Summary: Statement Endorsing the AAUP’s Statement “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism”
June 2022
The statement of endorsement, summarized here, was drafted by the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities. The Executive Council approved it as an MLA statement in June 2022.
- The MLA has a long history of activism and advocacy in support of academic freedom in the United States and abroad.
- We condemn current US legislative efforts to interfere in the design of curricula and teaching on race and racism and to label any criticism of the state of Israel as anti-Semitic.
- It is with a sense of urgency and abiding commitment to the future of education that we condemn all of these forms of academic censorship and express our full support for the AAUP’s March 2022 statement “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism.”
Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Anti-Semitism and Racism
The following statement was approved by the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure in March 2022.
Introduction
- There has been an increase in political attempts to restrict the public education curriculum and to portray some forms of public education as social harm.
- In particular, there have been restrictions to the teaching about the history, policies, and actions of the state of Israel and teachings about the history and perpetuation of racism in the United States.
- These restrictions have been justified under the guise of protecting students from harm, including discriminatory treatment or exclusion.
- New laws expand the definition of anti-Semitism to encompass political speech, with several discriminatory effects, such as skewing the social and legal meaning of equality and misrepresenting perpetrators of racism as victims.
- Political critiques of Israeli state actions—including discrimination and violence against Palestinians—become subject to the charge of anti-Semitism.
- The core assertion of the AAUP’s 2021 Statement on Legislation Restricting Teaching about Race applies equally to legislative restrictions on teaching about the history and ongoing actions of Israel: “Since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has steadfastly opposed political interference in the conduct of this country’s institutions of higher education. Today the AAUP condemns in the strongest possible terms the recent actions to ban, limit, or distort the teaching of history and related academic subjects.”
The IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism
- The problem with the definition of anti-Semitism offered by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) is that it equates criticism of the policies of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism.
- The definition privileges the political interests of the state of Israel and suppresses discussion and activism on behalf of Palestinian rights.
- In an effort to remedy the effects of the IHRA definition—including denying peaceful protest and freedom of expression, and the cancellation of university courses and conferences on the rights of Palestinians—a group of scholars in the United States, Israel, Europe, and the United Kingdom drafted the “Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism,” which acknowledges the importance of combating anti-Semitism while seeking a clearer definition of it, one that does not blur the distinction between anti-Semitic speech and political critiques of Israel and Zionism.
- Kenneth Stern, one of the authors of the IHRA definition has opposed attempts to enact legislation that incorporates the IHRA definition and has stated that it “was never intended as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.”
- Amendments, known as HB 741, define anti-Semitism by incorporating and extending (“weaponizing” in Stern’s term) the IHRA definition.
- The statutory conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel creates an unconstitutionally overbroad prohibition of protected speech on matters of public concern.
- These anti-Semitism bills also constitute state interference with academic freedom, thereby undermining the public mission of higher education to serve the common good through open, searching, and critical pedagogy; research; and extramural speech.
- In targeting public education, the Florida law violates both the First Amendment and the principles of academic freedom through state censorship of teaching, research, and public speech on particular issues.
- Legislation like Florida’s HB 741 imposes broad restrictions on speech by faculty members and students, subjecting both to charges of anti-Semitic religious discrimination for criticism of Israel.
The Attack on “Critical Race Theory”
- Critical race theory (CRT) is a form of analysis that describes the many different and even contradictory types of scholarship that seek to analyze the role of law and of institutions in perpetuating racial and other forms of social inequity.
- For CRT scholars, critical race theory is a “verb”—a practice that responds to historical and sociocultural changes, not a prescribed way of thinking.
- The attack on critical race theory is another example of the curbing of free inquiry in the interests of a state, this time the United States.
- If the immediate goal is to cleanse the teaching of American history from the charge of systemic racism, to eliminate portrayals of the evils of slavery, and to protect white children from experiencing the anxiety or shame they might feel when learning of discrimination based on race, then other histories of violence are subject to similar erasure.
- Texas congressman James White and other like-minded legislators invoke equality to reject critical analysis of history and arguments for social justice and to deny teachers of history their liberty of expression and their academic freedom.
- The weaponization of critical race theory seeks to control how educators discuss the nation’s history.
- The misuse and abuse of antidiscrimination law in certain bills represents an intensification of the reaction by conservative activists against the civil rights movement and its legal victories.
- This countermovement deploys laws originally designed to protect groups from discrimination to block attempts to remedy the compounded effects of past discrimination on these groups and to impede further progress.
- By misrepresenting what goes on in the classrooms that employ the resources of anti-racism, these new laws maintain that such teaching creates a hostile environment for white students and accordingly forbid the dissemination of knowledge regarding the histories and realities of what constitutes legal discrimination and, more broadly, the meaning and scope of social harm.
Conclusion
- In addition to the AAUP’s long-standing and broad advocacy of academic freedom, we affirm both the AAUP’s 2021 Statement on Legislation Restricting Teaching about Race and the recommendations in the AAUP’s 2016 report The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX, which urged that colleges and universities promote teaching and research “dedicated to the analysis of inequality.”
- Proponents of overly broad definitions of anti-Semitism and proponents of eliminating teaching about the history of racial and other violence share a desire to mobilize the government to enforce particular, emaciated accounts of history, harm, and injury.
- Aforementioned restrictions on faculty members portray robust academic inquiry and teaching as dangerous, deny students the opportunity to learn, and undercut the purpose of higher education.
- We therefore urge the defeat of these legislative initiatives and others of their kind in order to protect the academic freedom that is vital to the preservation of democracy.