The charge for the AHA’s Ad Hoc Committee on Academic Freedom is to “provide ideas and resources to guide the Association’s efforts to support the protection of academic freedom.” This is the first in a series of posts to help you understand what we’re doing, what we’re not doing, and why.
Some of our first decisions have been about how to communicate to the AHA’s membership who we are and what we’re doing. Given the current climate, should our names be listed publicly? (unanimously yes). Could we commit to regular communication with the membership about our processes and projects? (also unanimously yes).
And we have now turned to thinking about how we can be helpful in an extraordinarily challenging time. This committee is not charged with creating policies around academic freedom, nor does it have the mission or the capacity to adjudicate violations of academic freedom. What we know is that many of our colleagues are at a minimum concerned about threats to academic freedom and many are feeling directly threatened by policies that seem to impinge on their ability to research and teach history.
What we can and will do is to 1) articulate clearly the ways that academic freedom is inextricably bound up with our standards of professional practice, 2) develop some relatively straightforward pointers about the ideas and practices of academic freedom as they relate to historians specifically, and 3) compile and share information about AHA advocacy efforts on behalf of academic freedom.