With the 2024 election looming, conservative pundits and politicians are campaigning against supposedly “woke” universities. Nothing new here. For over a century, from the Gilded Age plutocrats’ crackdown on some professors’ support for labor unions to McCarthyism’s anti-communist blacklists to today’s war on higher education, the attacks on academia invariably center on the nation’s most explosive issues, targeting the professors who, it was feared, might threaten the status quo.

Our session will engage with the main issues the current wave of censorship presents as historians and citizens. Besides addressing Lenin’s still relevant question: “What Is To Be Done,?” our panelists will also ask:

How have America’s long-term struggles over racism, patriarchy, and economic inequality manifested themselves in the recurring campaigns to censor its classrooms?

How has the university invoked academic freedom to contend with political repression? And how does that concept relate to the First Amendment’s freedom of speech?

Finally, how does academic freedom, a century-old set of norms dependent on tenure, deal with such structural changes within the university as the introduction of collective bargaining and the growth of insecure faculties, 75% of whose members hold temporary and non-tenure track appointments?

The roundtable participants are all scholars and activists, deeply concerned about the above issues. Irene Mulvey is the president of the American Association of University Professors, while Donna Murch, the author of a prize-winning study of African American urban higher education, leads one of the AAUP’s most innovative collective bargaining chapters. Our other panelists, Valerie C. Johnson, an expert on D.E.I., Ruth, an authority on academic freedom, and Schrecker, who studies universities and political repression, are the co-editors of The Right to Learn: Resisting the War on Higher Education in an Endangered Democracy, a volume of essays to be published by the Beacon Press in 2024.