just a few months ago, the University of California set new rules and limits on student protest on campuses.
Like over 100 other campuses across the country, those rules were a response to the protests mainly last spring in support of Gaza. And they’ve sought to do various things like outlaw encampments, the use of face masks, as well as introducing new time and place restrictions with the threat of arrest and suspension to students. In this context, I’m wondering how we should think about the legacies or the importance of the free speech movement at Berkeley.
HANK REICHMAN: Well, I think, James, one aspects of the free speech movement is how near it was in time to the McCarthy era. In 1964, the University of California at Berkeley was still recovering from the loyalty oath controversy of the early and mid 1950s.
And even though students, of course, coming on campus were already not of that generation, most of the faculty and the administration and even some of the older students were still working under the legacy of those times and the fears that accompanied them.
And for many people, the response to the McCarthy era is not dissimilar, I think, to the response of some administrators and probably more than a few faculty members today, which is maybe we should sacrifice the broader ability of faculty and students to speak out as citizens in order to retain and protect the most important elements of academic freedom, the freedom and research and in the classroom and in teaching.
And what the free speech movement did was to throw cold water on that notion that somehow you could have academic freedom in the laboratory, the library, the classroom, but not have it on the quad and in the streets.
And free speech movement sought to extend principles of free speech to political activism by students that was not necessarily part of their formal education. What I would argue, and I think many faculty members would argue, was an important and remains to this day a very important part of the holistic college experience of what it means to be an educated person.
And, indeed, universities not only provide formal training and education and research facilities, et cetera, but we also provide an environment in which young people in particular, but also ourselves, the faculty and staff, can exercise their rights in an environment that is, by its very definition, perhaps the most conducive to diverse and even dangerous thinking. Without fear of the kind of repression that might happen in a corporation in other places of work, in a shopping mall or what have you.
JAMES VERNON: Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, we’re both historians that this being the 60th year, it reminds us in some ways how short the history of free speech on university campuses has been.
HANK REICHMAN: Yes, that’s true. That’s definitely true. And even, in fact, we think about academic freedom, which did not initially encompass this kind of broad sense of free speech for students, although I think the founders of the AAUP back in the early 20th century who first articulated most clearly the principles of American academic freedom.
I think they would have been sympathetic. And, indeed, they were themselves mainly political progressives. Nonetheless, I think the scope of what we have come to envision as appropriate for a contemporary university campus since the 1960s, arguably first emerges some places in the 1930s.
JAMES VERNON: Can we talk about that a little bit because it’s really interesting to think about the free speech movement as, in some ways, a product of the McCarthyite era. And it’s equally interesting to think about the principle of academic freedom being articulated in a moment in the 1920s and the 1930s by the founders of the AAUP at a time when fascism seemed to be very present in Europe and not exactly absent in the United States. So could you say a little bit more about the context in which the AAUP was founded and why academic freedom was such an important principle to be articulated at that moment?
HANK REICHMAN: Well, actually the AAUP is founded a bit before that. It was founded in 1915. And in its first year it produced a document that I would argue is still, to this day– despite some archaic language and a little the kind of whiff of elitism that came from these professors, all of whom were an elite, mainly private universities– still is, I think, the best single document articulating the principles of American academic freedom.
I mean, it’s obviously been expanded upon and developed over the years. And they were responding, of course, not just to issues of academic freedom, but they were, as I’ve argued elsewhere, they were motivated by two complementary, but in some respects, contradictory elements.
One was professionalism. They desired– as many people in the Progressive Era did, doctors, attorneys, et cetera– to define the rights of a profession. And they saw academia, not just any particular discipline, but scholarship as a whole, as a profession in the same way that medicine, for example, is a profession.
And in medicine, we don’t say that legislatures should determine what makes a good doctor. Doctors should determine that, people educated in medicine. And the same thing for professors. And that’s what they were fighting for, professional autonomy. At the same time, they were also political progressives. And this was the Progressive Era, the time when we got popular election of senators, when the income tax was adopted.
And they saw the universities as contributing to the progress of democracy and wanted to see that strengthened. Now, the interesting thing is that it was immediately challenged within a couple of years by American entry into World War 1. And, in fact, the AAUP, particularly while– put it nicely, they dropped the ball. I mean, they basically most of their leaders– not all, but most of their leaders just joined in the patriotic enthusiasms, willing to silence faculty members who disagreed.
Most notably, a Columbia professor at the time, James McKeen Cattell, who was one of the founders of the AAUP and was fired for his anti-war activism, prompting, by the way, Charles Beard to resign, et cetera. So that was their push.
When in the 1930s, as you say, fascism began to develop, the AAUP and many others sought allies and sought to strengthen the Democratic element in universities. And they allied at the time with the Association of American Colleges, which at the time represented mainly small private institutions. But once again, it was their desire to strengthen both democracy and progress and professionalism.
That was behind it because in the 1930s, the academic profession was in terrible shape. I mean, very few people were tenured. The tenure system had only taken off at a handful of elite schools, and even there was quite limited.
And faculty members were there, there was depression, their salaries were going down, et cetera. They had little power. And so the AUP then sought, once again, to ally their professional interest with political progressivism.
And I think that’s kind of a major lesson about American academic freedom is not to say that academic freedom can’t or shouldn’t protect conservative and even anti-progressive voices among the faculty. It definitely should.
And indeed, there have been conservative leaders in the AUP over the years. But I think the sentiment of American academic freedom has often been shaped by this kind of dual thrust of on the one hand, attempting to define a profession, but on the other hand, aiming for progress and serving democracy. And that comes, I think, ultimately from the justification of academic freedom.
It’s not just a professional right because we know better and others don’t, but because the whole raison d’etre of our profession, similarly to the profession of being a doctor, is to serve. And in our case, to serve a democratic society by providing informed opinion, informed research, and informed citizens.
JAMES VERNON: Wonderful. That’s a wonderful demonstration of the way in which academic freedom and indeed free speech, where the free speech movement, are intricately connected to the history of American democracy and the way in which university professors see the university as a key instrument of helping to build democratic life in the United States in different types of ways.
And I think sometimes we think of academic freedom as a technical issue, which is divorced from those wider contexts. So I’m very grateful for you reminding us of that important longer history of the principle of academic freedom. I want to move on.
I want to actually just come back to the University of California again because as you know, last month the faculty associations at the University of California filed a unprecedented unfair labor practice complaint against the Uc system for interfering with faculties’ protected rights to academic freedom and free speech, particularly in regards to the question of Palestine and the war on Gaza.
Now, that complaint accused the University of California of three things, of threatening to discipline faculty who supported student encampments. Indeed, we saw some faculty arrested for their roles at student and campus encampments. Using their classrooms to do teaching or to encourage students to join protests.
And prohibiting faculty from speaking to students and graduate students or, indeed, other faculty about the strike that the graduate Student Union, the UAW, had called for as an unfair labor practice because it felt the academic freedom of its members had been infringed by the university for their involvement in supporting protests about Gaza.
So it appears as though the Uc regents and the university leaders across the system issued some of those directives because they seem sympathetic to an idea of institutional neutrality. And this is a term that we’re hearing more and more about in the last year.
So I’m wondering whether you can say a little about what you think is meant when university leaders invoke the term institutional neutrality. Some faculty are also very supportive of this idea. And then perhaps we can begin to explain how that idea is being used to set new limits on ideas of academic freedom or free speech on campuses.
HANK REICHMAN: Well, let me preface my remarks by institutional neutrality to say something really quickly about that ULP because I had the distinct honor and pleasure of speaking at a press conference at UCLA when announcing the filing of the ULP.
And I think it is– I really want to compliment the faculty associations and the Uc for taking this initiative. I’ve actually read the entire ULP– well, 55 pages. I did not read the full 581 pages with all the exhibits– and it’s really an impressive piece of work. So I wanted to make that clear. As the institutional neutrality, can you–
JAMES VERNON: Just before we get on to institutional neutrality, it’s maybe worth emphasizing what a dramatic thing it is for faculty associations and for people not as familiar with the University of California system. We should preface this by saying that faculty at the University of California have no union, but they have faculty associations that seek to protect the rights and interests of faculty.
And many of those faculty associations are allied with the AAUP. But usually faculty have never ever before filed a complaint against their employers for infringing their protected rights to academic freedom and freedom of speech. So it is a really historic moment. It’s a sign of where we’re at, I think, on university campuses.
HANK REICHMAN: I certainly agree. I certainly think so. I want to just– a little correction here is that not all Uc faculty don’t have a union. Remember, about something like 40% of the Uc faculty are not on the tenure track. They’re not so-called senate faculty, and they are represented by the AFT.
JAMES VERNON: And we will come back to the question of tenure and who gets it and who does not.
HANK REICHMAN: Yeah. But anyway, yes, no, I do think this is– it is a major step. And in particular because it speaks not to– people think of unions or even non-union or union-like organizations, like the faculty association, using what is essentially labor of the higher education employer-employee relations act. They see that mainly for economic reasons.
And what is important here is this is on basic principles of free speech and academic freedom in defense not only of the faculty’s rights, but objectively of the students’ rights. And I thought it was a very bold and courageous move, whatever the result may be.
Turning now back to institutional neutrality, I think this is a perfect example of an idea that has a kernel of truth to it, important kernel of truth, but can be used and abused by various interests. The kernel of truth is this, universities are not in the business of taking positions on issues of academic controversy.
They are neither there to defend or critique the ideas advanced by any of their faculty members. What they are there to do as an institution is to defend the right of their faculty members, to advance ideas no matter how controversial. And leave it to the faculty to decide for themselves, according to their discipline, what is a legitimate academic scholarly idea and what fails the tests of scholarship.
So, for instance, in principle, if a university president is asked, what is the university’s position on well, let’s say climate change? Is our climate changing and what is causing it? The university could very simply say the university has no formal position, but all our scientists in that field agree that the climate is changing and human activity is behind it.
And if there is a dissenting scientist on the faculty who believes differently, the university can defend that person’s right to do that as well. That’s where the principle should apply. In fact, the calls we are hearing now for institutional neutrality are not so much about that.
Because, in fact, a university that really does defend the academic freedom of its faculty members in research and teaching, no matter what their positions may be, should and then feel freer to take its own positions where the university is by its definition required to take a position. Because actually, when we think about this question of neutrality, it’s constantly talking about the University can’t take formal positions. What is a formal position?
A formal position is a statement. But, in fact, as the old saying goes, actions often speak louder than words. And, indeed, the university, by its very existence, is compelled to take actions that are not neutral. When students demonstrate on campus, the university is compelled to take actions on how to deal with that demonstration. Should the demonstration become disruptive, become violent? What have you? And it has to be able to do that.
Now, in doing that, it is taking a position. Now, what kind of position is important? Is it a position defending the free speech of the demonstrators insofar as they are not unduly– and unduly is, of course, a matter of interpretation– restricting the free speech rights or endangering the lives or safety of those others on campus?
They must make a decision about that. I would argue, of course, that in doing so, it’s difficult. Another point about neutrality is the university can’t be neutral when the University itself is the subject of the political attacks.
And, indeed, this is what we’re seeing now. And this goes back to the McCarthy era. Remember, I was saying that one of the tendencies of many faculty members, and certainly of the university administration, back in the early 1960s was if we keep all this political controversy off campus, we will be able– and make ourselves look like we’re not involved in politics– we will be able to defend what’s really important, the rights of faculty members and students in research and teaching.
And there’s something to that. That’s exactly what we’re hearing today about institutional neutrality. But it isn’t neutral because the attack is on the university as, indeed, a political actor. So, for example, the attacks on so-called DEI, Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion initiatives, which are designed– sometimes well designed, sometimes poorly designed– to make the university more open to a variety of people and hence a variety of viewpoints.
The attacks on those are attacks on the basic structure of what is the university about. Is it a Democratic institution or is it an institution designed to serve only the privileged, only the wealthy, only whatever group you want.
So I think we have to be very careful about this institutional neutrality. I understand why many faculty members believe that it will protect us from political attack. But, in fact, it also can be a Trojan Horse for itself being a political attack. And, indeed, that’s what I think it has become in many universities, including, I fear, at the University of California.
JAMES VERNON: Yeah, I mean, there is a particular irony that many of the new rules about student protest that have been passed on so many campuses across the United States. One important component of them ask for the permitting of protests against the university by the university itself.
Of course, the other element of this, which has also been around for a while but we’re hearing much more about it in recent years has been what is sometimes called the principles of civility and community that are written into university regulations that students and faculty are meant to follow.
Do you think that’s coming from a different place? Do you think that saying that free speech in particular has to be modified by being– ensuring that all members of the community are equally respected or that the forms of debate and engagement follow the prescriptions of civility are coming from a place, again, of trying to find almost a neutral spot on campus life?
HANK REICHMAN: Well, look, I think universities and university faculty members in particular, have a professional obligation to model for our students and for the society reasoned debate. The question is not being civil, although reasoned debate usually can be conducted best when people are acting civilly to each other and not cursing each other or engaging in violence, et cetera.
But sometimes the term civility is used basically, don’t be passionate. And there’s a lot of things, unfortunately, to be passionate about in the world. So I think we have to model reasoned debate and discussion. And one of the great failures of universities over the last year has been that in increasingly resorting to repression or regulation rather than encouraging reasoned discussion.
I mean, think of how many great teachings could have been done from multiple points of view about the Gaza war instead of just putting out all these new time, place, manner restrictions, et cetera. So I think that that’s the obligation we have. But if civility is going to be used as a club to keep people from speaking their minds– and let’s remember, students are students. They’re young, they’re here to learn. And, frankly, you can’t learn unless you make mistakes.
And so students in their expression are going to make mistakes, and that’s part of the learning. I mean, heck, when I was a student, I was a political activist. And looking back on it, there’s a lot of things I did I would never consider doing today, but I’m no longer 20 years old. And so we need to be tolerant of that. We need to provide not repression but guidance. And the guidance is not lecturing people on, be civil. It’s modeling reasoned debate, providing guidelines, et cetera.
And so that’s what I think is called for. And the other element of it, this thing that speech that makes other people uncomfortable. Speech can endanger other people. There is a difference between harassment and just simply saying something that people don’t want to hear. And a lot of that is contextual.
Somebody who says that Israel should be driven into the sea, if they say that in the context of debate in class, yes, it may be an anti-Semitic comment but it is in part of a discussion and needs to be addressed. And if it makes some students uncomfortable, then that has to be dealt with.
But if someone paints it on the windows or walls of a synagogue, that’s harassment. That’s not protected by speech. And the boundaries aren’t, of course, as in anything else, they’re never entirely clear, but they can be drawn by reasonable people.
And so I think the thing is that we always and certainly– this is an obligation for faculty members in the classroom– we always must be respectful for students as individuals, but we don’t have to show respect for ideas that we know do not pass the test of our disciplines.
JAMES VERNON: Great. We’ve been talking a lot about some of the historical parallels of the past to the present and some of the ways in which current developments have echoes of the past. And it’s certainly been the case that for all of our lives universities have always been at the center of various types of culture wars, that universities have always been at the center of various forms of debate.
And we’ve talked about the free speech movement but we probably both remember the debates around political correctness in the 1980s and we both been around the– debates around critical race theory and gender neutrality, and now Israel-Palestine.
So I guess my question is, are we seeing just history repeating itself here in new terms or do you see that there’s something new about what’s been going on in the last few years? And I don’t want to imply that this is simply a consequence of the war on Gaza because it seems to be more about the political climate of the United States and the way in which that’s changed over the past decade.
But to me, at least, there seems something novel going on when you’re having congressional hearings of university leaders and you have the proliferation of various types of campus watchdogs and increasingly interventionist regents and donors trying to influence university leaders and faculty. Do you think I’m being alarmist or do you also share my sense that we’re witnessing an intensification of these concerns– of the ways in which universities are positioned within culture wars?
HANK REICHMAN: Well, I wish, James, I could say you were being alarmist, but I don’t think you are. I tend to agree with you. Marxists have the old phrase, the dialectic works by quantity, sometimes turns into quality. That a small quantitative changes ultimately result in a whole qualitative change.
And I think something like that is what we’ve seen. In, you mentioned, introducing me, if I can be crass and make a plug for myself, that my book, Understanding Academic Freedom, I’ve completed a second edition that– the publication date, by the way, is March 25– and it’s all been proof read. I can’t make any more changes and et cetera.
And in there I add a whole section into the introduction called the crisis of academic freedom because when I first wrote that book in 2021, I thought, well, this will last for maybe a decade as a kind of a good introduction to academic freedom that faculty members can use and other people as well. And suddenly I realized that the events of the past few years had changed things dramatically, and it needed already a new edition.
And the reason was is I think I tried to articulate that in the book. I came up with the notion that we have entered what I call the crisis of academic freedom, which I argue or could argue much more thoroughly in another context, is the worst crisis for academic freedom in our modern history, certainly since the founding of the AAUP in the beginning of the 20th century.
Worse still than the McCarthy era. Because in the McCarthy era this was– the forces behind Senator McCarthy, et cetera, they’re real. They were not attacking higher education or education per se, they were attacking liberalism and they were, by and large, losing even given the damage they were doing, including to higher education. I think now that attack– and it’s not an accident that Donald Trump is a pupil, shall we say, of Roy Cohn’s– and that attack is now far more powerful than it was back in the 1950s.
And I would argue– and we’ll get to this in a few because I know what your next– where you want to move the conversation– and the universities I think are arguably in a weaker position as institutions to defend themselves, especially– and since, in fact, the attack is not only on the universities, it’s on k-12 education, it’s on major groups of the population, it’s on the rights of women, et cetera.
It’s a broad-based assault so I don’t think you’re being alarmist. I do think what we’re seeing now is a really dangerous moment certainly in higher education. And it’s not at all clear to me, unfortunately, that we will survive it in the sense that universities aren’t going to disappear. But universities as the kinds of agents for democratic change and knowledge development that we have seen in the past will be, if not nonexistent, certainly greatly kneecapped, shall we say.
JAMES VERNON: Yeah. OK, so let’s– we’ve been talking almost exclusively about the nature of free speech and academic freedom in relationship to the state of American democracy. And so I want to move that conversation on, as you’ve already indicated, to thinking about how academic and free speech is also derived and shaped by the changing economic conditions that universities operate in.
And it’s often been suggested that the levels of state disinvestment that we’ve seen from public universities, which began in the 1970s, most infamously by Ronald Reagan in California wanting to sort out the mess of student protests at Berkeley, that withdrawing the state funding from public universities was a way of trying to discipline protesting students and faculty.
And particularly it’s also been suggested that state disinvestment coincided not accidentally with the very decades when the student population was increasingly no longer majority white. So one of the arguments that’s often made about the perilous position of academic freedom and free speech on universities is that after now half a century of state disinvestment, university leaders are so desperate to attract new types of commercial or philanthropic income that they don’t want to alienate investors or donors. And so, therefore, embrace this new rhetoric of institutional neutrality.
So do you think that the economic conditions that state disinvestment has led has created a particularly fertile environment for trying to prohibit or prescribe the forms of academic freedom and free speech on university campuses?
HANK REICHMAN: Well, I think it certainly has in the– although it should be noted that state investment, particularly at federal and state government investment in the universities, is not without its restrictions on freedom, et cetera.
I mean, for example, I mean, the great increase in federal investment in higher education in the 1950s and ’60s, much of it went to fund research for the military industrial complex that itself violated principles of academic freedom by being secret.
So I think we should– the other thing is I don’t think we should idealize the notion of what– well, let me put it this way, I don’t think we should assume that the conditions of the three postwar decades, from 1945 to 1975, were typical of the history of higher education in the United States or anywhere. This was a period of remarkable expansion in American higher education, yet even then universities were often felt themselves compelled to strive for new sources of funding, state budgets were limited.
There’s a very interesting book I read, just came out about two years ago or three years ago, about the University of Illinois, about two controversies in the 1960s around the academic freedom there. One of which was the Leo Koch controversy, a young faculty member biologist who was fired for his statements in support of pre-marital sex, which you would think from today’s vantage point is like, huh?
But it was a very big and very important case in the AUP’s history. This is in 1964. And a lot of it was because the president was desperately afraid that the legislature was going to cut off funding for expansion for the University of Illinois. So even in the flush times this was the case. But I do think, obviously, universities are in many ways now vulnerable in new ways, certainly, to private interference.
And even this is even more true now of private universities because in the 1960s, say, a private university, say, Columbia or Harvard, was getting a lot of its funding from the federal government. So in that sense had become almost– what’s the opposite of privatized? I don’t know.
But whereas now both private and public institutions are increasingly relying on corporate donations, so-called public-private partnerships, et cetera, which gives donors private interests, corporations, perhaps more say than they might have a couple of decades ago in university affairs.
JAMES VERNON: Including, of course, in what types of faculty are actually hired in which areas of academic study, which has a powerful relationship to what’s taught in the classroom and what is said and not said on university campuses.
HANK REICHMAN: Exactly. And that is a new development. That is something that in the past neither the state nor the private donors could say which faculty we want you to hire. I mean, the state can always say to a public university, Berkeley doesn’t have a medical school because there’s one in San Francisco. And they won’t let you start one even if you want one. That’s their right.
And it’s their right to tell the Cal States that they can’t offer a PhD or have a law school. But who’s going to be hired in the political science department? Who’s going to be hired to do climate studies is not– it’s something that the university itself and hopefully within the university, mainly the faculty and the relevant faculty get to decide.
And that has always been the case until recently with these donations and grants, and now some of them coming from state governments as well earmarked to hire a particular kind of faculty member in a particular kind of way, irrespective of what the qualified faculty members on the campus believe. And that is very, very troubling.
JAMES VERNON: I want to close out with a last question. Although as I’m thinking about it, I’m realizing that we probably should have made time to talk about the way in which the rising levels of student debt also sometimes forms a constraint upon the activities of students and the abilities of students to fully participate in the sort of civic life of university campuses.
But I want to focus on faculty and this question of academic freedom because the other way that people talk about the erosion of academic freedom on university campuses as being rooted in economic conditions is the ways in which faculty on universities, the labor force of faculty on universities have changed quite dramatically over the last two decades.
And you touched on this earlier, talking about the important distinction between tenured faculty and untenured faculty. And we’re now in a position where a ridiculous percentage of teaching faculty at public universities, around 70% across the country are untenured because they’re cheaper to hire and they’re easier to fire than tenured faculty.
So can you say something about why tenure is so important to the protection of academic freedom. Because so often in the news we hear tenure being represented as a type of sinecure for academics, that we’re the last profession to have a job for life, and that, to many people, seems wrong.
So can you explain why the institution of tenure is so important to the practice of academic freedom, and why so many of us are worried about the casualization of teaching within higher education and the growth of untenured– the size of the untenured population of teaching faculty.
HANK REICHMAN: Well, I think the first thing to emphasize is what tenure is and what it isn’t. It isn’t a guarantee of lifetime employment. What it is a guarantee that after a suitable probationary period in which you can be dismissed, faculty member who has proven her or his qualification as a researcher or teacher, depending upon– and teacher, depending upon what the job is, that person has the presumption of reappointment.
That they will be reappointed and can only be dismissed under a couple of conditions, but the most important one is for cause. And cause determined after a due process evidentiary hearing, before an elected body of faculty members, with the university having the obligation to prove that the person– there is cause.
Now, what is the cause? There are obvious things. Just not doing the job is the obvious one. Conduct completely inappropriate for the profession, sexual harassment, for example. There are a number of other things. Different institutions will define it differently. The AUP has made clear, however, that it shouldn’t be simply bad performance evaluations or it shouldn’t just be not being a team player or any of that kind of stuff.
And, indeed, tenured faculty members are all the time dismissed for cause after such due process. Although more often than not, what happens is when a due process is initiated, the faculty member may choose to retire or leave voluntarily, but the effect is the same.
So that’s what not– that’s what tenure is. The problem, of course, and the reason for that is that that system does two things. First, it protects the individual faculty member from being dismissed because his or her views have become controversial or they’ve been criticized, et cetera, et cetera, for whatever reason, from violation of their academic freedom.
The second is important too is that if there are enough tenured faculty members who feel secure enough in their job, that they can speak out in defense of a colleague who is being disciplined, then that strengthens the academic freedom of everyone, including the non-tenured.
And now in the point where only a minority of the faculty are tenured and the great majority have no access to tenured– they’re not even probationary– the ability of the tenured faculty to defend not only their untenured colleagues but themselves is greatly, greatly weakened.
And I think one of the things to point out about people who are hired on term contracts, often as short as one quarter or one semester, those people can be dismissed by simply non-renewal of their contract.
And one of the most interesting cases we had in the AAUP was a completely untenured philosophy instructor at a Colorado community college who criticized a new curriculum that was being imposed upon him. He agreed to teach it because it was his job, but he voiced criticism of it. And they fired him immediately because they said he was a terrible teacher. There was no evidence of it, by the way.
Now, this was interesting because he gave the AAUP the opportunity to investigate, and we condemned this and put them on our censure list, but the investigating committee pointed out that a more clever administration might have simply just kept their mouths shut and at the end of the semester just simply said, we don’t need you anymore.
Even though this guy, by the way, had been teaching for multiple semesters and had glowing student evaluations and glowing peer evaluations up until that very moment, but they could have just simply– and who knows how many cases there are in which a faculty member is being non-renewed for the simple being told– not being told a reason, no one’s told a reason, but the reason is he insulted the dean. Somebody complained, a legislator intervened, a trustee intervened.
JAMES VERNON: I’m glad that we began by remembering Reggie in his first semester as an untenured colleague taking part in the free speech movement because it should not be underestimated how intimidating and how fearful so many of my untenured colleagues are to take part in the civic life of the campus these days.
And so, yeah, I recall that example not as a call to arms to my junior colleagues, because I think they’re not even on the tenure track. They’re in a much, much more precarious position than even Reggie was back in 1964.
And I don’t know whether you have any final thoughts on how we might try and restore the institution of tenure or improve the ways in which even those on the tenure track can help protect the practices and principles of academic freedom and free speech on campus in the types of political and economic conditions that we currently work in.
HANK REICHMAN: Well, one of the things we’ve seen, of course, is particularly among untenured faculty, but among where they’re allowed to tenured faculty as well has been the growing movement to organize unions and to unionize. And unions are not the answer to all the problems. There are strong unions, weak unions, good contracts, poor contracts, et cetera.
But is one way of at least protecting some level of due process, if not the full tenure abilities. And, indeed, some contracts have adopted procedures for people who technically and formally, according to the university, do not have tenure, but, in fact, are guaranteed what I just talked about before after a certain amount of years. And the AAUP in private we’ve sometimes called that tenure light, that its tenure in all but name, and those are things we can win for people. But, ultimately, I think we need to try to revitalize the tenure system.
And the one optimistic thing I have to say about that is the situation we face now with respect to tenure and contingency in the faculty is pretty much the same as the situation faced by our colleagues in the late 1930s when the AAUP and the AUC began work on the 1940 statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure. And their efforts led ultimately in the post years to an explosion of the tenure system. And so our context is different but there is a part of me that says, well, if they did it before, we can do it again.
JAMES VERNON: Yeah, we have to rebuild higher education and we have to rebuild the fabric of democracy in the United States through– in part through our universities. And that seems like a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much, Hank, for a fascinating conversation. It’s been a complete delight to start this podcast series talking with you.
HANK REICHMAN: Enjoyed it as well. Thank you so much for having me, James. And it really is something of an honor to be your guest on the first of this, what looks like it’s going to be a terrific series of podcasts.
JAMES VERNON: Great. Thanks so much.
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