Academic freedom under Trump? Think McCarthyism, but worse

Speaking to University World News about threats to academic freedom in the United States, 92-year-old retired English professor Harry Keyishian held up US President Donald J Trump’s signed executive order, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling”, which instructs all public schools to “instil a patriotic admiration for our incredible nation and the values for which we stand”.

“Patriotic education,” read Keyishian, “means a presentation of the history of America grounded in: (i) an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterisation of America’s founding and foundational principles; (ii) a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history; (iii) the concept that commitment to America’s aspirations is beneficial and justified; and (iv) the concept that celebration of America’s greatness and history is proper.”

Such a curriculum, said Keyishian, who taught English at Fairleigh Dickinson University (Madison, New Jersey) from 1965 to 2010, reverses both good pedagogy and the very essence of scholarship.

“The president is trying to tell educators how to educate people and what conclusions to come to rather than to go through a process of actually looking at the evidence,” he noted.

It is, Keyishian added, more frightening than what occurred during the McCarthy era; named for Wisconsin’s late Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, who sparked the anti-Communist witch hunt that began in 1947 and lasted in some places until 1967 – when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the case of Keyishian v Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York that loyalty oaths were unconstitutional because they infringed on academic freedom.

This executive order does not apply to colleges and universities.

However, in the context of other executive orders Trump has signed – especially “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”, which instructs the attorney general and secretary of education to issue guidance to both state and local educational agencies “as well as all institutions of higher education that receive federal grants or participate in the federal student loan assistance” on the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices and programmes – Keyishian believes it represents the administration’s thinking about academic freedom at the post-secondary level too.

His view is shared by PEN America’s Director of State and Higher Education Policy, Jeremy C Young, who spoke to University World News in a joint interview with Keyishian.

“Although colleges and universities are chartered at the state level, given the wording and directive in the executive order concerning DEI, there is no reason not to suspect that the administration would issue an executive order defining academic freedom in a way that aligns it more with the White House’s priorities,” said Young.

“The lever would be the fact that (with the exception of four conservative Christian colleges and universities) every college or university accepts federal funds either in some sort of grant and-or through federally insured student loans.”

1967 Supreme Court lawsuit

Keyishian’s lawsuit (which he prosecuted with four other professors) was prompted by the fact that in 1962, as per New York State law, their teaching contracts were not renewed after they refused to sign an oath stating they were not Communists.

After the federal district court ruled against them, the plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court. In January 1967, in a 5-4 decision, the court ruled loyalty oaths unconstitutional.

Written by Associate Justice William Brennan, the Supreme Court ruling declared that the part of New York State’s education law that established that loyalty oaths were unconstitutional did not define “treasonable and seditious” actions.

Brennan built on the Supreme Court ruling in Sweezy v New Hampshire, in which the court reversed New Hampshire University Professor Paul M Sweezy’s conviction for contempt; Sweezy had refused to answer then-New Hampshire Attorney General Louis C Wyman’s questions about Sweezy’s belief in the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and the inevitable triumph of socialism.

In his concurring opinion, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Felix Frankfurter said that each university possessed four essential freedoms: 1) to determine who may teach; 2) what can be taught; 3) how it is taught; and 4) who will be admitted.

Building on Frankfurter’s formulation, Brennan wrote: “Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us, and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.

‘The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.’ The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas’. The Nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative’.”

In both our interview and in a Q&A with PEN America, and, no doubt because he was an English professor, Keyishian brought up a part of the decision that is often overlooked: Associate Justice Tom Clark’s dissent. The dissent, which was signed by the three other justices, casts the issue before the court as an existential one.

After arguing that since New York State had removed the law, the case was moot, Clark goes on to say that the majority says the law authorising the loyalty oath “is bad because it has an ‘overbroad sweep’. I regret to say – and I do so with deference – that the majority has, by its broadside, swept away one of our most precious rights, namely, the right of self-preservation.

“Our public educational system is the genius of our democracy. The minds of our youth are developed there and the character of that development will determine the future of our land. Indeed, our very existence depends upon it.”

Moving towards fascism

Twice during our interview Keyishian characterised the Trump administration as moving the United States “rapidly in the direction of fascism”, a word he uses “without apology because of the elements of the work [that is], the executive orders and other administration statements] that I read daily.”

As for the cause, the professor who faced down what, in his interview with PEN America he called “the chilling effects of the McCarthy and ‘red scare’ era”, points his finger at “institutions like Fox News” that he likens to the “propaganda arm” of a fascist “mindset that would very much like the country to go in that direction”. Of Trump himself, Keyishian says he is both a “sponsor and a spokesperson” of this mindset.

“I see him as an obnoxious, stupid man, of course, as he obviously is. But also, there’s something behind him, and something is going on for which he’s just the public face,” Keyishian added.

Keyishian’s characterisation of Trump led me to ask whether his analysis of Shakespeare’s works, in his 1995 book The Shapes of Revenge: Victimisation, Vengeance, and Vindictiveness in Shakespeare provides insight into Trump.

Since returning to the Oval Office, Trump has made good his promise to extract revenge against those he views as political enemies (for example, the firing of Justice Department prosecutors who had investigated him and removal of the security details assigned to Dr Anthony Fauci and General Mark Milley) and, as many have observed, he casts himself as the victim.

“Vindictiveness is to feel as if you have a just cause for revenge [which was considered unchristian in Shakespeare’s period] out of some sense of envy and other factors that create in you the mindset that I’m justified in doing this,” Keyishian noted.

Pointing to Iago, the evil manipulator in Othello, Keyishian recalled how Iago said of Cassio: “He has a daily beauty in his life, which makes me ugly”, before applying this to Trump and saying that you can talk yourself into being the victim.

“You may, in fact, be a victim, but maybe not of what you think is victimising you. The tricky part,” from the point of view of psychology, “is to shift the blame to some crew [that is, someone else]. Hitler did it, of course, and it has been done a lot in many places in the world.”

Academic freedom under threat

In the final part of my interview with Keyishian and Young, we turned to whether Brennan’s decision is strong enough to protect academic freedom in today’s environment.

The phrase most quoted from the decision, that academic freedom is “a special concern of the First Amendment”, does not, as many believe, mean that academic freedom and freedom of speech are one and the same. In fact, in no decision has the Supreme Court or any other court stated this outright.

Academic freedom may be, as Young put it, of “transcendent importance”, but, he added, the decision “doesn’t define academic freedom. It doesn’t lay out a test to see whether it’s been measured there.

“There’s a lot more that could have been done [by the decision], and the fact that it wasn’t done, I think, leaves it [academic freedom] vulnerable to challenge.

“So I do worry about what might happen,” said Young, his words echoing Keyishian’s “gloomy view” of the future of academic freedom.