The Assault on the Humanities and Social Sciences
Troubling Legislation Being Introduced in States Around the Country Take Direct Aim at the Future of the Humanities and Social Sciences
The American college experience is meant to help students gain knowledge and new experiences, larger and more diverse networks of friends and mentors, and a richer sense of how they might choose to lead their lives. Our campuses are known globally as places in which students are invited to learn, think, invent, debate, and dream — all key elements to happiness, innovation, and a robust democracy.
Yet recently an alarming and dangerous trend has emerged aiming to redefine the college experience. State lawmakers in Florida and Iowa have introduced legislation designed to dictate what is discussed and taught on publicly funded campuses, cloaking their rationale with a misleading call to protect “diversity of views.”
In Florida, Senate Bill 264 would allow students to record their professors in the classroom without permission, make faculty members’ political views a matter of state supervision, and hand the state the power to decide who speaks publicly on campus. Such a campus culture is antithetical to fostering a true free exchange of views. This wide-ranging legislation would also put thousands of scholars of history, literature, art, philosophy, religion, politics, culture — all flashpoints of divisiveness in the current moment — and other fields of public interest at risk of losing the freedom to pursue topics of their choice and help open their students’ minds to the many nuances of our complex world, past and present. This is dangerous.
Iowa House File 496 and Senate File 41, sought to discontinue the competitive practice of offering tenure at Iowa’s three public universities. While the state’s tenure system already includes policies that allow the removal of tenured faculty for just cause, program discontinuation, or extreme financial exigency, the proposed legislation allows for dismissal in instances where there “appears to be pretty coercive behavior from some professors who expect that their students will conform to their political ideology,” according to Senator Jim Carlin. According to Sen. Carlin and the bill’s supporters, conservative students and their views have been made to feel unwelcome on campus.
While these measures could not generate the support needed to advance in the second legislative “funnel” round this week, the ideology driving it persists in other bills still under consideration. Iowa Senate File 478 and House File 802 seek to prohibit the teaching of “divisive concepts” like critical race theory and the concept of unconscious race or sex bias from being taught on state campuses.
As a nation proud to be known as “The Land of the Free,” since when do we tell people what to study, what to think and say, and what is valued in terms of intellectual curiosity? When did we become a nation so eager to “protect” diversity of thought by stifling instead of encouraging the exchange of ideas and healthy, respectful debate?
As our nation continues to grapple with increasing cultural and political divides, it is more urgent than ever to preserve diversity of thought and opportunities for academic freedom in our classrooms. But these values are not protected by intrusive laws. The legislation proposed in Florida and Iowa has the potential to do irreversible damage to each state’s system of higher education and to current and future generations of students. It is counterproductive and destructive.
As a former interim president of the nation’s leading public urban university, The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, as well as a former provost of that institution and former tenured faculty member, I find these proposed laws offensive and disturbing. They are the products of limited, misguided views of the purpose of higher education in the US. Disguised as “common sense” solutions, they are ultimately poised to degrade the esteemed reputations for quality and innovation that we as a nation have paid for over generations and with millions of well-invested tax dollars.
As the current president of an organization dedicated to the advancement of the humanities and social sciences, areas of study focused on understanding the human experience, I see these measures as foreshadowing a world in which our public colleges and universities no longer attract top faculty or students. Instead, they represent a sad example of lost potential in America.
Before we reach that point, let us call on our lawmakers to work with their Boards of Regents and higher education administrators and faculty to strengthen policies and practices that advance scholarship for the greater good, promote the circulation of knowledge and truths based in facts, and encourage critical thinking on all perspectives. This is what quality education looks like.
