ANALYSIS: All groups agree there should be some limits
“Stripping, flashing, and titillating have no place in academics,” Patrick Reilly, the president of the Cardinal Newman Society, told The College Fix via email.
Not all agree with Reilly.
The Fix surveyed higher education and academic freedom groups for their analysis on three recent controversial incidents.
Reilly, and other higher education experts, provided comments in response to a Santa Clara University professor who showed students graphic pornography and had them write a “sexual autobiography” in class; a Mesa Community College Acting professor who asked students to strip as part of “vulnerability exercises”; and a Northwestern professor who exposed his genitalia as part of a live-streamed dance performance. The Fix reached out to all three professors directly involved in these cases but received no comment.
Reilly defined academic freedom as “the freedom to seek and teach truth, and like any freedom, it requires certain conditions to flourish, such as mutual respect and rational dialogue” and said the “absolute liberty to do and say anything that opposes truth and human dignity does not free people.”
“It invites bad actors to deceive, offend, do harm, and behave in the most vulgar ways,” the president of the Catholic education reform group said.
Graham Piro, a Faculty Legal Defense Fund Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, offered a nuanced perspective on the controversies and academic freedom in general.
The Northwestern professor who exposed himself would not fall under academic freedom protections, Piro said on a phone call with The Fix. This is because the exposure of his genitalia was not for a “legitimate artistic purpose” as the event was meant to be about artificial intelligence.
Piro is also a former fellow and employee of The Fix.
He also said, “we would want to take as expansive a definition of academic freedom as possible, while also acknowledging that students should be able to be in class and learn in environments where they are not exposed to obscene things or that a professor is not abusing their authority.”
In regard to the Mesa Community College incident, Piro said “there could be a very narrow place where this sort of thing [students stripping] may be permissible,” qualifying the comment by saying students would need to consent for it to be protected legally.
He said it would “raise genuine concerns about potential harassment about it being done for clear educational purposes,” if the professor targeted a specific category of students, such as gender or race.
With this specific case, Piro said in order for a professor to ask students to strip or undress and be protected legally, that an alternative method must be available and that the behavior does not target one specific subset of students.
However, Piro defended the right of some specialized classes to show things to students such as bondage porn – “advanced courses could be quite difficult… and there would be legitimate pedagogical purposes to asking students to view certain types of porn… if there is a clear teaching purpose for doing so.”
Piro would not go so far as to say all types of porn are protected, saying that there are scenarios where the viewing of sexually graphic content could be “excessive or over the top” for classroom settings.
He also explained that it is hard for him to give clear deliberations on certain situations without more insight into a class’s syllabus or primary insight of what a professor is intending to teach their students.
Discussing the “sexual autobiography” assignment at Santa Clara University’s counseling psychology program, he thought that the best solution for uncomfortable students would be to provide “a legitimate alternative” to the paper as it could be seen “as a violation of privacy.”
However, “under an expansive view of academic freedom there could be situations where this sort of assignment would be pedagogically useful or relevant.”
Academic freedom ‘is not absolute,’ faculty union says
Kelly Benjamin, spokesman for the American Association of University Professors, offered a different view of how restrictions on academic freedom should be governed or even spoken about in higher education. He told The Fix via email that “academic freedom is essentially the right of a college or university professor to teach, conduct research and publish the results, engage in speech and conduct related to institutional governance, and engage in speech and conduct as a citizen.”
The AAUP declined to take a specific stance on the controversies.
Benjamin said academic freedom “is not absolute” and that, under AAUP guidelines in cases in which “faculty or administration at an institution believe that a faculty member’s speech or conduct violates disciplinary or ethical standards… a faculty body [of faculty members own university] sits as judge and jury… about what is and what isn’t protected by academic freedom are rendered, not by laypersons, but by professional peers.”
“For this reason, it would not be appropriate for an AAUP staff member to render a judgment about the specific allegations regarding faculty speech or conduct that you cite,” Benjamin said. “That role belongs to an appropriately constituted faculty hearing body on the accused faculty member’s campus.”
In regard to trigger warnings, both Piro and Benjamin agreed that under their respective FIRE and AAUP guidelines, mandatory content warnings of any form in settings of higher education are generally detrimental to academic freedom.
This is due to the potential of scaring consumers away before even engaging with said content, possibly stifling civil discourse and discussion. Piro said trigger warnings are permissible for a “professor on a case-by-case basis,” but that any sort of content warning required for faculty would violate FIRE’s academic freedom guidelines.
Reilly with the Cardinal Newman Society had a different view. “[I]f [one has] to warn students about an event’s deviancy and potential harm, it shouldn’t have been scheduled in the first place. How can a university pretend to be a place of learning when it destroys virtue and promotes every sort of vice?”
Heterodox Academy and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni declined to comment over email to The College Fix.
The Fix also reached out to Professor Inara Scott, who has written about the limits of academic freedom. She cited unfamiliarity with the cases being discussed and declined to comment.
The Academic Freedom Alliance and PEN America were both reached out over email twice by The Fix and did not respond in the past several weeks.
MORE: Education Department to begin mass layoffs following Supreme Court victory
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Headlines from the Daily Northwestern and New York Post; Daily Northwestern; New York Post