BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE
For ten years before I retired at the end of 2021, I regularly taught a course called Corporate Power in America. The course examined how corporations shape politics, culture, and everyday life in the United States. I sometimes used my own university, North Carolina State, as an example of how corporate partnerships influence research and teaching and abet corporate crime. In offering this analysis, was I speaking for the state? Could my employer have rightfully demanded that my classroom speech affirm the view of Republican state legislators that corporate-university partnerships are all to the good?
On its face, the first question seems absurd. No sensible person with an inkling of how higher education works in this country would think that an individual professor, presenting subject-matter material in a classroom, “speaks for the state.” But nutty as it might sound, this question can no longer be dismissed out of hand.
In my course, I spoke as a professor whose expertise included the matter of how large corporations, individually and collectively, try to maximize profits and shareholder returns by shaping public opinion and dominating government. This is bread-and-butter political sociology, rooted in long traditions of research and theorizing about power, politics, economy, and culture. My job was to guide students through this territory. My disciplinary colleagues, and by extension the university, had deemed me professionally competent to perform this role. It’s hard to imagine any student, ever, thinking that what I said about the exercise of corporate power represented the official position of any government entity. If a student had thought such a thing, it would have reflected a terrible pedagogical failure.
The second question—whether the university, as my employer, could have compelled me, under threat of termination, to present the party line of right-wing state legislators—seems no less absurd. Again, no one who understands academic freedom as an essential underpinning of professorial work would see such compulsion as lawful or morally legitimate. It is widely understood and accepted as a good thing in the United States that professors are neither mouthpieces for political parties nor apparatchiks for whichever group manages to temporarily capture the state. Flacks and hacks, most people still seem to know, are not professors.
So why dwell on questions that arise from a place beyond reasonable understandings of higher education, academic freedom, and professorial work? The short answer is because these questions are linked to a worldview that is gaining traction in our debased political climate and threatens, if its momentum is not resisted, to destroy much of what gives higher education and professorial work their special value to an ostensibly democratic society.
That traction is evident in a brief filed by counsel for the Florida Board of Governors of the State University System, in response to a suit charging that Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act”—an instance of legislation targeting critical race theory (CRT)—violates the First Amendment rights of faculty. The brief defends the act by arguing that professorial speech in the classroom is “government speech”; therefore it does not violate the First Amendment because the government is free to regulate its own speech, including in the forms of university curricula and course content. Professors’ speech, in other words, is state speech that the state is constitutionally permitted to regulate.
No doubt crazier legal arguments are made every day, but this argument was put forth in all seriousness, in a US District Court, by a prominent Washington, DC, law firm, to defend a law embraced by a group of adults who are responsible for overseeing one of our nation’s major university systems. No matter how far out the argument seems, it is being made with a straight face in the legal mainstream. I suspect that the argument would not have been made at all if it did not seem plausible to a lot of people, in Florida and elsewhere, who wield power over higher education in this country.
The argument that professorial speech is state speech may yet be shot down for its disregard of constitutional case law establishing First Amendment protections for speech in an academic context, even when that speech comes from professors who are state employees. A recent analysis by Keith Whittington, professor of politics at Princeton University, offers hope that the argument made in the Florida case will meet this fate. But considering the damage that could be caused by the idea that professorial speech is state speech, broader resistance is called for. We need to make clear, whenever we can, that professorial speech is guided by commitment to truth-seeking, not ideology.
The ideals of higher education would be utterly corrupted if students believed that professors say only what has been approved by the dominant political regime. Our authority as experts and our credibility as educators rest on the opposite belief: that even if we sometimes turn out to be wrong, we speak the truth as best we know it, based on the good-faith investigatory efforts of politically independent scholars and scientists. Our ability to function as we are hired to function depends on that independence. If we were to be defined as speakers for the state, or even perceived as such, it would mean the end of our ability to do what we are supposed to do as professors in public universities. If we are not trusted to speak independently of the state—and, when truth and conscience demand it, in opposition to the state—our public service mission is sunk.
The notion that professorial speech is state speech might seem laughable to those who know that trustworthy science, scholarship, and higher education depend on individual professors’ intellectual independence from reigning political powers. Not just today in the United States but everywhere always. The time for laughter, however, is past. We have serious arguments to make in defense of tenure, academic freedom, and our work as professors. Part of that work, especially in perilous times, is to oppose foolish and destructive ideas before they gain dangerous momentum.
Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.
