The Danger of Silence When Academic Freedom Is Under Threat

Before Clark Kerr was president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967, he was a faculty member working on a committee to evaluate colleagues who had refused to sign California’s new loyalty oath, which included, among other points, an explicit disavowal of membership in the Communist Party. In the wake of his death in 2003, The Daily Bruin reported that even though Kerr had signed the loyalty oath, he “also disagreed with the idea and rallied faculty against the regents’ policy.” This is a generous interpretation, given that Kerr himself in volume two of his memoir makes clear that he despised Communism—“I was totally opposed to communism”—and only “rallied” for a subset of the faculty who offered proof to his committee that they were not members of the Communist Party.

Kerr and his fellow faculty committee members actually recommended that several colleagues should be fired, without any indication that they had committed any harms or clear evidence of their membership in the Communist Party. These people were recommended for termination because no one could substantiate that the person was not a Communist. (My statistics and philosophy colleagues can surely wax poetic about the struggles of trying to prove a negative.) With whitewashed histories about figures like Kerr, as we see in The Daily Bruin and elsewhere, it is small wonder that we have a limited common understanding about how rank-and-file faculty members acted during this time of censorship.

Defenders of political repression during the Red Scares pushed the need to have an expansive understanding of Communism. Senator Joseph McCarthy, in an interview with U.S. News & World Report in 1953, explicitly stated that he was going to target “Communists and Communist thinkers” (emphasis added) within education. This perspective trickled down to everyday people. For instance, in Priests of Our Democracy, Marjorie Heins described how one academic’s building superintendent told FBI agents that the “frequent interracial gatherings” at the apartment showed his “communist inclinations.”

It is true that, at the height of the Red Scares, academic freedom was more of an idea than a legal right (the latter would not occur until judges decided later court cases). Still, faculty responses ran the gamut. Some people informed on their colleagues. Most, however, contributed by doing absolutely nothing. They didn’t sign petitions when they were circulated, nor did they put pressure on university administration to protect their peers. They taught their classes and did their research and kept their heads down.

Even though the number of professors directly investigated and subsequently fired during the Red Scares was small, this culture of fear still created a seismic shock to U.S. higher education that spurred academics to comply in advance and to self-censor. As noted in a review of a recent book on this time period in The New Yorker, the small number of firings was “all it took to set off a wave of anticipatory obedience.”

When we think of higher education’s response to political repression, many of our minds first turn to the decisions of presidents and boards. While they may be the primary decision-makers, they are not the only ones with power. Faculty and staff also have a role to play. This has always been the case. A recurring theme across histories of the Red Scares period is that if the faculty had shown solidarity, with a meaningful share of faculty within an institution refusing to sign things like loyalty oaths, the damage to academic freedom could have been averted or greatly lessened.

Let’s talk about the value of solidarity. Recently, senior leaders at the University of California, Los Angeles, made overtures to work with the Trump administration after receiving a settlement proposal that required the university to restrict freedom of speech and expression on campus and to pay $1.2 billion to the federal government. The UCLA Faculty Association and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, along with the American Association of University Professors and other unions, sued the administration.

The judge issued a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration, writing that the administration used a “playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.” (A ProPublica and Chronicle of Higher Education investigation detailed how the administration tasked lawyers to “rapidly ‘find’ evidence backing a preordained conclusion” at UCLA.)

Last month, the Trump administration dropped its appeal of that ruling. While the case itself proceeds, this means that unions were the ones who protected academic freedom at UCLA, not the institution’s senior leadership.

Faculty unions can provide some scaffolding to make it easier for faculty members to find ways to act together. But if you can’t join a union at your institution (seriously, join your union!), it can be just as important to join organizations like local chapters of the AAUP (which has already shown a willingness to fight government repression that directly contradicts their past actions during the Red Scares). United Academics of Maryland at the University of Maryland, College Park (affiliated with the AAUP), which is not an official bargaining organization, still worked collectively to win nearly $9 million for workers at risk of losing their jobs due to canceled federal contracts.

I particularly call on people with the (limited) protections of tenure. We have seen a world where the people with the most power do nothing while people in the most precarious positions put their literal bodies on the line. A corollary in our past is that Harry Keyishian—the lead plaintiff in the SCOTUS case that bears his name and eventually enshrined faculty’s right to academic freedom—was a contingent lecturer at the University at Buffalo who had not yet completed his dissertation when he challenged the state of New York’s loyalty oath. His co-plaintiffs included other lecturers, untenured professors and a staff member. It may seem obvious, but I’ll be explicit: Faculty with tenure should summon the same level of courage as an all-but-dissertation lecturer or untenured assistant professor to fight against attacks on academic freedom.

I know there are real risks to standing up for what is right. But that’s always been the case. In the ’50s, people who refused loyalty oaths or stood with their targeted colleagues had to worry about blacklists for work, having their passport confiscated, being followed by government agents and having their phone calls recorded, in addition to other surveillance tactics. Legislation at the time made those fears even more warranted. Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, the so-called Concentration Camp Law, made it legal for the president to detain those suspected of potential espionage or sabotage. The language of the act made clear that holding “communist views” could qualify someone for detention: “In the United States those individuals who knowingly and willfully participate in the world Communist movement, when they so participate, in effect repudiate their allegiance to the United States.”

Still, the potential harms of silence are even more devastating. In higher education, historians have noted how during the Red Scares faculty would stay silent in order to protect the “reputation” of their university, and in doing so create irreparable harm to their community.

Indeed, Victor S. Navasky’s Naming Names, one of the best books explaining why people aid political repression, details how artists and organizations in Hollywood during the 1950s “accepted the illusion of inevitability and in so doing collaborated in the perpetuation of social evil.” He also lamented how “trust, our most cherished of possessions, was dissipated and the possibility of true community polluted by the advent of symbolic betrayal and literal collaboration.” To put it simply, Navasky’s work chronicles the indignities that occur “when the citizen delegates his conscience to the state.”

Other examples of solidarity in action are the folks across this country who have banded together to protect their neighbors. The people of Minneapolis and surrounding areas have found ways to unite through enormous upheaval and the “deaths [of at least two of their residents] at the hands of federal immigration agents” (we will not know for a long time how many people have died at the hands of agents of the state in this occupation). Residents in Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland and other cities have found their own unique ways of resisting occupation. Regardless of what the federal government states, these cities, and others like them, are still being terrorized as I write this column. And yet, the people press on, knowing there is a chance they will be murdered and then have their character smeared by politicians who will label them domestic terrorists.

This work continues because solidarity and community are the key weapons against authoritarianism. Across the many books I have read for this series, historians cataloged the ways the Red Scares made betrayal expected and distrust the norm.

What if faculty had protected each other in the past? What if we chose to support each other right now? Action can take many forms: offering to guest lecture for fellow academics while they protect their communities, sending mutual aid, pushing our institutional leadership to protect our international students and colleagues, refusing grants pushing us to produce propaganda, or maybe, just maybe, considering withholding our labor when the leadership of our university collaborates with authoritarianism. When we move in a group, we make it less likely that a single individual is targeted.

It is frightening to consider a world where I am fired because I wrote this column. It is more frightening to imagine a world where I stayed silent and allowed a colleague, a student, a fellow human being to be targeted by the government. As Martin Luther King Jr. noted in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” it is a “strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills … Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.” Change requires action. Action requires courage. And, hey, a little bit of courage is contagious.