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The AAUP and the Angela Davis Case

Revisiting the AAUP's 1971 UCLA investigation.

Insofar as Davis’s extramural speech and schol­arly work more generally challenged the AAUP’s vision of the “learned profession” as objective and appropriately restrained, it tested the limits of “aca­demic freedom” as it had been theorized, understood, and applied up to that point. Yet, in relying on the UCLA ad hoc committee’s finding that Davis’s state­ments did not warrant disciplinary action, the report confirmed that it is the university’s imperative to make determinations on fitness through its shared governance processes (distorted as they were here in the university’s dependence on a secretive ad hoc committee)—which is to say, academic freedom has an institutional dimension, not just an individual one. Notably, however, neither the ad hoc committee report nor the AAUP report took a position on the merits of Davis’s conception of academic freedom.

Yet Davis’s understanding of academic freedom is one that, in my experience, resonates with many academics. The late Edward Said, for example, made a similar point in his 1994 BBC Reith Lectures, “Represen­tations of the Intellectual,” when he said, “Intellectuals are not professionals denatured by their fawning service to an extremely flawed power, but . . . are intellectuals with an alternative and more principled stand that enables them in effect to speak truth to power. . . . The goal of speaking truth to power is, in so administered a mass society as ours, mainly to project a better state of affairs and one that corresponds more closely to a set of moral principles—peace, reconciliation, abatement of suffering—applied to known fact.”

Fifty years after the AAUP report was published, it still isn’t clear to me, even having served on the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure for almost six years, that Davis’s and Said’s notions of academic freedom (and intellectualism) square completely or even satisfactorily with the AAUP’s academic freedom canon and “common law.” Indeed, to my knowledge, the AAUP has not addressed Davis’s particular conception of academic freedom at all outside of the 1971 report.