Anna Peterson’s New York Times article has restored my faith

Are contemporary faculty members at risk from false accusations made by supporters of Governor DeSantis? Or more generally President Trump? Has a crackdown begun that instills fear into the hearts of classroom teachers? Is there an epidemic of self-censorship that has gripped the campus? 

Anna Peterson, professor of religion at the University of Florida, believes all this is true.  She presented her testimony in a New York Times guest essay last Sunday, “Did One of My Students Hate Me Enough to Lie to Get Me in Trouble?” I am among those naturally disposed to doubt pretty much everything in the Times that has a political slant – and few of its articles don’t. Nonetheless, I’m an assiduous reader of the newspaper. That’s mostly on the grounds that I cannot afford any lapses in my attention to the curated voice of “American wokeness.” 

I use that term loosely to refer to the ever shifting consensus of left-wing views that blend beliefs in the omnipresence of American racism, sexism and homophobia, a piercing dislike of the traditional American past, disdain for heterosexual white men, admiration for so-called transgressive speech and styles, contempt for free markets and capitalism – above all hatred for the half of the country that voted for and continues to support Trump.   

So let’s say I read the Times aware that I am not going to encounter much which summons by enthusiastic assent. Lately the Times has been especially hard at work in printing page after continuous page explaining how Trump is a mortal danger to “democracy.”  The entire May 4 Opinion Section was titled: 

Repress dissent, Shatter precedents.
Dismantle oversight. Bully the 
Opposition. Crush elite Institutions.
Seize executive power.

It consists of 17 back-to-back anti-Trump diatribes. I’ve learned to read this stuff with anatine ease – that duck-like state of mind in which there is nothing to perturb my peace as I paddle forward. 

But Anna Peterson’s article fell like a morsel of Wonderbread tossed into the waters before my beak. It appeared in the printed paper (as is often the case) under a different title from the digital edition. The print title is more arresting: “How Anti-Woke Ideology Transformed My College.” That’s more to the point. It is not a question of one mean student slandering Peterson. It is a story of how a political regime has successfully oppressed an entire class of conscientious academics just trying to do their jobs.   

Let me be the first to admit that there is something to this. I’ve spent a career in higher education watching something very similar play out. I’ve seen academic careers ruined by false accusations. Freedom of expression stopped dead in its tracks by vengeful students, punitive administrators, denial of due process, cowardly colleagues, possible entrapment and a pervasive atmosphere of fear. I’ve intervened in dozens of such cases, only to find myself up against institutions willing to lawyer up to defend outrageous infringements of the rights of faculty members. If you are looking for current cases, look into what’s happening to Amy L. Wax at the University of Pennsylvania and Scott Gerber at Ohio Northern University. I’ve also been threatened by such lawyers for expressing views they would rather quash. 

But all those attacks on academic freedom of expression are and were attacks on conservatives (or in some cases libertarians) for refusing to row in the direction ordained as “the right side of history” –  or racial justice, or whatever other virtue terms are slung around at the moment. The victims do not have to be conservative. They just have to have said something that can be contorted into that framework. Think of Roland Fryer at Harvard who is by no stretch conservative but who ran afoul of Claudine Gay for expressing views of black crime that contradicted the “Narrative.”  

This is to say that what Anna Peterson describes at the University of Florida is by no means implausible.  The faculty who once complacently or perhaps vigorously enforced the ideological doctrines of wokeness now fear that the conservative powers-that-be will do the same to them by enforcing the doctrines of anti-wokeness. Her article is replete with… non-examples. What Peterson reports are apprehensions that the rules against “political activism” on campus will muzzle the faculty and the students:    

Some started avoiding terms like “racism.” One student recently told me that when someone used “intersectional” in class, the instructor told her not to use that word.

And: 

In a conversation in one of my classes, female students expressed the fear that catcalling provoked, and their male peers responded thoughtfully, reflecting on their own behavior – a learning experience for everyone. Today that conversation would, I fear, violate a Florida law that prohibits teaching male students that they must feel guilt for the actions of other men.

What’s notable about these and her other examples is how little actually happened. I am used to cases of faculty members brought up on charges, subjected to tribunals, or summarily fired – not for an untoward actions, but for expressing opinions disliked by a student or a bureaucrat.  What happened at the University of Florida?  By Peterson’s own account, her department chair: 

called me into his office to tell me that someone claiming to be a student in my Religion and Science class had complained that I spent 20 minutes talking about specific candidates, including who I was voting for and why.

She denied that it had happened and the matter was summarily dropped. The fascists at the University of Florida are apparently not very good at their Gestapo-like job. They seem to let innocence get in the way of securing a conviction.   

I’ve read Solzhenitsyn’s account in the Gulag Archipelago of Stalin’s show trials which never let the actual innocence of an accused stand in the way of a “confession,” let alone a guilty verdict.  And I have seen these tactics at work in American higher education. It is plainly possible to terrorize a campus community into similar compliance. Human nature is human nature.   

But has Anna Peterson shown us that Ron DeSantis’s people – or Donald Trump’s – are doing anything like that? Some may be tempted to play turn-about-is-fair – play, but I’ve seen no evidence of it yet. Indeed I take Anna Peterson’s article as the good news that nothing like that has emerged. If she had seen it at the University of Florida, she would surely have cited it. Instead what she has witnessed is fellow faculty members, some of whom may have guilty consciences, fearful that they will be held to account if they misuse their authority in the classroom to impose their wokery on their students. 

They may be right to worry. Years and years of freedom to indulge in “leaning in” to their political convictions in the classroom may have ingrained in them some bad habits. Learning how to play it straight – to teach without favoring one political side or demeaning the other, or signaling one’s own preferences – may appear to them onerously difficult. A little fear may be salutary in reminding them of their real responsibilities. So thank you Professor Peterson for restoring my faith in human correctability.