PROF. ELLWANGER: Academic Freedom Alliance wrongly defends student agitators

Adam Ellwanger is a professor of English at the University of Houston - Downtown. His primary areas of expertise are rhetoric and critical theory. He writes political and cultural commentary for outlets like Human Events, Quillette, American Greatness, The American Conservative, New Discourses, Minding the Campus, and many more.

Last week, the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), an organization that promotes and defends the principle of academic freedom in higher education, released a statement “on the Deportation of Noncitizen Scholars and Students.” This was a response to the Trump administration’s recent revocation of visas for at least 300 students. Although I am a member of the AFA, I find their statement a poorly reasoned defense of the tiny minority of foreign students who commit disruptive behavior on American campuses.

Visas were revoked due to the foreigners’ political agitation on campus and in society more broadly. Many of those affected are critics of America’s support for Israel – activists who support the cause of Hamas. Some of them aided the seizure and occupation of buildings in violent demonstrations on campus. Others participated in illegal encampments.

Not all who were effectively deported were violent: a Tufts graduate student’s visa was revoked in response to her authorship of an op-ed column that criticized Israel and supported Palestinian aggression. Still, we cannot forget that the campus left has spent years insisting that speech can be a form of violence. Their sudden epiphany that speech is harmless seems to be a new revelation to the left.

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In defending the rights of these students and faculty—some professors have also been marked for deportation—the AFA statement contains many troubling assertions. First, it makes no distinction between the political speech of faculty and that of students. The traditional American doctrine of academic freedom provides far less protection for students than it does for professors – it guarantees only that the student’s “freedom to learn” is not violated. But does a student’s right to learn require that we allow their participation in non-academic political agitation?

The principles of academic freedom have no legal standing in the United States. Rather, they are an elaboration of First Amendment principles in a university context specifically, where knowledge production is heavily dependent on free speech and open discourse. The AFA’s stance echoes the popular assumption that holds that all legal foreigners in the nation possess the full scope of liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment. But that’s inaccurate.

The Patriot Act of 2001 codified into law that legal non-citizens who express support for terrorist groups may be deported. Hamas is currently designated as a terrorist organization. A Supreme Court ruling in 1950 found that foreigners have lesser First Amendment rights than citizens, and another ruling in 1952 allowed the deportation of a resident alien who espoused Communist sympathies. So, there is long-standing jurisprudence that indicates limits on foreigners’ free speech rights in the United States – and clear precedent that shows that violating those limits may affect their immigration status. While there have been legal decisions affirming unlimited free speech rights for non-citizens, it’s inaccurate to say that there is a clear jurisprudential consensus on the matter.

Legal issues aside, the crux of the matter for the AFA seems to be that a “free exchange of ideas on campus” cannot occur unless we allow foreign students and faculty to engage in political agitation in the United States. Of course, that is preposterous. The vast majority of resident aliens in higher education do not engage in behavior that would jeopardize their presence in the country. A tiny minority of activist students and faculty losing their visas will not meaningfully impact the exchange of ideas on campus.

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Further, the notion that a “free exchange of ideas” cannot happen unless foreign activists have a physical presence at our universities is ridiculous. In the age of email and Zoom, and with academic conferences happening all over the globe, there are many ways that scholars and students can share perspectives and engage in dialogue without living on the same campus.

Published research is the most vital channel for academic discourse, and no one is saying academic journals cannot publish the work of non-citizens. But it must be noted that America is not the only nation with a doctrine of academic freedom. Foreign scholars who dislike America or its policies can find employment in countries they find less offensive. The exchange of ideas will continue.

It’s ironic that the AFA claims that many foreign students and faculty see the United States as “a refuge for scholars from across the globe who feared persecution and censorship at home.” Oddly, these agitators who sought refuge from the abuse of their native governments rarely seem to use the American right to free speech to criticize the society they had to flee. Instead, their outrage is directed towards the United States – the nation that offered them refuge and provides freedoms that their home countries never would.

We also cannot ignore that the most aggressive agitators on campus support the causes peddled by the political left. The irony, of course, is that left activists bear primary responsibility for the draconian crackdown on campus speech over the last decade. As Campus Reform has tirelessly documented, they are the ones who shout down speakers, impose speech codes, and demand safe spaces – but they are also the ones who participate in the most egregious forms of “hate speech”, who seize buildings, and who destroy property.

Ultimately, the AFA charges that the visa revocations were capricious – that they were undertaken only because the students’ speech “upsets those holding political power.” But it’s not Donald Trump and Marco Rubio who are offended by the speech in question – it’s a majority of Americans. Our government should advance the interests of the majority of citizens. And our citizens deserve a higher education system that doesn’t foment hatred or direct violence toward the nation that we call home.