Academic Freedom and Attacks on Disciplinary Knowledge

The AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure issued this statement:

The Trump administration seeks to make Columbia University an example of its power over any college or university that resists its extreme political interference in institutional governance. On March 13, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration made Columbia’s access to federal funding contingent upon its implementation of “immediate and long-term structural reforms” that include placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department (MESAAS) into receivership and making drastic changes to student discipline, admissions, and other processes. Noting that “the subjugation of universities to state power is a hallmark of autocracy,” the AAUP on March 14 condemned Columbia’s decision, in an apparent act of appeasement, “to punish students with multiyear suspensions, degree revocations, and expulsions.”

Today Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure reinforces the AAUP’s March 14 statement and highlights the specific dangers to academic freedom and shared governance in the Trump administration’s demand that MESAAS be placed in receivership. Implicit in that demand is the unfounded assumption that critical scholarship on the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa produces antisemitism. The specific targeting of MESAAS—a department that engages in interdisciplinary scholarship on topics of tremendous international importance—threatens a future where intellectual inquiry would be controlled by the state. This governmental intervention, like attacks on the autonomy of academic work concerning the histories of slavery and race, public health, gender and sexuality, and biomedical and other sciences, aims to substitute partisan politics for academic judgment.  

On March 22, Columbia University acceded to most of the federal government’s demands, including by overhauling campus disciplinary processes and hiring “special officers” with the power to arrest or remove individuals from campus. Further, the university is creating a centralized system that authorizes a new senior vice provost to review all aspects of area studies programs, “starting immediately with the Middle East.” The senior vice provost’s responsibilities include making recommendations to the president and provost for academic restructuring of the programs. This is tantamount to receivership, as the new review system undermines departmental autonomy over the curriculum and other academic functions.

For over a century, the hallmark of American higher education has been the ability of the scholarly community to pursue free inquiry without external political or economic constraint. We recognize the deep threat that federal funding cuts pose to institutions like Columbia. But we urge students, faculty, and administrators to resist the seeming benefits of an acceptance of these demands or an acquiescence to the Trump administration’s effort to characterize and demean scholarly disciplines. Conceding the normal procedures of university governance and peer review will lead—as it has in countries from Hungary to China, from Turkey to Russia, and from Iran to Nicaragua—to increased state intervention into, and repression of, US colleges and universities, long the exemplars of education for democratic citizenship.