Academic Freedom

03-24-2019

By Samantha Hill

Student protestors calling themselves the “Diaspora Coalition” at Sarah Lawrence College have issued an extensive list of demands to university administrators. In addition to demanding free fabric softener, which alone garnered the attention of social media, they have demanded that the college make new hires because “Students of color should not be forced to resort to racist white professors in order to have access to their own history.” They have also called for the administration to “confront how the presence of Samuel Abrams, an anti-queer, misogynist, and racist who actively targets queer people, women, and people of color and is an alumnus of an institute with direct ties to a neo-Confederate hate group, affects the safety and wellbeing of marginalized students.”

There is something admirable in the students’ successful organization and their idealistic if untenable list of demands; but their demands concerning the hiring and censorship of faculty pose a dangerous threat to academic freedom. Students cannot be allowed to dictate the hiring and firing of faculty. The attitude that they can is consonant with the transformation of universities into private corporations. Courses are not consumer goods that can be designed to the consumer’s taste. The absence of diversity among faculty is a real issue, but demanding that only people of color can teach work by people of color, or women can only teach work by women, is a dangerous slippery slope that presumes one only has access to their immediate lived experiences. Education should expand the imagination, not foreclose it.

David French illuminates the irony of the attack on Abrams in an essay for the National Review. He writes,

Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias – in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things – a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abram’s research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. ‘Liberal staff members,’ he wrote, ‘outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to one,’ making them the ‘most left-leaning group on campus.” Looking at this data Abrams argued that the liberal bent of progressive administrators coupled with their agenda-setting power, “threatens the free and open exchange of ideas.”

French points out that Abrams argument is not radical. “Administrators draft and enforce speech codes. Now his point is being tested by the protestors. Hopefully there is a way for the administration at Sarah Lawrence to take what truth there is in the student’s demands and address their concerns without sacrificing academic freedom and what little there remains of faculty governance.