On Feb. 5, Keziah Ridgeway and Maura Finkelstein visited Swarthmore for a conversation on “Academic Freedom and the Palestine Exception” as part of the 2024-25 Cooper Series. Both teachers have been the subject of intense pushback for pro-Palestine speech: Finkelstein was fired from her tenured faculty position as Associate Professor of Anthropology at Muhlenberg College and Ridgeway was suspended from her job as history teacher at Northwest High School in Philadelphia. The event will be covered at length in next week’s issue of The Phoenix. Before the event, however, Ridgeway and Finkelstein sat down with The Phoenix for an interview. An edited transcript is as follows:
Daniel Perrin: Why do you think that there is such sensitivity that people have around what teachers are and aren’t allowed to do? Is it possible to change the norms and conventions of teaching to move past the idea of the teacher as separated from politics?
Keziah Ridgeway: In order for us to understand that question, we have to look back at the reason education was set up in the first place in our country. Education was meant for a specific few. But as time went on, there was, first of all, this need to expand public education. But the reason for that expansion is to create workers. So you’re not exactly looking to create critical thinkers. You’re not exactly looking to be able to produce students that are going to make good decisions politically. So, over the last 20 years, there has been a movement that has been spurred, oftentimes by the Civil Rights Movement, Black Lives Matter, etc., where we try to change the way that we view education and make it more multi-dimensional. This includes ethnic studies, where you’re allowing people to really process and think not only about the history of our country, but how it affects the present and how it’ll impact the future. And I feel like once we started to push for that, we saw that, one, it was actually a wonderful thing for students, because they felt seen. But two, it made people who do not value diversity and real history really uncomfortable because you now have a generation of children that are going to question authority, and that was not the original purpose of education. So a lot of it goes back to the history of education in our country.
Maura Finkelstein: I love that answer. And the only thing I would add to expand it is to think about how educators and our students exist in the world. We’re products of the world, we are also producing the world. And, there is this myth about education, that it’s about learning facts as if there is an objective reality. And the truth is that we, if we’re really teaching, we’re actually not trying to reproduce knowledge or power or institutions or whatnot. We’re trying to help our students imagine the world otherwise. Because there’s education which trains you to be good workers and good subjects. And then there’s learning which involves imagining education more expansively and actually about thinking towards the future, getting tools from the past, knowing our history in order to imagine how we can bring about social change, liberation, freedom, etc. That’s very dangerous to institutions, whether it be our workplaces, as teachers, our schools, whether it be our governments, whether it be any gatekeepers who are more interested in reproduction than they are about creativity, imagination, and more. I would want to hear this in a K-12 context, but as a college professor, I think that’s one of the things that were so scary about the student encampments on college and university campuses: it was actually the best possibility of what learning can be. It was collective. It was socialist, it was about community care. It was about knocking down hierarchies. It was about thinking about how space can be imagined in its most creative and expansive ways as a space of learning. And that’s very scary for institutions that want a certain kind of discipline and control.
DP: Ms. Ridgeway, at Swarthmore, there are lots of conversations about higher education academic freedom. What does academic freedom look like in a K-12 context? What should it look like?
KR: What it looked like pre-2023 was that the curriculum was opening up. Philadelphia was the first city to implement African American history as a graduation requirement for high school students. That happened back in 2005, and then you have a situation where Ishmael Mohammed and Ishmael Jimenez became the social studies chairs of the School District of Philadelphia and intentionally broadened the curriculum and started to add a more ethnic studies approach. That means you’re going to specifically talk about Native Americans. You’re going to include Africa into history, and not just start at slavery here in the Americas. Within that setting, I had a lot of academic freedom to implement my curriculum, and I did. Because of that, I became this celebrated African American history teacher in the city of Philadelphia.
What I realized post-Oct. 7 was that when we talk about ethnic studies and when we talk about curriculum or curricular freedom, it stops at Palestine. I thought that being in the city of Philadelphia, that there were just certain things that wouldn’t happen here, that our school district is specifically dedicated to diversity in curriculum, and they have really worked hard over the last couple of years to make that an intentional practice within the school district. What I found out was that, because there are people who are uncomfortable with us having these conversations about Palestine, that was the limit, and so now you have to clear things. And ‘oh, you can talk about Congo, you can talk about Sudan, you can talk about Haiti, but you can’t talk about Palestine.’ And why? ‘Well, it’s a touchy subject.’ Isn’t it all touchy? I’m teaching history, we’re learning about Nat Turner, we’re learning about Haiti. Do you know what happened in that revolution?
What should academic freedom look like? It should look like that no matter who is involved in the conflict, students should be allowed to learn about it, and teachers should be allowed to teach it. When the war with Ukraine and Russia happened, the whole school just supported Ukraine, and we had a significant number of Russian students. But no one was like, ‘Oh, the Russian students might be upset about this, so we shouldn’t talk about it. And you all shouldn’t have a Ukrainian flag on your pin.’ So what should it look like? It should look like us being able to prepare our students for the world, the real world, and having really important conversations.
DP: Professor Finkelstein, You worked at a very small, liberal-arts college, with many similarities to Swarthmore. These institutions are hailed for their academic excellence and freedom, and often for being beacons of social justice. Do higher education institutions still have the capacity to be such institutions? If that capacity has been weakened, what prescriptive steps would you articulate for higher education to get back towards its mission?
MF: There are a lot of different ways to answer that question. I think that Muhlenberg and Swarthmore exist in the same universe, but they don’t exist in the same town. There’s a lot of differences. But, I will say what I saw happen at Muhlenberg is something that I’ve seen happen across the U.S. and colleges and universities over the past few decades, which is a combination of federal defunding of higher education, which causes a reliance on tuition – even at public universities – and a reliance on big donors, with an erosion of faculty governance, which is a form of accountability and peer review that is really critical to uphold academic freedom. Both of those things give an unreasonable amount of power to administrators who are in the pockets of their donors if they’re in difficult financial situations like Muhlenberg is.
In terms of faculty governance, we’re seeing across the country the ways in which students, faculty, and staff who should be able to have their cases heard in front of a panel of their peers or faculty are now having that right removed and sort of placed in the black box of Title IX, Title VI, other sort of closed-door administrative hearings in which it becomes about the bottom line. So, when you’re thinking about this funding model for higher ed, when you’re thinking about the erosion of faculty governance, you can’t have academic freedom. I mean, a larger conversation is, do any of us have academic freedom? I’ll table that, but the idea of what protects the sort of fantasy of academic freedom has been badly eroded, both in terms of funding and in terms of the destabilizing of faculty governance. So it’s very, very, very concerning. I haven’t done the research yet, but one of the things that I want to look at is what colleges and universities were doing during the McCarthy years and how they recovered. Because I think that there was a great deal of destruction that was done to these institutions that pushed them in a more conservative, neoliberal direction, but in terms of resistance and trying to rebuild guardrails, I think that there are probably good blueprints for us of what we would need to do instead of what I think we should do, which is sort of metaphorically burn everything to the ground and rebuild it.
DP: For both of you, how have these experiences changed (or reinforced) your approach to change-making, and what do you recommend to students who are grappling with change-making, whether or not to engage with the system, how to engage with the system, and things like that.
KR: Well, I think events like this one are important, and so is being able to have these conversations, and being prepared. But, the weaponization of Title VI is something that I didn’t foresee coming, and I should have as a history teacher, but I think that it’s important that students become students of history. So if you’re in a teacher education program, and even if history is not your thing, you absolutely should become knowledgeable about the various different phases that our country is going through and the phase that we’re in right now: seeing the rise of fascism. I guess the advice that I would give to students is that your morality should never be for sale. If you feel like something is wrong, you should speak on it and not be afraid to do so. But also, do an assessment and think about what privileges you have, see where you are, and base your advocacy around What can you afford to do? What are you willing to do? And what are you able to do?
MF: That was sort of what I was going to say. I had a mentor in high school who taught me that we don’t get rewarded for this behavior. We don’t get rewarded for resisting power. We don’t get rewarded for going against the status quo. There will be loss, and in that assessment, we have to know what we have to lose. But a really clear-eyed realization is that if we are raised to be good, that is actually very hard to resist. It is very hard to sort of get outside of that framework in which we get rewarded for good behavior instead of important behavior. So, figuring out what it takes to change that worldview in which the reward is the community that we’re in, and the reward is knowing that you are doing good work, but also knowing that institutions will punish us. That’s why we need to have each other’s back.
DP: Thank you both very much.
