The Right To Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, edited by Valerie C. Johnson, Jennifer Ruth, Ellen Schrecker
The sequence of events flowing out of those earlier protests is astounding. During the backlash that followed, state funding for colleges and universities was withdrawn, and wealthy and largely right-wing white male donors came to play an outsize role. Courting big donors dismayed by any form of peaceful protest meant, in many cases, suppressing those protests with any means at hand, including expelling students, prohibiting them from their campuses, and voiding their right to attend their own graduations. While many of us who never attended so-called elite universities, their tuition prohibitive, may wonder what this has to do with us, it cuts close to the bone when we are reminded that most teaching at these universities is handled by adjuncts, part-time teachers, paid three thousand dollars a semester, without any protection from summary dismissal or any hope of becoming fulltime and tenured. Most of these adjuncts are women.
I was one of them for a couple of semesters at the University of Louisville when I was living in Kentucky in the 1980s. A “streetcar” college with a predominantly lower class student body and many African-Americans, the university raised millions from private donors to build an enormous sports stadium—that was what their largely male, white and right-wing supporters wanted. Meanwhile we adjuncts were doing our best to teach writing to students who through no fault of their own were so poorly prepared it was an exercise in frustration for all. But this core responsibility of the university didn’t resonate with the donors who thronged to the big new sports arena.
Since then most of the college level teaching in this country happens at the community colleges where tuition is almost affordable but where salaries for teachers don’t begin to finance even a modest middle class life.
Do we really believe in education as a free exchange of ideas? Or is that too threatening, as the Civil Rights Movement, The Women’s Movement, Black Lives Matter, and organizing for gay and transgender rights has shown? The backlash goes on and on, silently and underground in some eras, rampant in others.
What are we losing?
I was lucky enough to go to a very small Catholic two year college in the 1970’s. Like many small Catholic colleges in America, it no longer exists. The nuns and lay teachers gave us kids a great education. I had private French lessons since there were only two of us in the class.
I went on to the University of Iowa. That was much different! I had one Teacher’s Assistant, but because I was a junior I mostly got profs. My husband attended CU in Boulder. He had some kind of science class that was only taught by a TA. This guy was from India and he spoke English with a heavy accent that the kids could hardly understand! I am all for equal rights for all, but CU most likely paid this guy next to nothing and the kids got next to nothing in that science class.