Academic freedom as academic necessity: an editors’ note

I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And, I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you. (Lorde, 1983, p. 9 )

Since the National Communication Association (NCA) convention in November 2023, responses to the decision made onsite by NCA staff leadership to censor Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb have loudly cracked fissures within our discipline wide open. Foremost, at Dr. Muhtaseb’s expense, our discipline learned an unnerving lesson about the vulnerability of our scholarly voices: we can indeed be suddenly and formally silenced by people in positions of power in NCA’s national office—sans transparency, open discussion, or a voting process. This lesson is especially poignant for those of us who endure multiplicative forms of structural disenfranchisement throughout education writ large via cultural norms, policy, practice and the recent surge among conservatives and the GOP to legislate censorship (e.g., see Blankenship, Tager, & Howzell, 2023). As Dr. Muhtaseb’s accounting circulated, we also learned that throughout its 100+ year history NCA has consistently recognized and affirmed the importance of academic freedom—but does not (yet) have a codified definition or policy of academic freedom.

Academically raised in the Black Caucus and African American Communication & Culture Division to challenge dominant social structures predicated upon silencing and exclusion (Daniel, 1995), we echo the 2023 Editors’ Collective assertion: “Speaking out matters. Communication matters. Media framing matters. Words matter. Stories matter. Visuals matter (Editors' Collective, 2023).” In this particular cultural moment, preserving our discipline’s academic vitality is dependent upon expanding the organization’s infrastructure (e.g., bylaws, procedures, strategic planning initiatives, etc.) to define and codify academic freedom as academic necessity. As members of NCA and co-editors of Critical Studies in Media Communication (CSMC), we are implicated in the organization’s decision to engage in censorship. Lorde’s (1983) epigraph reminds us that our structural vulnerabilities are deeply intertwined across intersecting similarities and differences. Thus, censoring any scholar has the grave potential to ripple dangerously throughout academia—theoretically methodologically, epistemologically, and pedagogically.

As CSMC’s first Black women editors since its 1984 founding, we take seriously our responsibility to cultivate intellectually rigorous, original scholarship featuring a multitude of critical/cultural and Cultural Studies perspectives on media and popular culture. In the convention’s aftermath, we continued to learn how power works in our learned society when NCA was called upon to transparently address its censorship decision-making. Simultaneously, there was the public, political saga endured by Dr. Claudine Gay of Harvard University.

Now the former first Black woman, and, notably, the shortest serving President in Harvard University’s history (Haider & Kettles, 2024) Dr Gay, along with the Presidents of the University of Pennsylvania (Elizabeth Magill) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sally Kornbluth) testified in a 2023 U.S. congressional hearing to how a campus should respond when freedom of speech and expression collide with anti-Semitic hate speech. As Black women academics, we found ourselves watching even more closely as discourses surrounding the event shifted away from every campus’s responsibility to confront and condemn anti-Semitic calls for genocide and toward disciplining Gay’s testimony in particular.

We watched as rightful calls for any/every campus president to swiftly respond to current increases in anti-Semitic hate speech and hate crime devolved into a vehemently raced and gendered dissection of Gay’s character, dissertation, publication record, and career-long commitment to scholarly excellence. Both Gay’s resignation letter and Congressional Representative Elise Stefanik’s (R-NY) subsequent January 2, 2024 X response to Gay’s resignation at 11:49am disturbingly punctuate how Black women academics can be held to different, unequal, and inequitable standards of excellence. We also learned that our respective agency to advocate against censorship in specific cultural contexts can be hemmed by institutional power dynamics that regard the academic freedom of an Associate Professor with tenure (Rachel) differently than the academic freedom of a Dean (Kimberly).

In 2024 NCA will host its 110th convention calling for “Communication for Greater Regard.” Articulating the intentionality behind her convention theme as the 2024 program planner, Sims (n.d.) implores us to consider:

Greater regard as a process of cultivating care and concern; that which we regard is deemed important, granted value, and given consideration. To be a “regarder” is to be one who watches, takes notice, and is expressive, often by increasing with thoughtful intensity amid a climate where less use of regard is occurring. Communication is both the conduit and manifestation for greater regard.

Embodying the ethos of call and response, as co-editors we are positioning ourselves as “regarders.” Dr. Muhtaseb’s (2024) speech should not have been “singled out for removal” due to her “references to genocide and ‘free Palestine.’” Her words—spoken and written—should have been fiercely protected by a fervent organizational commitment to academic freedom. In short, Dr. Muhtaseb should have been treated with greater regard.

Positioning CSMC as a conduit for greater regard, we joined the widescale efforts to prioritize academic freedom by publishing Dr. Muhtaseb’s speech because it is the right thing to do. The NCA’s injurious mistake offers a stark reminder that smart people, ourselves included, are indeed fully human and therefore fallible. Returning to Lorde (1983), when human fallibility un/intentionally fuels the colossal momentum of oppressive structures dissent itself becomes the target for destruction.