Rejecting Narratives That Divide Faculty and Students

Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism, by Kendall Gerdes. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024.

Academe has dedicated much space in recent years to attacks on higher education from the political right. The AAUP’s defense against those attacks has centered on academic freedom in research and teaching. Focusing on the latter, Kendall Gerdes’s book takes us directly to the heart of the relationship between students and professors by drawing our attention to a rhetori­cal consequence of that defense. The author “asks why appeals to academic freedom are often able to turn professors, even those with otherwise progressive values, against students.” In response to that question, Gerdes offers a provocative and compelling case for linking defenses of academic freedom directly to students.

The key evidence for Gerdes’s claim about such division between faculty and students is the use of the word sensitive: Some profes­sors’ criticism of the “sensitivity” of students redirects “public argument away from the policy issues to which student activists are responding” toward the value of free speech. This framing of speech in opposition to social change is grounded in a “neo­liberal view” of academic freedom, “which advantages the corporate interests of universities.” What is most disturbing about her claim isn’t its accuracy but how it became the reality on campus. Gerdes argues that “critiques of sensitivity” by professors are the outcome of “a coordinated right-wing campaign aimed at fracturing solidarity between students and faculty” and other members of the campus com­munity. In other words, professors who might be attuned or, dare I say, sensitive to attacks on higher education may also be unwitting accomplices in them.

For Gerdes, the solution to this critique of sensitivity is to redefine sensitivity as a positive contribution to debate and dialogue on campus and thus academic freedom. Defin­ing sensitivity as “our unclosable openness to the address or affection of others,” Gerdes argues that sensi­tivity is “the very rhetorical structure that makes it possible to learn.” Pitting academic freedom against sensitivity risks casting the former as a “private” and individual right and the latter as impinging on that right. But seeing sensitivity and academic freedom as parts of the same whole demands that we rethink the impact of language on others.

Readers of Academe and lead­ers of our AAUP chapters and conferences must consider this demand. Gerdes hints at but never directly states what revisions to academic freedom principles might be needed to address “student sen­sitivity.” One gets an indication of the impact of such revisions when she names sensitivity as the “condi­tion of possibility for language to both injure, wound, or harm.” A rhetoric of sensitivity would, in theory, “affirm” the potential of language to induce trauma. Most directly, Gerdes writes that if we recognize that sensitivity is a “con­dition of possibility” for language we must also see it as one for teaching and learning.

As a professor of rhetoric, I can understand why Gerdes didn’t extend her argument beyond the clear valorization of rhetorical stud­ies. The book’s intended audience is indeed the academic discipline of rhetorical studies. But, as a faculty organizer and president of a state AAUP conference, I wanted more. If you are not in the field that Gerdes and I share, you may find the book frustrating. Nonetheless, I recom­mend it to you, in all its complexity and tentativeness, as a contribution to the larger debate over academic freedom.

Gerdes draws lessons from three rhetorical case studies. Before reviewing each one, I must state that whatever the impact of the book’s larger argument, higher education is unsustainable without students, who become members of an alumni com­munity. Many will have children, and on and on it should go. This key role of students is something readers should keep in mind.

In the most powerful chapter of Sensitive Rhetorics, Gerdes recounts the heady days of the debate over trigger warnings in 2013–14. Critics of the warnings deployed the rhetorical common­place about “coddled, entitled millennials” and their “performance of outrage” when arguing that accepting demands from students has “a chilling effect on academic freedom.” Gerdes claims that the 2014 AAUP statement On Trigger Warnings helps to spread some of these rhetorical commonplaces that pit “the rights of instructors against the rights of students.” The AAUP statement begins with that frame by calling trigger warnings a “threat to academic freedom.”

In response, Gerdes argues that we need to see trigger warnings not as an affront to professors but as a kind of “disability accommoda­tion” and that “accessibility is a precondition for students’ academic freedom.” The rhetoric around the debate about accessibility then can aid us as we consider such warnings. The use of academic freedom prin­ciples to “block” accessibility urges us to perceive requests for trigger warnings in opposition to efforts to “close down the question of hospi­tality, territorializing the classroom as a space where freedom belongs to the instructor (only), and students are not to be welcomed.” In other words, trigger warnings are channels through which students who don’t “feel at home in the university” find a way to make implicit, unstated norms about academia “negotiable” and “consensual.”

This is where the rubber meets the road for Gerdes and academic freedom. Such commonplaces about “sensitive students” spread by professors who pit student interests against academic freedom “are also being deployed broadly to defend the espousal of repug­nant views, especially by white supremacists.” In short, academic freedom is “now being mobilized to protect and amplify reactionary hate speech, and to pretend that it has no material consequences.”

The most direct application of Gerdes’s claim about sensitivity as a positive element in academic freedom comes after her account of the rise of campus provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Not denying anyone’s First Amendment rights, Gerdes writes, “I am questioning whether the university ought to be giving [neo-Nazi ideology] a platform completely divorced from the contexts of peer review and shared governance that legitimate academic freedom” and that allow experts to refute such “noxious” claims. In other words, if colleges “protect and harbor hate speech outside of these vigorous contexts, we erode the doctrine of academic freedom and diminish the openness of higher education to students of all backgrounds.”

If that sounds like a choice between academic freedom and diversity as a value, it is not an either-or choice for Gerdes: “We are talking about the right to speak, as well as what resources it actually takes for students to exercise that right on campus.” This statement comes in the chapter concerning race that focuses on the creation and criticism of “safe spaces” in response to a series of racist incidents at the University of Mis­souri in the fall of 2015. Following demands for more administrative action to address campus racism, Black students formed a tent camp on the campus quad in solidarity with a student on a hunger strike. With support from the football team and then extensive media coverage, the student protest worked, and the school’s president resigned. That context includes the university’s dismissal of a professor after she tried to stop the media from film­ing within the encampment, which landed Mizzou on the AAUP’s list of censured administrations in 2016.

Gerdes sets the story of that professor, Melissa Click, not in the frame of faculty academic freedom but in dialogue with the com­monplace of student sensitivity by writers who deride “safe spaces.” Gerdes frames the encampment “as a paradigmatic example of student activists seeking—and creating—a safe space precisely because the students at Mizzou instantiated this very space in their occupa­tion.” In other words, students acted out of “their sensitivity” in putting themselves “at risk” and drawing on “networks of solidarity to secure one another’s well-being,” thereby creating “a possible world that other students around the country pursued” in response. This rhetorical and physical invention by students of color works by engaging sensitivity, not denying it. Gerdes argues that “whiteness insulates itself and its members from feeling their exposedness to others” and thus “amplifies its own violence while simultaneously drowning it out.” It was sensitivity that made the rhetorical intervention in this campus debate necessary: “If students could shield themselves from this rhetorical violence, if they weren’t sensitive, there would be no need for the demand, no impetus for” occupation of the quad.

A chapter that focuses on sexual harassment—including campus sexual assault and Title IX—also highlights the student-professor divide. Gerdes argues that “even feminist critics of Title IX who accuse student activists of being too sensitive are disavow­ing” the “rhetorical exposedness” that makes “education and ethics possible.” The key figure for this chapter is Laura Kipnis, a feminist scholar at Northwestern University whose 2015 Chronicle of Higher Education essay “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” started a chain of events that don’t need recount­ing here. Her criticism of imagining students as “exquisitely sensitive creatures” is, according to Gerdes, grounded in a rhetorical “fantasy” in which such sensitivities “are simply matters of individual agen­tive choice” akin to a “valve” one can shut “if you don’t like what’s coming your way.” But sensitivity can’t be “turned off or grown out of.” As Gerdes notes, “We all are sensitive subjects—students and professors alike. Every subject, to be what it is, is sensitive.”

The book’s final case study, on gun violence on college cam­puses, is most personal to me. I got involved in the AAUP after advocating against laws that allow gun owners to carry their firearms in classrooms, hallways, and other common spaces on campus. Gerdes recounts the battle—which mirrored the one we had in Georgia—over “campus carry” legislation in Texas when she was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.

The frame of students versus professors switches in debates about campus carry, as faculty and stu­dents who opposed laws allowing guns on campus were “targeted by accusations of sensitivity.” Gerdes notes that this issue also introduces race as a key element because the “question of allowing guns on campus has historically been not only a provocation to student activ­ism but a response to the activism of Black students.” Added to that is the larger modern history of school shootings. Gerdes suggests that such “traumas” should be “understood as the context” for the “practice (and limitation) of academic free­dom at UT Austin.” We as teachers “ought not forget that a genera­tion of our students has grown up rehearsing active shooter drills” and has witnessed the “accelerated frequency” of mass shootings.

It is in this context that Gerdes offers the most compelling rea­son to link defenses of academic freedom to students: “If academic freedom matters to us, we will have to embrace, in its defense, the sensitive nature of our classrooms and our communities.” And this is where the AAUP, its members, and its allies can do the same. The defense of academic freedom is a defense of student sensitivity because both come from the same ground: exposure to what is in the world. Academic freedom opens up research lanes, and student sensitivity can open up classrooms. Legislative attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion are not attacks on academic freedom merely because they hinder research and teaching; they are attacks on aca­demic freedom because they seek to shut off that valve of sensitivity in professors and students alike. This is the claim that Gerdes demands we heed. And we must heed it, if only to acknowledge that we are sensitive by default.

Matthew Boedy is professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia. He is the president of the Georgia AAUP conference and the author of May 1970, which recounts the intersecting history of student protests and the field of composition.