The American Educational Research Association's Shameful Hypocrisy on Free Speech
The American Educational Research Association (AERA) just released a self-righteous defense of free speech. That’s good, in that free speech can use all the campus allies it can get. The shame of it is that this statement follows two years during which the AERA, the major organization of the nation’s education professors, actively promoted campus groupthink when it came to sensitive issues.
Only now, as the woke project is starting to crumble under its own weight and as some Republicans are sharpening their knives, the nation’s ed professors have suddenly rediscovered their abiding passion for free speech. This week, the AERA solemnly intoned, “Our democracy is in a precarious moment.” It explained that higher education institutions “serve as the bedrocks for the free expression of ideas and innovation” and must be protected from those who would “suppress academic freedom.”
The AERA declared, “These institutions are in many respects the centerpiece of a vibrant democracy, where ideas—no matter the viewpoint—are shared, challenged, and improved in the service of our communities and the world at large.” It quoted the Supreme Court and observed, “Threats to academic freedom are not new, but the political climate in which we now live is putting those freedoms at grave risk.”
All fine sentiments. Except the AERA doesn’t seem to see any threats to campus speech emanating from the left. Indeed, its statement ignores the threats posed by things like campus speech codes while focusing narrowly on the assertion that scholars who tackle such “topics as racism, critical race theory, or gender identity are being scrutinized or chilled.” The AERA calls out a “wave of legislation that aims to restrict academic freedom, limit anti-racist education and research, and even prohibit the discussion of ‘divisive’ concepts in the classroom”—with the specifics of this mostly amounting to complaints about goings-on in a handful of red states: Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Texas.
Now, the AERA is wrong on much of the substance here. As my colleague Max Eden has pointed out, most legislative proposals that have been labeled a “critical race theory ban” actually prohibit teaching that one race or sex is “inherently superior or inferior.” The definitions of “divisive concepts” similarly require that educators respect similar language in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Without wading too far into the fine points of the debate, it’s worth asking whether the academics at the AERA really believe professors can’t talk about race without making assertions about innate racial superiority.
But, even setting aside ideological blinkers, it turns out that the principled defense of free speech isn’t actually principled at all. Indeed, in the past few years, when the threat to campus speech has come from the left, the AERA has been more than willing to support the censors.
When enthusiasm for Black Lives Matter surged onto campuses in 2020, inspiring a host of demands that colleges restrict free speech in all manner of ways, the AERA said nothing. Indeed, not only did it fail to challenge the woke mob, but it eagerly reached for a torch of its own as it joined the National Academy of Education in issuing a “Joint Statement in Support of Anti-Racist Education” instructing researchers to “stand against the notion that systemic racism does not exist.” As for any scholars laboring under the misapprehension that the existence of “systemic racism” is the sort of thing that they’re supposed to examine or question? Well, the AERA believed the time for such speech was past.
Last year, as states wrestled with the complicated question of transgender athletes and considered laws restricting the ability of biological males to compete in women’s sports, the AERA had an opportunity to serve as a forum for thoughtful, serious discussion. It flatly rejected the opportunity, with the AERA’s executive director (the same one who just penned its embrace of free speech) declaring certain policies “educationally harmful and otherwise devastating to transgender citizens members.”
Indeed, the AERA’s executive director admonished members to reject “transphobic attitudes, cultures, practices, and policies that threaten” transgender students and educators. This presumed, of course, that right-minded people agree on these attitudes, cultures, practices, and policies. There was no acknowledgment that scholars should inform this sensitive debate rather than enter it as partisans.
It’s tough for free speech to flourish in schools where faculty have concluded that only certain views are legitimate. After all, it’s not difficult to envision students or scholars asking whether locker rooms or sports teams organized by identity rather than biology could have negative consequences. Is such speech to be silenced as an illicit manifestation of “transphobic culture”?
We need to fiercely defend free speech. As I’ve written time and again, attacks on free inquiry are a mortal threat to the very heart of higher education — whether they come from left or right (see, for instance, here, here, here, here . . . you get the idea). But it’s hard to take the AERA seriously when its complaint seems more like a convenient, self-serving tactic rather than a principled statement.
Principle is not a “sometimes” thing. Attacks on campus free inquiry are deeply troubling and must be addressed. But the AERA has sacrificed its credibility on this question and, unfortunately, that means the AERA’s big words ring hollow.
Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
