Education,Free Speech,and the Fate of the Public

If you are a public school teacher or a teacher at a public university, and at some point you happen to find yourself embroiled in an academic freedom dispute with your employer, before you hire an attorney, do yourself a favor: read this book. Beautifully written and well argued by Joan DelFattore, a professor of English and legal studies at the University of Delaware, Knowledge in the Making provides the best single guide available to the legal minefield that has become academic freedom and free speech in America’s public schools and universities. It’s essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the fate of this country’s public education system.

Yes, the whole public education system—kindergarten to college. This is a refreshing and useful approach. Educational researchers have for too long examined the K–12 and higher education sectors in isolation rather than as a continuous pipeline, albeit one rife with detours and dead ends. DelFattore is an able guide whose map will prove helpful to other researchers who share her interest in exploring “the interconnectedness and interdependence of public education as a whole” (p. 5). If this book is any indication of the benefits of a synthetic approach, future scholars will be richly rewarded if they retrace DelFattore’s ambitious path.

The body of the book consists of a series of arresting case studies on race, homosexuality, religion, and school/campus politics. Her analysis spans the K–12 to higher education gamut and includes the perspective of faculty, administrators, students, and the courts. Although she’s trained in English literature, and makes her academic home in an English department, DelFattore is just as comfortable dissecting historical texts and legal decisions, moving between multiple literatures and methodological approaches in order to shed light on each of the cases she probes.

The book is at its best in those spots where DelFattore brings all of these scholarly talents to bear. In Chapter 2, for instance, her coverage of the legal wrangling around the effort to ban Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) at public schools in Pennsylvania and Arizona moves well beyond the blow-by-blow court cases that anchor most legal analyses. Not only does DelFattore follow these cases as they wind their way through the legal system, she also provides a layered interpretation of the novel, explaining its controversial racial dimensions and situating it in the American literary canon. DelFattore knows Huck Finn well, and when the reader is finished she feels as if she does, too.

The same nuanced approach is deployed in Chapters 5 and 6, and to equally good effect, when DelFattore explores the ongoing, seemingly endless debate between evolutionists and creationists. In clear and readable prose, DelFattore easily glides from scientific-method-pioneer Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), to Charles Darwin’s Origins of Species (1859), to the Scopes Monkey Trial (1925), to the present-day legal battles between evolutionists, who dominate the core of the professional science community, and their challengers, who now bow down at the altar of “intelligent design.” In short, DelFattore succeeds splendidly at placing each of the substantive speech issues she considers into a thick legal and historical context. It’s a winning formula.

A brief review of this sort cannot do justice to all that Knowledge in the Making has to offer. Ultimately, the book provides three primary takeaways. First, public school teachers enjoy precious few speech rights since the authority over what is taught and how “rests. . .with school boards that are either elected or appointed by elected officials” (p. 3). Second, although university faculty are given comparatively greater speech rights under the doctrine of academic freedom, which permits them to teach and research at the cutting edges of their fields, the doctrine is, DelFattore warns, much less secure “as a constitutionally protected right” (p. 222). Finally, students’ rights include the freedom from “coercive indoctrination and the right to be taught the subject matter of the course” (p. 23). Bringing her story up to the near-present, DelFattore concludes with an overview of the Supreme Court’s decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006). Although the case did not directly implicate public education (Richard Ceballos, the plaintiff, was a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County), the Court’s decision granting government employers far-reaching authority over employees’ on-the-job speech, DelFattore maintains, bodes poorly for the future of public-sector employees’ speech rights writ large—especially for public school teachers and university professors. We shall see.

Lest there be any doubt about her own stance, DelFattore condemns the erosion of public educators’ speech rights, viewing it as a critical legal and educational dilemma. In order to “make knowledge,” she argues, teachers and students must be able to engage freely in socially, politically, and religiously controversial speech—even when that speech veers far from the pragmatic mainstream of ideas and ideologies and crashes headlong into the “lunatic fringe” (p. 178). Professional communities of teachers and scholars, at every rung of the education ladder, but especially in higher education, must decide among themselves what the limits of free expression are. When it comes to education, DelFattore is resolute: “controversial speech is its heart’s blood” (p. 264).

One question left unanswered here is why educators’ speech rights have come under such heavy fire in recent years. “Among the chief culprits,” posits DelFattore, “is a powerful and growing cultural current that drives political leaders, media voices, and the general public into increasingly polarized positions” (p. x). So, should we blame the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Chris Matthews for our present free-speech impasse? Aside from the fact that these “media voices,” if they are the sort of voices she’s hearing in her head, evidence the strength of free expression, not its weakness, this specious explanation simply fails to satisfy. A better reason, in my opinion, and one that DelFattore’s own evidence supports, lies in the diminishment of the teaching profession itself over the course of the past several decades. Public K–12 and higher education faculty have faced heightened scrutiny by local, state, and federal government officials, by self-anointed education reformers, and by parent groups looking for scapegoats to blame for the country’s educational woes.

The politically motivated assault against teacher unions and provocateur professors, combined with the financial recession and the steep decline in public support for education funding at all levels, has taken a real toll. The spread of alternative teacher certification and the increasing reliance on contingent faculty are the result, in part, of fiscal stringency and of relentless antiprofessional attacks. DelFatorre is right that the protection of speech rights is first and foremost a professional matter: professional communities are the best hope for ensuring that the marketplace of ideas remains free and open. But what if there aren’t any professionals left? What then? Given the waning public commitment to public education, and to the professionals who work in it, these are questions all of us will need to ponder.