The Chilling of Free Speech

      It doesn’t take organized book burnings to mute free speech in today’s MAGA America. At Indiana University, it took only a disgruntled college student, an influential U.S. senator and a cowardly university administration.

      The story barely caused a ripple in a week that saw the collapse of Democratic courage to stand up for affordable health care, a lurid dump of Jeffrey Epstein emails, the beating of U.S. war drums off Venezuela, ICE’s invasion of another U.S. city (Charlotte, NC) and yet another Trump turnaround on tariffs as his administration scrambles to stabilize his plunging poll numbers in the face of rising prices.

The Indiana University saga, however, deserves a lot more attention, particularly since the impact of the university’s actions could prove chilling not only in Indiana but on campuses across the country.

      Here is how the New York Times began its story on the incident, the only one I could find in a major publication.

      “A professor who showed a graphic labeling the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan as covert white supremacy has been removed from teaching a class under a new Indiana law meant to foster ‘intellectual diversity.’”

      Forget the smokescreen of the “intellectual diversity” euphemism. The law clearly is trying to dampen what’s taught and how. But while it requires faculty to “introduce students to a variety of perspectives,” according to The Times, it does not call for removing from the classroom someone who includes a perspective that a single student finds offensive. Yet that appears to be what happened in this case.

      Here is the account of the suspension, which happened some weeks ago.

      Prof. Jessica Adams was teaching a class, titled “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice,” in the university’s School of Social Work. She shared with students a widely used illustration, a pyramid showing the escalating steps from language that suggests covert support of white supremacy to language reflecting overt statements of white supremacy. Among the covert steps on the chart was the slogan “Make America Great Again.”

      Adams, a full-time lecturer, told The Times she was using the pyramid as part of a discussion of racism in the 24-student, graduate-level class. She noted it is used in other social work classes, in part because racism often comes up in the field.

      “We recognize that white supremacy is the ideology that emboldens racist behavior,” Adams told the Times. Among other statements on the graphic, which has been in use for a couple of decades, were such things as “not challenging racist jokes” and “don’t blame me, I never owned slaves.”

      The Times’ modest account steered clear of the contextual reality of the rapid rise of racism roiling the country right now. In the first 10 months of the Trump Administration, there have been widespread arrests of documented as well as undocumented brown and black Americans in workplace dragnets, firings of top black military officers, systematic downplaying or outright whitewashing of race and slavery-related exhibits in national museums and National Parks, and equally systematic scrubbing of federal websites so that terms such as “racism” and “feminism” don’t even appear on them. All of this has been documented in multiple mainstream news reports and, it might be argued, done in the name of Making America Great Again.

      But one student’s complaint apparently was enough to remove Adams from an Indiana University classroom. At a press conference, covered by The IndyStar, Adams said “I feel that my academic freedom has been stifled. I feel that I have not been treated with care or allowed due process, and I do feel that my students are suffering.”

       Two students who attended the press conference said that in the weeks since her removal, assignments have gone ungraded by a series of guest lecturers who have stepped in.

      Yet the dean who removed Adams declined comment to The Times.

      Adams said the university had told her the student who filed a complaint against her said he was concerned that the term Make America Great Again appeared on the pyramid above other phrases he deemed more offensive, such as one about police violence.

      The American Association of University Professors held a press conference recently in which it decried the application of the state law “to punish and stifle faculty members.”

      Indiana University, the AAUP noted, has closed its diversity offices and fired diversity employees.

      Perhaps it’s wise to investigate what changes in policy are being applied on a university near you.

In Hamburg, members of the SA and students from the University of Hamburg burn books they regard as "un-German." Hamburg, Germany, May 15, 1933. Source: The Holocaust Museum.