THE PROFESSIONAL PROTEST COMMUNITIES MESSED UP THE UNIVERSITIES.

That's the bed the various "studies" departments made.  Now they have to lie in it.  "Ethnic studies finds itself ill protected by disciplinary norms of academic freedom, Timothy Messer-Kruse writes."

The fundamental problem confronting the "studies" departments is that a lot of what passes as critical theory rests either on untestable priors, or is normative per se.  Don't say I didn't warn you.  "The logic bomb detonates. Is anybody surprised that denying coherent beliefs might generate incoherence, or counterrevolution?"

It's the counterrevolution that's concentrating Professor Messer-Kruise's mind.

Conservative attacks on critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programs and anything labeled “woke” have rekindled a national conversation over the proper role of the university in society. Academics have attempted to uphold higher education’s status quo by defending the idea that professors have the right to formulate and promote contrarian ideas within their area of expertise. While this tactic has well served the champions of academic freedom for the last century, it is now threatening to unwittingly jettison my home department, ethnic studies, from its besieged bastions.

Antiwoke laws have explicitly carved out vast areas of scholarship as “controversial” topics that may no longer be taught in state institutions of higher education.

Indeed. Higher education's DeSantis problem, though, is self-inflicted, dear reader, and I ask you to hold two contrasting opinions in mind. First, that the use of public moneys to support education is censorship per se. Second, that universities exist to play around with ideas.  It's on the legislatures to trust the faculties to be good stewards of their curricula, and it's on the faculties to maintain standards of quality control on their inquiries.  The professor, however, defends the area studies types for abandoning those standards.

Organizations dedicated to defending academic freedom have long attempted to widen First Amendment protections shielding professors by emphasizing the unique and exceptional contributions universities make to society. As the American Association of University Professors declared in 1915, the modern university was “an intellectual experiment station, where new ideas may germinate and where their fruit, though still distasteful to the community as a whole, may be allowed to ripen until finally, perchance, it may become part of the accepted intellectual food of the nation or of the world.”

This argument is grounded in the idea that intellectual discovery and progress depend on the freedom of experts to pursue truth even in realms that are popularly seen as frivolous, dangerous or heretical. Such formulations draw power from and reinforce an older genteel notion of professionalism and traditional disciplinary organization. Bound to them is a presumption that threatens to leave interdisciplinary fields outside its ramparts—namely, that academic freedom exists only within the boundaries of a professor’s expertise in a defined area of scholarship. AAUP’s official position on academic freedom defines “freedom of research” as being “grounded in the exercise of professional expertise.”

That "genteel notion of professionalism" suffices to protect the inquiry that goes on in "studies" departments or centers.  Researchers in literature or philosophy or political economy or sociology have ample opportunity to investigate and collaborate on the sort of "intersectional" questions the "studies" departments have arrogated to themselves; and, retaining affiliations in more traditional disciplines might provide precisely the sort of checks on one's speculations that the "studies" departments and their flying monkeys in Student Affairs have freed themselves from.  That has not turned out so well, has it?

Ethnic studies, because its subject of inquiry is viewed as being uniquely charged with political and partisan controversy, is often viewed as lacking the sort of neutrality that would rise to the standard that is credited as the mark of professionalism. Because it lacks an easily definable disciplinary home, its claims to unique expertise are often suspect.

Partly, this is due to its unique origins within the academy, as the achievement of a protest movement whose demands encompassed both the academy and the wider world. The first ethnic studies departments, like my own here at Bowling Green State University, were founded by Black, Chicano, Asian American and Native American students who were unrepresented in traditional departments. At the time, it seemed that only by establishing separate programs and departments would universities be pushed to hire more faculty members of color and include nonwhite perspectives and experiences in the curricula.

Ethnic studies, like its sibling women’s and gender studies, once established, quickly incorporated a fundamental critique of universalism and its drive to canonize subjects, challenging disciplinary paradigms by pointing out how they were rooted in dominant raced and gendered identifies and their consequent standpoints. While such purposeful interdisciplinarity proved its usefulness in both blazing paths to new questions and methodologies and revitalizing the approaches of traditional disciplines, its successes came at the cost of venturing farther away from the established academic protections of “expertise in a discipline.”

I repeat: literature, philosophy, sociology: and the problems the "studies" departments now face are precisely because the protesters abandoned the disciplinary protections that protected them, and people noticed.  "Use your academic status to make a silly argument, on a non-private platform or wherever, brace yourself for the incoming. 'We don't refute people like this. We mock them. And we pity the students in their classes.'"  In my gloomier moments, I think the silliness is the point.  "Minor-attracted person?"  "Feminist mathematics?"

That's too adult a point for the professor.

Traditionally, disciplines have been seen as not just the means of organizing the production and teaching of knowledge, but also as the means by which education and indoctrination are distinguished. It is disciplines that stake out what subjects, questions, theories and debates count as educative, and what is relevant and extraneous to that purpose. Since 1940 the AAUP has marked the boundary between teaching and indoctrination as being where an instructor introduces “controversial matter that has no relation to their subject.” What happens when such a subject is neither respected as a settled professional standard within the academy nor recognized as a legitimate subject by the public?

I don't know, the economics departments managed to grapple with the Quantity Theory of Money and Rational Expectations and Rational Cooperation despite their initial status as outside the professional standards, and probably recondite in a way that reframing pedophilia as "minor-attracted" is not.

It is the responsibility of the faculty, whether in disciplinary organizations, or in shared governance, to evaluate their professional norms.  The protest community disciplines have repeatedly trashed, sometimes gleefully, those norms, and thus provoked the incoming.