Savannah Keyse
Kevin Nguyen
Alex Truong
Week 7 Presentation
ASA 2
May 14, 2017
Academic Freedom and Its Treat
Academic freedom refers to the right for those who are involved in academia to be able to express their ideas without fear of penalty from the academic institution that they are involved with. The theme of academic freedom and the threat that it poses is apparent in the readings by Darrell Hamamoto, Robby Cohen, and Greg Lukianof et. al. The book written by Darrell Hamamoto, Servitors of Empire, contains a chapter that introduces us to the past of Norman Yoshio Mineta and links his professional and familial history to the belief that he has been hired by governmental agencies to be used as an ethnic cover. Ethnic cover is the purposeful promotion of non-White individuals to create a feeling of “post racial” multicultural society (Hamamoto, 2014) in order to persuade individuals of minority groups to accept the information given to them. The existence of ethnic covers is the specific threat that academic freedom imposes. Ethnic covers create a feeling of trust within those hearing information and ethnic covers are spread throughout academia. When professors and other university faculty are able to say and teach anything they believe and students do not think to question them or do further research on their claims then they are imploring the same traits that allow ethnic covers to do the same thing. The ability that university instructors have to teach any material they desire is a result of academic freedom and it is a threat to students and others who use scholarly works because their claims that are taken at face value as fact but can often be subjective.
The article published in 1985 by Robby Cohen addresses the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964 that paved the way for students and faculty alike to have academic freedom. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement began when students wanted to express their support for the Civil Rights Movement but were censored by the university’s faculty due to the current statute that stated free speech did not apply on the Berkeley campus if it contained political matters. Students were not able to distribute materials or openly rally or support political movements including the fight for civil rights. The students began to fight back against this ruling on October first of 1964 by tabling to provide information on civil rights. Student, Jack Weinberg, was told to stop tabling and because he refused he was eventually placed into a police car that drove onto campus but then hundreds of other students surrounded the police car and sat down making it so the car could not truck Weinberg off (Cohen, 1985). For the next two days following this sit in students began rallying and having sit ins of main campus buildings, amassing a total of about 100,000 students and 900 of the 1200 teachers assistants to begin boycotting classes and forming picket lines to obtain their goal of free speech. Through persistent fighting the students gained the attention of faculty who held an Academic Senate and voted that free speech should be universal on university grounds (Cohen, 1985). This historic fight provided other campuses tactics to use when they want something within the university to change and has been used on UC Davis’s campus a number of times. Students have realized that they can come together to change the way their university is run and they have taken it so far as to now restrict speech of instructors and students through the use of trigger warnings and policing possibly offensive language.
“The Coddling of the American Mind” is an article published by The Atlantic and written by Greg Lukianof et. al that addresses the new intense political correctness of the university. The authors write that they believe the purpose for extreme political correctness “is to turn campuses into ‘safe spaces’ where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.” At first this seems like a step forward toward progressing to be a more inclusive and less separating institution but the authors think otherwise. Lukianof and co-authors write that the extent to which political correctness is reaching is actually hurting students by allowing them to ignore certain topics of discussion because it might be a trigger for previous traumas or make them uncomfortable but the ignoring of materials that present both sides of a story produces ignorance. The title shares that by allowing students to push political correctness and the use of trigger warnings onto instructors actually does a poor job of preparing students for professional life where topics cannot be as easily avoided or advocated to not be spoken about (Lukianof et. al, 2015).
UC Davis has recently been visited by Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing commentator, who was invited by the Davis College Republican club to give a speech to the club and others who wished to attend the event. As a part of the club’s academic freedom and freedom of speech they were allowed to invite an individual that they deemed appropriate, but the conflicting views of the more left-wing students caused a protest of the club’s event and eventual cancellation of the speech (Paul, 2017). This is an instance of a threat that comes from academic freedom. UC Davis student protesters believed that it was their right to object and stop a speech from a political side they do not agree with but in the process it limited the freedom of those who wanted to attend the event. This example and the three previous articles demonstrates that academic freedom has now been taken over and turned into strategic censoring of groups and ideas that conflict with any other individual or group’s ideologies.
Citations
· Cohen, R. (1985). Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Paving the way for campus activism. OAH Magazine of History,1(1), 16-18.
· Haidt, G. L. (2015, September). The Coddling of the American Mind. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
· Hamamoto, D. (n.d.). Ethnic Cover: Inquiry Into Norman Yoshio Mineta and Post-Racial Profiling. In Servitors of Empire: Studies in the Dark Side of Asian America (pp. 201-223). Waterville , OR: Trine Day LLC.
· Paul, D. (2017, January 14). Protesters shut down Milo Yiannopoulos event at UC Davis. Retrieved from CNN Online.
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