The Faculty Are Not Entirely in Charge

Commentary

Back in the 1990s when I was an assistant professor, a graduate student dropped by my office to discuss her plans and how our program might meet them. I was in the English Department, which was open to students interested in other disciplines including history, theater, and women’s studies. The latter program was a notable one. Emory University was one of the first departments in the country to offer a doctorate in the field. It didn’t surprise me when the student communicated her interest.

She spoke of courses in women’s studies and mentioned the director, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a prominent historian of the antebellum South. The student had a reservation, however. It seems that Fox-Genovese had expressed doubts about unrestricted rights to abortion and had expressed them vocally and in print. I wasn’t aware of the controversy and shrugged. It wasn’t clear to me how that position might hinder a student’s progress toward the doctorate. The student proceeded to declare in blunt tones: “A pro-life professor doesn’t belong in Women’s Studies. Everybody has to be pro-choice.”

She spoke firmly in spite of her age and inexperience. To her, the disqualification was indisputable. No matter how good a scholar and teacher an individual is, pro-life is a nonstarter.

I let it go and didn’t argue. A position stated with so much certitude and clarity didn’t invite any back and forth. Besides, it wasn’t unusual. One encountered the contention again and again as the years passed and identity politics settled ever deeper into humanities and “studies” departments. The obvious question of why a person’s position on abortion should be a criterion of fitness wasn’t asked. The field had absorbed it as a founding premise. Academic labor is supposed to be nonpartisan, no political litmus test allowed. This is a foundation of academic freedom. What was remarkable to me back then, and remains so today, is the perfect comfort the student back then and tens of thousands of faculty members at the present time felt and continue to feel in chucking that principle and tracking a party line.

One should keep this violation in mind as we hear of women’s studies and gender studies programs closing, as has happened in a few places in recent months. In January of this year, officials at Texas A&M announced that it was doing so, while the University of Texas at Austin said in mid-September that the women’s/gender program would end (as would three other identity-based programs. The trend started in August 2023 when the trustees at New College of Florida (myself included) terminated the gender studies concentration. The following year, the University of Iowa announced that it would close its gender, women’s, and sexuality studies department. More such actions are likely to follow.

The standard reply to these closures is that they both curtail academic freedom and set back the cause of women’s rights. A commentary republished in the Washington Post last March calls the trend “a long line of recent institutional rollbacks of women’s rights and autonomy in Texas and across the nation.” To the author, a professor of communications in Massachusetts, the laws and policies behind these moves are “increasingly functioning as instruments of censorship.”

But as the student in my office made clear, as do the faculty profiles in women’s studies departments, the field has exerted censorship for a long, long time. Only one side of a controversial issue has been allowed. As soon as women’s studies aligned with a particular politics, the game was up. If the faculty had not refused conservative opinion on social issues and shunned professors who might teach them, non-faculty forces would not have had to step in and restore academic norms.

For a half-century and more, the faculty members have had total control over the curriculum. Regents, trustees, and state officials and politicians have always had the authority to play a role in the governance of the public institution, but on curricular issues they have deferred to the profs. Their circumspection has given the faculty a false sense of absolute prerogative. Professors take it for granted that they are free to define their disciplines as they wish, and if the advancement of certain political positions is part of that definition, then who are outsiders to meddle in matters they don’t understand?

That’s the assumption—I’ve heard it expressed many times.

It’s also a formula for complacency. My colleagues are astonished and dismayed at what has happened. The loss of total control is hard. They should add a bit of soul-searching to their reactions.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.