Division F Vice Presidential Session: Threats to the Freedom to Teach and Learn: Historical Precedents and Modern Implications

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The menaces to academic freedom and institutional autonomy were real in 1931, as they were in the McCarthyite late-1940s and 1950s, for decades in the Jim Crow south, and in many other periods of U.S. history. In the 2020s, we are again experiencing significant and well-funded efforts to limit what educators can say and do, including state legislatures prescribing curricula and proscribing speech and teaching on vital issues. This panel of educational historians will locate the current challenges facing K-12 and higher education in longer national trends, will discuss the historic efforts to counter them, and will address what this generation of educators can do to preserve the freedoms to teach and learn.

Sub Unit

• Division F - History and Historiography

Cosponsor

• Division L - Educational Policies and Politics

Chair

• Michael S. Hevel, University of Arkansas

Participants

• Timothy R. Cain, University of Georgia

• Michael Hines, Stanford University

• Adam Laats, Binghamton University - SUNY

• Ellen Schrecker, Yeshiva University

Papers

• This is a symposium. No paper. - Timothy R. Cain, University of Georgia

• This is a symposium, no paper - Michael Hines, Stanford University

• This is a symposium, there will be no paper - Adam Laats, Binghamton University - SUNY

Discussant

• Jon Hale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign