U Board of Regents must not fold on defense of academic freedom

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The Trump administration’s announcement that it was pulling $400 million in federal funds from Columbia University because of a failure to address alleged antisemitism has undoubtedly sent shudders through the University of Minnesota’s administrative building Morrill Hall. After all, Columbia and the U are among a handful of institutions being openly investigated for such a supposed failure by the Departments of Justice and Education — and, as a New York Times headline ominously put it, “Other Schools Could Be Next.”

That the Trump administration’s announcement came a week before the U’s Board of Regents will vote on a resolution on “institutional speech” escalates that vote’s significance, raising critical questions about whether the university will retain its expressed commitment to academic freedom or whether it will crumble in the face of the authoritarian onslaught.

The vote gets at a basic but consequential question: Will faculty collectively retain the right to speak on matters of public concern? The resolution’s origins are no mystery. It comes in the wake of misguided yet well-publicized claims from a number of people — most notably law Prof. Richard Painter and former regent Michael Hsu — that the university tolerates and even subsidizes “antisemitism.”

To be sure, antisemitism is ugly and vicious and certainly exists, including, no doubt, at the University of Minnesota. But what Painter and Hsu mean by antisemitism is something quite different. To them, harsh criticism of Israeli policies is antisemitic, and the fact that the university administration has not unilaterally removed the collective online statements of some departments denouncing Israeli atrocities means that the U tolerates and subsidizes the hateful scourge.

The subtext here, of course, is the place of Israel within American political culture, including portions of the Jewish community and, not insignificantly, much of right-wing evangelical Christianity. For American apologists of Israel, calling out the Jewish state for engaging in apartheid against Palestinians, as have Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the leading Israeli rights organization B’Tselem, can only come from a place of either intellectual dishonesty or Jew hatred. Even more objectionable, such folks claim, is to accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza. That a U.N. Special Committee and the International Court of Justice have found the charge plausible, and that both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have issued extensive reports likewise supporting the claim, seems to be immaterial.

So why is this an issue for the University of Minnesota? The protests spawned by the horrific attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the Israeli obliteration of Gaza that followed made it one. Faced with campus demonstrations, the university administration doubled down on a flawed set of time, place and manner restrictions for students and employees, for example. And it infamously denied the directorship of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies to Raz Segal, an Israeli Jewish scholar of the Shoah who had the temerity to apply the moral commitments derived from that history to Israeli actions in Gaza. This human-rights even-handedness, according to Painter, makes Prof. Segal a “political extremist.”

The shameful saga of Segal is instructive. Both the university administration and several regents have publicly insisted that they are committed to academic freedom. But when challenged to actually demonstrate that commitment, they have failed. University President Rebecca Cunningham, despite faculty and national pressure, notably chose not to reverse the violation of academic freedom by her predecessor days before her appointment began by restoring Segal’s job offer. And for those three regents who recently took to the Minnesota Star Tribune to claim that academic freedom is a “core value of the University of Minnesota” (“Counterpoint: U resolution does uphold academic freedom,” March 4) where were they when the American Association of University Professors sent them its letter addressing the university administration’s denial of the same?

Prof. Eric Schwartz has already compellingly laid out why it is essential for the Board of Regents to vote down the resolution on Friday (“University of Minnesota must not muzzle its scholars,” Feb. 28). While offering a token expression of gratitude to the President’s Task Force on Institutional Speech, the resolution expressly rejects the task force’s essential recommendation that departments and other university units retain the right, through established processes, to offer collective statements on issues of public concern.

But I’m worried. In light of the Trump administration’s Columbia University announcement, some regents may feel tempted to vote for the resolution to show that the university is “doing something” to respond to the claims, however spurious, of campus antisemitism.

They shouldn’t delude themselves. The right-wing attack on universities is worse even than what we saw under McCarthyism, and the Trump administration is not going to be appeased by a board resolution.

This is not a time for anticipatory obedience. On the contrary, now is the time for the Board of Regents to recommit to what makes the University of Minnesota great. Rejecting the careful advice of shared governance bodies and neutering the faculty’s ability to collectively speak up, particularly at a moment when senior leaders may lack the courage or willingness to do so, would be not just wrong and misguided but a betrayal of their obligations to the institution. They must vote no.

Scott Laderman is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and a former president of its faculty union.