by AAUP National
August 4, 2021
The AAUP released the following statement in response to partisan attacks on critical race theory and recent attempts by state legislatures to ban or restrict teaching about race and racism.
Critical race theory (CRT) is a well-established academic discipline that emerged within the legal academy decades ago in the early and mid 1980s. CRT is an analytical approach that legal scholars use to explore and understand how race impacts law, and how law impacts race. Over the past forty years, CRT has developed into a robust field of scholarship that, like most capacious academic approaches, has been employed by scholars in many different fields. Within the past year, it has suddenly come under sharp and partisan political attack. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in an egregious example of false equivalency, publicly decried CRT as “a lie” that is “every bit as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets.” To date, eight states, including Texas, have taken legislative or administrative action to ban or limit the teaching of CRT and similar concepts deemed “divisive.” Much more alarming, at this time, twenty-five states have considered legislation to limit how and whether race and racism are taught in schools.
For more than a century, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has prescribed that institutions of higher education function as sites of unfettered scholarly inquiry and teaching. The 1915 Declaration of Principles, the AAUP’s founding document, states: “It is . . . not the absolute freedom of utterance of the individual scholar, but the absolute freedom of thought, of inquiry, of discussion and of teaching, of the academic profession, that is asserted by this declaration of principles.” The Association’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which has been endorsed by more than 250 scholarly and educational groups, makes plain that “teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject.” In addition, the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, jointly formulated by the AAUP, the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, defines “curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction” as areas in which the faculty has “primary responsibility.” And in the 2007 statement Freedom in the Classroom, the Association stated its opposition to efforts by groups that “sought to regulate classroom instruction, advocating the adoption of statutes that would prohibit teachers from challenging deeply held student beliefs or that would require professors to maintain ‘diversity’ or ‘balance’ in their teaching.”