Academic Freedom | dr. p.l. (paul) thomas

[Header Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash]

On April 28, 1967, Muhammad Ali publicly defied being drafted into the Vietnam War, costing him his heavy-weight title and derailing his career for three years during his prime.

Ali’s willingness to put publicly his name and his words on his beliefs reminds me of James Baldwin’s response to William Faulkner’s call for patience when confronting racism and inequity in the US: “There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”

I am also compelled by a central motif in the life and work of historian and activist Howard Zinn, who argued that we cannot be neutral on a moving train. In this era of the second Trump administration, our democracy and academic freedom train is heading off a cliff; we are all on board.

At the end of the first Trump administration, I implored academics to do more, to speak more, to use our academic and intellectual capital to advocate for the marginalized and the vulnerable as well as the core principle of what academics and education must preserve—academic freedom.

Yet, most academics and colleges/universities remained committed to the “politics of silence” approach to the threats around us.

We have chosen a sort of self-preserving silence, in fact, despite the danger that poses, one confronted by poet Adrienne Rich:

The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable.

The current political dismantling of K-12 and higher education is an assault on democracy; real people are suffering in inexcusable ways. The values we claim to hold sacred are being destroyed each moment we hesitate, each moment we remain silent, each moment we fail to act.

We academics may believe that the Ivory Tower allows us to protect our community as our only priority, and thus that we must protect that Ivory Tower. But I have witnessed at the highest level of my 41-year career very real and justified fear among college students, staff, and faculty.

A first-year student writing about their journey as a gay child navigating their family expectations concluded an essay with the following chilling recognition: “No one knows what the future holds for the United States now. Unfortunately, what we face is not simply a political matter, but rather, a threat on individual liberty, and I am scared for what will happen in the next four years.”

And for faculty—especially those most vulnerable due to personal status or rank—who have served the academic community as scholars and teachers, the same fear of the uncertain and hostile world beyond the Ivory Tower is directly impacting how and if we teach as we know we should. Many of us have targets on our backs simply for remaining committed to the academic freedom we hold sacred and fulfilling our moral obligation to address diversity, equity, and inclusion.

That Ivory Tower was never protecting anyone; it isn’t protecting us now in that increasingly hostile world.

Therefore, now is not the time to keep our heads down, now is not the time to retreat into the politics of silence.

As a former high school English teacher, I hear constantly in my mind Willy Lohman imploring “the woods are burning,” and I fear if we persist in a “politics of silence” approach, if we bow to cultural expectations that education and educators must appear to be politically neutral, that fire will consume us all.

We could be better than that, we should be better than that.

As the poet Maggie Smith wrote when Trump was first elected:

The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.

…This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Ultimately, we must make a decision, one reflected in William Butler Yeats’s enduring poem:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The time is now to reject the politics of silence that brought us here, to speak and act in the name of academic freedom, in the name of our students walking our campuses now but who must enter the very real world burning around them.