Trump’s attack was quickly parroted by officials in some 20 states that have legislated against CRT in their schools and universities. In September 2020, in the waning days of the presidential election, then president Donald Trump issued an executive order banning CRT-inspired education from the federal government and characterised CRT as being “divisive, un-American propaganda”. They trace CRT from its beginnings in the 1970s, when it emerged from Critical Legal Theory, through the attacks on it in the 1990s (because it inspired the introduction of campus speech codes) and, most importantly, to the present. My scepticism about Bérubé and Ruth’s proposed solution aside, It’s Not Free Speech is extremely valuable for a number of reasons, starting with its discussion of Critical Race Theory (CRT) which is signalled by its subtitle: Race, democracy, and the future of academic freedom. Staffing the committees Bérubé and Ruth call for could end up requiring still more committees to adjudge the membership of the first committee – and on and on. Nor is it clear to me how universities can ensure that a professor who is highly respected in his field but has written in a blog that vaccines cause autism could be kept off a committee judging another professor who has made insulting comments about minorities or women. No matter how carefully their mandates are written, such committees will almost certainly fail to deal adequately with professors whose scholarship in their area, such as electrical engineering, is impeccable but who publish essays in newspapers saying that climate change is a hoax. The most interesting aspect of Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth’s It’s Not Free Speech is not their proposal for still more committees charged with academic governance. Tweet “It’s Not Free Speech: Race, democracy, and the future of academic freedom” by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth is published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
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