Last week, soon after news broke that graduate-student workers at Stanford University had initiated a unionization campaign, a professor there weighed in with a public statement of solidarity.
“I support the rights of Stanford Graduate Workers to unionize,” William Giardino tweeted on April 3. That tweet, he later worried, may have violated guidelines put forward by the administration that sought to limit faculty members’ social-media use about the issue. Giardino, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, felt conflicted, and wondered if he should delete the tweet.
After an outcry, those guidelines were removed. But the administration’s since-deleted statement raises questions about the role of faculty members during graduate-worker unionization efforts, particularly at private institutions, and poses implications for academic freedom.
In response to Stanford graduate workers’ push to unionize, the university’s administration initially posted guidelines for students and faculty about the unionization effort. In an original version of the message shared with The Chronicle, Stanford included a guideline saying faculty members “should not post your opinions about union organizing on your office door, in your faculty office or on social media. You should not send letters or emails to communicate your views to graduate students regarding the pros and cons of union representation.”
The guidelines also expressly said that faculty members can discuss and share their opinions on union organizing with graduate students, as long as they don’t threaten, interrogate, promise, or coerce graduate students on the subject.
Since then, the guidelines have been updated to omit the part barring faculty from sharing their thoughts on social media, but they continue to state that faculty “should not” post opinions about union organizing on office doors or in faculty offices.
But the initial version of the guidelines struck some observers as an example of administrative overreach and a restriction of faculty freedom.
Timothy Reese Cain, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Georgia whose expertise is in labor and academic freedom, said Stanford’s initial move to restrict all faculty members’ social-media use on the topic of unionization on campus was an “explicit infringement of academic freedom.”
In an emailed statement, Stett Holbrook, a Stanford spokesperson, said academic freedom is a “core value” at Stanford and that the administration’s initial statement about social media was meant to protect graduate students from undue influence.
“The reference in the university’s FAQs to faculty posting on social media was included out of an interest to ensure that our faculty did not inadvertently infringe on graduate students’ rights during their publicly announced unionization drive,” Holbrook wrote. “It has been pointed out that this guidance could be misinterpreted as an infringement on academic freedom and we have removed it.”
Employees or Managers?
In part, the potential concerns about tenured and tenure-track faculty members exerting undue influence stem from the particular status they occupy at private institutions, according to the U.S. Supreme Court. It ruled in 1980 in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University that tenure-line faculty at such institutions have responsibilities, like participating in hiring and promotion decisions, that made them managers, not employees.
Cain said that, while barring expression about the topic of the unionization effort was a clear violation of academic freedom, Stanford could still have a “legitimate concern” if faculty members were perceived to be coercing graduate students to either join or refrain from joining the union, because, as managers, it would be a violation of the National Labor Relations Act.
“The issue here would be if a faculty member is viewed as a representative of the university, and they promise a graduate student some sort of outcome for voting one way or another, either a good outcome or a bad outcome, then they’re coercing them and they’re violating law,” Cain said.
A lot has changed in 40 years. Cain said that in the “modern era,” faculty members have become increasingly concerned that strong, centralized, administrative power has limited their voice in shared governance and has distanced them from identifying with management. Additionally, Cain said, working conditions and pay issues for faculty members have, in some cases, “pushed tenure-line faculty to either support unionization or themselves organize and unionize.”
While Stanford walked back its guidelines about posting on social media, Cain said the continued prohibition on faculty members posting opinions about the unionization efforts on their doors and in their offices raises “serious concerns” for academic freedom. It would be fine, he said, if Stanford had a blanket ban on all signage and stickers on doors and office walls in order to preserve the property; targeted bans on certain topics threaten academic freedom.
Cain added that Stanford seems to be arguing that the presence of signage or stickers expressing a view on the union organizing is inherently coercive. “That would imply that the faculty-office space creates such a power differential that just having a faculty member express their opinions in that space, in written form or in signage or on a graphic, would tend to, maybe inherently, coerce students,” he said. “I’m not a labor lawyer, but that sort of argument about a power differential there, as being inherently coercive, seems like a leap.”
The topic of graduate-student unionization is one that higher education is still navigating after a 2016 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that recognized the right of graduate students at private universities to form unions. Grad students are conducting unionization drives in increasing numbers, as part of a larger groundswell of labor activity.
For his part, Giardino, the professor who posted his support on Twitter, said that over the years, there had been many topics that Stanford probably wished faculty members didn’t discuss on social media. But he couldn’t recall administrators ever putting out a statement prohibiting speech about specific topics until the other day.
“I don’t remember any other instance within the past almost 10 years in which faculty were specifically forbidden from expressing their opinions on social media about anything,” Giardino said, “so it definitely stands out in that regard.”
The story went like this: One day, a police officer stationed near the University of South Florida’s campus watched as a car zoomed through a stop sign and barreled across a busy highway. When he caught up to the car, he found the driver overcome with emotion, tears running down her face.
Why was she so upset?
In Smith’s telling, the woman was “practically hysterical” over what she was being taught at USF. She told the cop that the university “would destroy the things she had built her very life on.”
“This,” Smith observed, “could have cost her life or that of someone else.”
The story, on its face, is absurd. Even the most rousing of lectures is unlikely to provoke reckless driving. But it was persuasive to Smith, whose son was a student at USF, then a brand-new university. She and other parents were already incensed by what they considered the anti-religious teaching at the institution and its coziness with Communism. They brought those complaints to Florida lawmakers, helping thrust USF into an existential crisis over what could and should be taught at a state-supported university.
“The question is, are we to have academic freedom without responsibility, without restraint? If so then it is not true academic freedom. It is an imitation of it,” Smith wrote in a lengthy report documenting her views.
In a note to a Florida representative, she was more aggressive. “Do I want my sons and daughters indoctrinated in the belief that there exists no right or wrong, no morality or immorality, no God, that family life has failed, that premarital relations are good, that homo-sexuality is fine? And then told, in the name of academic freedom it’s none of your business? … Then I say the parents should have unlimited freedom, even if it means seeing the professors — flattened on the floor!”
State Archives of Florida
Jane Tarr Smith
Smith had dramatic flair. But the general thrust of her argument has pulsed like an electric current through the modern history of higher education: Out-of-control liberal professors infect impressionable young people with dangerous ideas, distorting their views of what the country has been, is, and should be. But other sensibilities — like those of parents, who pay tuition, or lawmakers, who hold purse strings — also matter when it comes to curricula at public institutions. Therefore, there must be constraints on what an instructor can teach, for the sake of the students and for the sake of America.
Over the past two years, that argument has been resurrected in the form of bills that restrict how faculty members (and schoolteachers) can teach race and racism. Critics of the measures, including free-speech organizations, contend that the legislation erects political barriers where there should be none, impeding faculty members’ ability to determine their course content as they see fit.
But supporters of the bills, including Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, argue they’re necessary curtailments of leftist indoctrination. Florida tax dollars will not go toward “teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other,” DeSantis said in a 2021 news release announcing one such bill.
By examining one historical precedent to such arguments — specifically the saga that engulfed Smith and the University of South Florida — we can see this moment with fresh eyes. Today, the professoriate is in some ways better positioned to fight back than it was in the mid-1900s. Many faculty members are doing just that. Yet these bills are being introduced during a bout of public distrust of professors and what they teach. And some colleges have urged their faculty members to err on the side of caution. The contours of academic freedom are, once again, hotly contested.
Amid those and other attacks, college leaders had to determine to what lengths they would go to protect academic freedom on their campuses. Until the mid-20th century, the “Gentleman Scientist Model” was in vogue, John K. Wilson writes in his dissertation, “A History of Academic Freedom in America.” Under that model, safeguarding academic freedom “depended upon the good faith of honorable administrators following unwritten academic norms.”
How a committee of Florida lawmakers waged a crusade against higher ed and upended the lives of people in it. Read more here.
“The academy did not fight McCarthyism,” Schrecker writes. “It contributed to it.”
In the wake of those purges, and after the failure of the higher-ed establishment to defend its faculty, many academics believed they needed to be more aggressive in protecting their rights. What Wilson calls the “Liberty Model” was born. That model, which arose over years of struggle and debate, represented “a much broader sense of academic freedom, in which professors were free to express their ideas on all political issues,” he writes, “even if it offended critics and embarrassed their institutions.”
Of course, there were always criticisms, especially from conservatives. In his 1951 book God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” William F. Buckley Jr. argued that “honest and discerning scholars” must “cease to manipulate the term academic freedom for their own ends.” Rather, it “must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.” Or, put simply, those who pay should set the agenda. Those on the payroll should fall in line.
In the midst of this ideological tug-of-war, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee was born. A late-stage Southern offshoot of McCarthyism, the committee was set up in 1956 to investigate “all organizations whose principles or activities … would constitute violence, or a violation of the laws of the state.” Lawmakers initially had integration in mind, but the committee soon became a roving attack dog that hunted for evidence of Communism and homosexuality in state institutions, including Florida’s public universities.
The Johns Committee thought decency was particularly imperiled at the University of South Florida. Lawmakers trained their eyes on the campus in 1962. A group of parents organized by Smith informed the committee of its concern that professors were introducing vulgar or sacrilegious materials or touting Communism and socialism in the classroom. At the heart of their complaint was the belief that academic freedom for professors had gone too far, infringing on the rights of students to learn freely, and that it now threatened democracy.
“Should the moral laws of our universe be repealed by the professors in their demand for academic freedom?” Smith wrote in her report. “They may call it academic freedom. Others call it national suicide!”
For the Johns Committee, too, academic freedom’s ripeness for abuse was concerning. Lawmakers conducted hearings on campus of students, professors, administrators, and the university president. Though the committee’s chief counsel, Mark Hawes, acknowledged that academic freedom is “a fundamental principle … that education rests on,” legislators nevertheless disparaged certain reading materials, like a short story by J.D. Salinger. They asked how far academic freedom extended, particularly when it came to Communism. “Would it include the bringing of a member of the Communist Party here to speak on the subject of Communism, or democracy, or the isms, generally?” Hawes asked the dean of student affairs. (That’s “a very leading question,” the dean replied.)
The committee’s eventual conclusion was scathing. Yes, academic freedom had been “the very backbone” of any educational institution, Hawes told the 1963 Legislature, according to one archived rendering of his speech. However, the term was now being used to mean that educators could “run these schools without restraint of policy at all from the people or their elected representatives.”
That sort of academic freedom covers the right “to teach as they please in a state-supported school in regard to religion,” Hawes continued, clearly indignant. “… It includes the right to teach there is no right and no wrong. It includes the right to take this ordinary, everyday filth, which I call intellectual garbage, off the newsstands and put it in the classroom as required text.”
The committee did not stop at a public harangue. In 1965 it proposed an “academic freedom bill” that regulated campus speakers as well as professors’ speech and actions. According to a copy of the bill in the state’s records, it would have, among other things, required the state’s Board of Education to adopt regulations banning any higher-education employee or organization from advocating, “by word or deed,” the willful disobedience of state or national laws.
But by the time the bill was on the table, Floridians had been grappling with what it would mean for politicians to regulate professors’ speech and course content. As one USF dean observed, the Johns Committee ordeal had provoked a fundamental question: “Does the state wish to develop distinguished universities where all aspects of the truth may be pursued without fear or favor? Or does it wish to develop a group of glorified finishing schools in which scholars are unable to pursue their honest lines of inquiry or to stimulate students into creative and unfettered thinking?”
Many citizens agreed with Allen and rallied to his defense. “I just want to be counted on the record as deploring this present ‘witch hunt’ on the campus,” one woman wrote to the university. Wrote another, to Allen: “I wish to assure you that as the mother of one of your students I heartily concur with the teaching methods and materials used by the professors.” Some Floridians worried that should their state not protect academic freedom, some gifted professors would resign, and others would be discouraged from accepting jobs at Florida institutions.
Florida faculty members also made the case for academic freedom publicly, arguing it was necessary to society even though, as one professor acknowledged, it could be uncomfortable. “Nothing grows without the signs of cracking, without the snap of bark, without unlovely skin peeling,” wrote the University of Florida historian C.K. Yearley in an open letter to Florida citizens and parents, published in the press.
Yearley continued: “You have an option, of course. You can cease to grow. I will not cease to grow with you. I will move on. And others will follow and you will have great husks of brick and steel and concrete. You may derive some satisfaction from that. But you will in the estimate of thinking men have nothing but a great investment in husks.”
The academic-freedom bill died a quick death. Nearly nine years after its inception, the committee folded, too. But not before leaving a score of college employees without their jobs after they were accused of homosexual conduct. Virtually no one rallied to those employees’ defense. In that way, said Wilson in an email, the Johns Committee period reflects the “darker side of the history of academic freedom in America” — one of “straight white male professors leaving behind disempowered groups in order to carve out a narrow idea of academic freedom that would protect themselves.” Yet when the committee expanded its attack and waged a campaign against the fundamental principles of higher education, that proved to be too drastic. The committee, which suffered from several scandals, eventually lost the support of the public. USF, though weary from the fight, was still standing.
It’s possible to see today’s bills that restrict instruction about race and racism as an extension of that same impulse. It’s no coincidence, said Jeremy C. Young, senior manager for free expression and education at PEN America, that the bills arose after the murder of George Floyd and the publication of The New York Times’s 1619 Project, at a moment when the country seemed poised for a racial reckoning.
Regardless of what motivated the bills, they have proved popular among conservative state lawmakers, if not as popular with the public. According to PEN America, nearly 200 such bills, which the organization calls “educational gag orders,” were filed across the country in 2021 and 2022. Nineteen have become law, seven of which apply to higher education. This year, there has been “an increase in the complexity and scale of legislation, as lawmakers have sought to assert political control over everything from classroom speech to library content, from teachers’ professional training to field trips and extracurricular activities,” the organization wrote in a recent report.
Each historical moment has its own context, its own actors. But the rhetorical parallels between the Johns Committee period and today “are just stunning,” Young said. “Here we are fighting this battle,” he said, “and it’s a battle that’s been fought many, many times before.”
“We believe in academic freedom,” Patrick said. “But everyone has guidelines in life. Everyone has barriers.” He then said he planned to propose ending tenure for all new hires and threatened to rescind tenure for faculty members who teach critical race theory.
There are notable differences between the eras. During the McCarthy fervor, individual scholars were targeted, but the college classroom went untouched, though many academics began dropping controversial topics from their curricula, according to Schrecker, the historian of McCarthyism.
In the mid-20th century, skepticism about the value of academic freedom was broader, Wilson said in a phone interview. Now, it seems fewer people openly denounce the concept.
But there’s also a growing view among conservatives that universities are “captive to their enemies — not just containing radicals but being run by radicals,” Wilson said. “That’s language you didn’t hear in the ’50s and ’60s.” Which is not to say that criticism of faculty members as radicals has gone away. Nearly 80 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents who said they think the higher-education system is headed in the wrong direction cited professors’ bringing their political and social views into the classroom as a major reason, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey.
Professors are also much more organized than they were during the 1950s and 1960s, and more likely to speak out — at least those with job security. The instruction bans have sparked a wave of faculty opposition, particularly in Florida. Florida International University’s faculty union launched a Freedom to Teach/Freedom to Learn campaign. It held a teach-in on academic freedom, has told professors they don’t need to change how they teach because of the law, and is attempting to build political connections with teachers across the state who face similar restrictions and are natural allies, said Eric Scarffe, vice president of the union.
HB 7, the Florida law, has also been challenged in court by professors, among other groups. The law says in part that students cannot be subjected to instruction that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” them to believe certain “concepts,” including that the values of “objectivity” or “racial colorblindness” are “racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race, color, national origin, or sex” to oppress other such groups. If a university is found to have committed a “substantiated violation” of HB 7, it will not receive performance funding the following fiscal year, according to a separate law passed by Florida lawmakers.
In defending the measure in court, lawyers representing the state argued that professors do not have an individual right to academic freedom. Rather, that right, to the extent it exists, belongs to universities and extends only to their autonomy from the judiciary, not from “the state that chartered it, governs it, and provides its funding,” reads the filing. The idea that individual professors “have a constitutional right to make their own decisions, free from interference by anyone, whether university administrators or the state itself, concerning what may be taught and how it shall be taught would be a recipe for educational chaos,” it says, “not excellence.”
A guide for faculty members and deans at Valencia College, also obtained by FIRE, notes that while the “use of double negatives in the wording” of one of the concepts makes it difficult to know what is banned, “a critique of colorblindness or insistence on identity consciousness could constitute discrimination” under the law.
In America, the desire for censorship in public education comes in waves. There are fevers, PEN America’s Young said, and then they break, typically not on their own. The McCarthy era, and the Johns Committee, was one such fever. To Young, this is another, and he’s not sure when it will subside.
For now at least, what curriculum is appropriate for college students, and who should decide, remains an active national argument. Sentences that Jane Tarr Smith, the concerned USF parent who died in 2002, wrote six decades ago still resonate:
“We know that as the student goes, so goes the nation,” she said. “Hence, our grave concern over the teachings they receive.”
