The Right To Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom

by Jennifer Ruth (Editor), Valerie C. Johnson (Editor), Ellen Schrecker (Editor)

Overview

From leaders on the front lines of the battle for academic freedom in higher education, an empowering collection on fighting back against anti-CRT policies, book banning, and more

Spanning over 40 years of contested history through to today, The Right to Learn speaks out fearlessly against the far right’s decades-long war against intellectual freedom. This essential anthology outlines and contextualizes the culture wars’ demonization of critical race theory, Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and other hot-button issues.

With an introduction that places the current crisis within the broader context of the ongoing attacks on American democracy, The Right to Learn features the testimony and analysis of activists, scholars, and attorneys with firsthand experience in the struggle against well-funded conservative groups’ assaults on academic freedom.

An impassioned, inspired resource for those fighting on the ground for the right to learn, this anthology is structured in 3 parts designed to equip educators with the necessary tools to understand the battle—and to fight back.

• PART 1 explores educational gag laws, featuring, among others, PEN America staff members Jonathan Friedman, Jeremy C. Young, and James Tager.
• PART 2 offers perspectives on key issues from those on the front lines: activists, educators, and attorneys like Dennis Parker, director of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice.
• PART 3 investigates the implications of undermining academic freedom, with insight from experts such as Sharon D. Austin, one of the professors barred by the University of Florida from testifying against a restrictive voting rights law and a plaintiff in the main legal case against Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act.”

As they confront today’s attack on higher education, The Right to Learn’s expert contributors reveal that what’s at stake is the pursuit of the real-world and contemporary knowledge a democratic polity requires

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807045176
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	04/09/2024
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Valerie C. Johnson is associate provost of diversity, equity, and inclusion and associate professor of political science at DePaul University in Chicago. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of race and class. She is the author of Black Power in the Suburbs: The Myth or Reality of African American Suburban Political Incorporation and the co-editor of Power in the City: Clarence Stone and the Politics of Inequity with Marion Orr.

Jennifer Ruth is associate dean in the College of the Arts and professor in the School of Film at Portland State University. She has written about academic freedom and higher education in publications such as the New Republic, Truthout, Academe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and Ms. Her most recent book, cowritten with Michael Bérubé, is It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom.

Ellen Schrecker is well known for her scholarship on McCarthyism and higher education. A retired professor of history at Yeshiva University, her latest book is The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s.

Table of Contents

Foreword, by Irene Mulvey

INTRODUCTION
A Time for Faculty to Act
Valerie C. Johnson, Jennifer Ruth, and Ellen Schrecker

PART I—THE CURRENT CULTURE WAR

CHAPTER 1
Academic Freedom and Political Repression from McCarthyism to Trump
Ellen Schrecker

CHAPTER 2
A Koch-Funded Racial Backlash: Understanding the Critical Race Theory Moral Panic
Isaac Kamola

CHAPTER 3
The Rise of Educational Gag Orders
Jonathan Friedman, Jeremy C. Young, and James Tager

CHAPTER 4
The Epistemology of Ignorance and Its Impact on Democracy and Higher Education
Valerie C. Johnson

PART II—WHITE RAGE, TWISTED LAWS, AND PATRIARCHAL CONTROL

CHAPTER 5
Knowledge and Good Community Organizing Can Counter the “Divisive Concepts” Campaign
Kevin McGruder

CHAPTER 6
Subverting the Intent of the Fourteenth Amendment
Dennis Parker

CHAPTER 7
“Don’t Say Gay” and Can’t Be Trans: Behind the Anti-LGBTQ+ Schooling Agenda
Sonnet Gabbard, Anne Mitchell, and Heather Montes Ireland

PART III—COLLECTIVE ACTION AND VISIBLE RESISTANCE

CHAPTER 8
The Resolutions: Mobilizing Faculty Senates to Defend Academic Freedom
Jennifer Ruth

CHAPTER 9
Silence Gets Us Nowhere: Faculty Responses to Anti-CRT and Divisive Concepts Legislation
Sarah Sklaw

CHAPTER 10
Academic Freedom: It’s a Question of Job Security
Helena Worthen and Joe Berry

CHAPTER 11
My Battle to Preserve Academic Freedom at the University of Florida
Sharon D. Wright Austin

CHAPTER 12
Florida Faculty Unions and the Struggle for Public Education
Katie Rainwater

CHAPTER 13
Schools of Education Under Fire
Marvin Lynn, Michael E. Dantley, and Lynn M. Gangone

Appendix
List of Contributors
Notes

Editorial Reviews

03/04/2024

For this enlightening essay collection, political scientist Johnson (Black Power in the Suburbs), film studies scholar Ruth (It’s Not Free Speech), and historian Schrecker (The Lost Promise) bring together educators and activists to respond to recent right-wing attempts to ban teaching material pertaining to race, gender identity, and sexuality. According to the editors, these bans constitute a serious attack on the liberal principle of unfettered inquiry and, consequently, on democracy itself. The basic facts justify the contributors’ sense of urgency; in 2022 alone, 48 state legislatures considered proposals for “anti-LGBTQ schooling or curriculum restrictions,” and, by the end of the year, 15 states had passed 19 of those bills. Many of the chapters have a journalistic bent, documenting contributors’ personal experiences of their institutions being targeted by conservative donors and activists trying to get education bans enacted—among them Charles Koch and Christopher Rufo—as well as the educators’ attempts to fight back through teachers unions and faculty senates. Primarily intended to be read by educators “as a source of information and perhaps inspiration,” the anthology, despite the occasional jargon-filled passage, paints a kaleidoscopic picture of a nationwide struggle playing out between powerful institutions—right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation squaring off against the ACLU and PEN America. It’s a detailed dissection of an urgent political issue. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Over the past decade, the Right’s assault on American higher education has become openly authoritarian, taking as its model Viktor Orbán’s decimation of Hungary’s universities. The Right to Learn is the most compelling response to date—and one of the most important books ever published about higher education in the United States. Read it right now.”
—Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor, Pennsylvania State University, and author of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education

“This timely and urgent volume historicizes contemporary attacks on the right to read, think, and write, connecting the struggle for academic freedom to broader social and political movements for justice. By turns deeply personal and sharply analytic, contributors describe not just how we got here but, crucially, where we must go next in the fight for the world we want.”
—Emily Drabinski, 2023-2024 president of the American Library Association

“Book banning, education gag orders, threats to school boards and attacks on teachers: Where is it all coming from? Why? Read this bracing, essential book to understand—and to learn how you can help stop the wrecking of our public schools.”
—Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

From the Publisher