Climate Change: The War on Higher Education Comes for Law Schools
Angela P. Harris | 24 September 2024 | LPE Project
Academic freedom is under assault in the United States. Like the authoritarian populism rising across the globe, domestic attacks on individual professors and academic institutions buttress a broader and multifaceted campaign to undermine multiracial democracy and the institutions that sustain and safeguard it. The individuals and entities driving this antidemocratic movement have also targeted the electoral process; public education; the right to bodily autonomy; the civil rights and liberties of minoritized and marginalized communities; and freedom of speech and expression (increasingly marshalled against pro-Palestinian advocacy). Their openly stated goal is to delegitimize, defund, and “lay siege to” the institutions that anchor American democracy and civil society, including the institutions that comprise higher education.
So begins an essay that I and colleagues affiliated with the Critical (Legal) Collective (CLC) recently published in the UCLA Law Review Discourse. Climate change seems an apt metaphor for our situation. As with biophysical climate change, political-economic-legal climate change on our campuses has been happening stealthily for some time. What snaps us to attention as the relatively privileged professoriat are the spectacular moments – a professor attempting to destroy his own students’ careers; a university president throwing her own faculty under the bus; U.S. House members hurling caricatured claims at university presidents; those same presidents then forced to resign following a manufactured scandal – as well as certain key indicators. Our essay focuses on one key indicator of climate change in higher education: academic freedom, which is seeing a swift and sharp decline…