Academic Freedom and Critical Race Theory

On September 9, 2020, AAUP National President Irene Mulvey issued a statement calling President Trump’s recent attack on critical race theory “a naked attempt to politicize our national reckoning with racism and a new escalation in the assault on expert knowledge.” The AAUP, she writes, “calls on faculty and administrations to condemn this ban and, further, to actively support the work of critical race theorists and other academics who offer indispensable resources for understanding the past and present and for building a more racially just society.” 

We, members of the Executive Committee of PSU-AAUP, wholeheartedly endorse the national organization’s statement. We pledge to protect the academic freedom of our colleagues in critical race theory, social justice, and related fields against those efforts intended to, as Mulvey writes about Trump’s words, “advance a political agenda best described as white supremacist.” We condemn Trump’s threatened ban and commit our unwavering support for the work of our colleagues in critical race theory, social justice, and related fields.