EDUCATIONAL THEORY ON WHITE ACADEMIC FREEDOM: A BLACK PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH TOWARD EPISTEMOLOGICAL JUSTICE IN HIGHER EDUCATION

EDUCATIONAL THEORY ON WHITE ACADEMIC FREEDOM: A BLACK PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH TOWARD EPISTEMOLOGICAL JUSTICE IN HIGHER EDUCATION

ABSTRACT. Recent challenges to academic freedom in the U.S. have centered on conservative policymakers' attempts to limit academic concepts that they deem as divisive and un-American. These challenges underscore the acknowledged yet unnamed racialized aspect of academic freedom in U.S. higher education, which privileges Euro-western academic thought. In this article, I recognize academic freedom not as a color-evasive and politically neutral professional agreement, but as a race-conscious and ideologically driven tool used to perpetuate intellectual white supremacy. Naming this concept white academic freedom, I explain how academic freedom privileges knowledge and knowledge dissemination that (re)creates and protects white supremacy, while stifling knowledge and knowledge dissemination that challenges it. Using insights derived from a Black philosophical approach, I then describe the characteristics of white academic freedom and how they advance epistemic injustice and white supremacy. In naming white academic freedom, I do not advocate for the abolishment of academic freedom for the sake of epistemic equity-rather, I call for the reframing of academic freedom under a Black philosophical lens to embrace collaborative knowledge generation and dissemination, which can disrupt white supremacy in the academy. I name this reframing Black academic freedom, as an expansive approach to embracing knowing and knowledge generation outside of white normativity and supremacy.

Despite recent shibboleths about 'academic freedom,' state legislators and boards of trustees have the right-the duty-to redirect, curtail, or close down academic programs in public universities that do not align with the mandate of the taxpayers who generously support them. When public universities violate their part of this social contract, the people ... have every right to insist on reforms.

-Christopher Rufo

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today ... it covers more than two thousand years of western political thought. Western political theory is not a contract between everybody ("we the people"), but between just the people who count, the people who really are people ("we the white people").

-Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

Challenges to academic freedom are not new. However, recent challenges to academic freedom in the context of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Critical

Race Theory, gender and queer theory, as well as other scholarly areas that challenge white supremacy-bring into focus a previously explored but unnamed racialized aspect of academic freedom. Academic freedom is a generally recognized norm in U.S. higher education, influenced by though not inscribed in the U.S. Constitution. From a western context, "intellectual freedom" granted individuals the right to ponder, research, and teach in a "quest for truth," so long as it did not disrupt the status quo. Given the exclusionary, racist (e.g., white supremacist) history of higher education, academic freedom critically unexamined protects whiteness as the ideological status quo. Due to the doxic nature of white supremacy in higher education, I posit that academic freedom exists as white academic freedom. In this article, I define and conceptualize white academic freedom-naming its primary characteristics of being brutal and focused on assimilation, neoliberal, and concerned with maintaining the status quo. I then propose a different approach to academic freedom through a Black philosophical/Black consciousness lens, Black academic freedom. Black philosophy and Black philosophical approaches are best suited to illuminate white supremacist practices as they emerge from the experiences of those who experience anti-Black racism. What emerges from Black philosophy, then, is an awareness of how to address inequality and achieve socially just outcomes in anti-Black spaces-Black consciousness. Counter to white academic freedom, Black academic freedom acknowledges the liberatory role of knowledges not grounded in or in support of white supremacy and is grounded in communal care, pluralism, and intellectual expansiveness.

White academic freedom privileges scholars, regardless of racial phenotype, who advance scholarship that does not challenge whiteness and punishes those who pursue meaning-making that elevates, explores, and expands knowledge challenging white normative ways of knowing. To frame my argument, I use Stovall's notion of white freedom and a Black philosophical approach as the challenge to white normative knowing to define white academic freedom. If scholars are to pursue authenticity in higher education, scholars must determine who the current conditions afford the opportunity for authenticity; to wit, knowledge and scholars that challenge white supremacy have been marked as propaganda and divisive. Therefore, in using a Black philosophical approach, I name white academic freedom as a means to validate and extend the work of other critical scholars in critiquing the harmful structures of academia.

To be free, arguably, is the zenith in U.S. society. Written into the Declaration of Independence from the British monarchy is the idea that all men have certain inalienable rights, which include life, liberty (freedom), and the pursuit of happiness. However, due to the U.S. history of chattel enslavement, and the denial and policing of individual rights, the idea of liberty or freedom as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution remains at odds with being non-white. Frederick Douglass highlights the hypocrisy of celebrating freedom in a country that views other humans as animals suitable only for ownership, unable to think and govern themselves, when he posed the question, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"

U.S. universities are sites that (re)create and preserve whiteness ideology and white supremacy. Though higher education in the U.S. is at times celebrated as a tool for creating an equitable and inclusive society, it exists generally as a place that exercises white dominion over what knowledge is viable, valid, and acceptable within its ivory walls. Therefore, scholars should call into question the supposed race-neutral stance of academic freedom that aims to protect the production and dissemination of knowledge. What, then, to the marginalized scholar, is academic freedom?

ACADEMIC FREEDOM: FOR THE COMMON, PUBLIC GOOD

The notion of academic freedom in the United States has existed since the inception of the colonial colleges. Its philosophical foundations were birthed in Greece, adopted by Europe, and tailored to United States higher education. Unique to academic freedom in the United States is its relationship with the United States Bill of Rights and the protections provided to United States citizens because of it. The nineteen fifteen Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure from the American Association of University Professors defined the foundational principles of what would come to be academic freedom in United States higher education. The document outlined three core purposes of the university: to promote inquiry and advance the sum of human knowledge; to provide general instruction to the students; and to develop experts for various branches of the public service. By extension, the American Association of University Professors identified three types of academic freedom that coincide with the three core purposes of higher education: freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and the freedom of extramural utterance and action. Vital for legitimacy, the nineteen fifteen Declaration served to elevate the profession and to attract the best talent into the profession-extending professional deference to faculty equivalent to physicians and lawyers. Doing so granted legitimacy to the profession not previously given to the tutors of the colonial era of United States colleges and positioned academicians as servants of knowledge and truth within liberal education and exemplars of the "ideal Christian gentleman."

The nineteen forty Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure released by the American Association of University Professors formalized the relationship and role of faculty within the academy. Building on the nineteen fifteen Declaration, the nineteen forty Statement identified four academic freedoms entitled to higher education faculty: the freedom to research, to publish the results of such research, to teach, and to communicate extramurally. Further clarification deemed faculty's ability to freely research dependent upon their performance in other responsibility areas, and the freedom to teach reliant upon subjects exclusive to the faculty members' expertise. Protected extramural speech under academic freedom recognizes a faculty member's right to free speech as a private United States citizen and not as an agent of the institution. However, given the special status of academic faculty, extra care and caution should be taken when speaking extramurally so as not to implicate or speak on behalf of their institution.

Academic freedom is not a right enumerated in the United States Constitution, but rather a professional courtesy that emanates from the First Amendment. Within a professional context, just as lawyers and physicians are granted the right to practice law and medicine, so too are academic faculty given the right to produce and disseminate knowledge as it relates to their academic expertise. Furthermore, academic freedom grants academics the security to pursue knowledge for the sake of answers without regard to political or personal gain, and ideally without fear of professional retribution. Institutions, under this professional courtesy, may choose who benefits from academic freedom by determining faculty appointments, curriculum, and areas of research featured institutionally. Additionally, private institutions are given greater exclusionary preference to shape academic freedom according to the preferences and values of their institution.