The Political Machine Behind War on Academic Freedom
Steven Brint | 28 August 2023 | The Chronicle of Higher Education
Ricardo Rey for The Chronicle
The last few years have seen a troubling and unusually brazen series of challenges to academic freedom. In 2021, Republican state legislators began to draft bills banning what they referred to as “divisive concepts” in education curricula, and eliminating administrative offices and practices concerned with racial-ethnic and other forms of diversity. In the GOP’s rendering, the term “divisive concepts” refers to the idea sometimes propounded by historians that the institutions of the United States were created to maintain racial and gender inequalities and to preserve the supremacy of white people and men. Most of the bills to regulate curricula have been directed toward public K-12 education, where the states have been accorded great authority by the courts. But from the beginning, this restriction fever seeped into the higher-education arena, where state prescription has historically run aground of academic-freedom protections