The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
We at the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies and the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies stand with our colleagues around the country who are facing unprecedented attacks on academic freedom. We also call on all in the Penn community to support education measures that affirm the rights of all to safety, nondiscrimination, and life-saving health care–including reproductive and gender affirming care.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s assaults on academic freedom are but the most publicized instances of a multi-state effort to ensure that the content of college and university instruction is determined by politicians rather than instructors. Like restrictions on education at the K-12 level, prohibitions of diversity education and initiatives in higher education reveal an overt program of ideological control by threatening universities and their employees with funding cuts, closures, and termination of jobs. Florida’s HB 999 proposes to “provide direction to each constituent university on removing from its programs any major or minor in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems.” This explicit gag order codifies Florida’s attempts to curtail DEI initiatives and gender affirming care in public higher education and to interfere with hiring and tenure as well as curriculum. This breathtaking interference with university instruction and governance seeks to align public higher education with a radical rightwing ideology that would deny reproductive and gender affirming health care to Florida residents more generally. Texas has followed suit with Senate Bill 18, which decrees that “An institution of higher education may not grant an employee of the institution tenure or any type of permanent employment status,” thereby removing the single most important protection of academic freedom. In fall 2022, the Kansas Board of Regents approved a “workplace management strategy” granting Emporia State University authority to fire any university employee — including tenured faculty — for virtually any reason, resulting in the termination of 33 employees. These attacks on academic freedom are instrumental to a broader effort to curtail reproductive, LGBTQ, and voting rights in the US. Only three months into 2023, 435 anti-LGBT bills have been introduced in state legislatures around the country. In the eight months since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, 24 states have banned abortion or are likely to do so. Since the 2020 election, 26 states have endeavored to limit voting access, thereby further disenfranchising the populations they are targeting with bans on health care access, DEI initiatives, and the teaching of gender studies and histories of enslavement and colonization
This week, and as we celebrate QPenn here at the University, we join others speaking loudly and collectively against these attacks. Below, you will find recent open letters issued by the AAUP, the National Black Justice Coalition, and a group of Black feminist scholars, all of which spell out in detail the democratic principles that are at stake with such attacks. We appeal particularly to the Penn administration to affirm their commitment to academic freedom and our students’ access to accurate knowledge by fortifying DEI initiatives and by extending job protections and health benefits to the non-standing faculty who teach so many of our courses and who remain the most vulnerable to threats to instructors’ autonomy.