The Right to Learn by Jennifer Ruth

Author:Jennifer Ruth [Ruth, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2024-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Looking at our prose in retrospect, I can see that we were in that rhetorical bind that fastens around all those who try to satirize something that is fast becoming reality. The Marjorie Taylor Greene line has the rhythm of a joke and yet that is precisely what we were and are facing: partisan right-wing politicians claiming the authority to decide what curriculum is acceptable in the nation’s public institutions.

THE CAMPAIGN CONCLUDES

“Showing an unprecedented solidarity,” Schrecker reported in The Nation in March 2022, “the academic community is mobilizing to confront what its members rightly perceive as an existential assault on their professional work and values.”14 In April, I reported on the Academe Blog that “the resolution campaign has decisively turned a corner: faculty senates and AAUP chapters across the country—in red states as well as in blue—have passed resolutions to defend academic freedom to teach race and gender justice and critical race theory.”15 There was no point, many in red states seemed to feel, in waiting to see what happened with the bills. They were not going to go away on their own; they were too useful as political weapons for Republican politicians seeking election or reelection. The question of poking the bear had thus become irrelevant, and the senates at the universities of Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi all passed resolutions.

The campaign had proved more successful than we’d anticipated. I had initially commented that I’d be happy with twenty-five institutions passing a resolution. By the end of the 2021–22 school year, at least sixty institutions had passed one.16 Individual AAUP chapters on campuses had too when their senates did not and, in some cases, in addition to their senates.

We pushed and prodded in the ways discussed above, but of course, where the campaign succeeded was entirely due to the sustained efforts of the faculty members on the campuses. Despite doubts and fears of retribution, these senators did the work of shepherding resolutions through numerous committee meetings—revising and refining the text—all the way to senate floors.

The success of the documents as collective statements over the long term has yet to be known. They are largely untested in the sense that, to our knowledge, faculty have yet to invoke them in a court case or in the context of crises. All of these individual and collective efforts notwithstanding, the senate resolutions are only a beginning to the kind of collective faculty action demanded of this political moment, as a few of the senators whom Sarah Sklaw interviewed for the next chapter point out. The end of the right-wing campaign itself is not yet in sight. The resolutions model one effective step forward and show that in the midst of a country sliding toward authoritarianism, faculty can—and will—mobilize to defend the academic freedom that provides one crucial pillar of our endangered democracy.

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