Texas State faculty, staff, and students could be forgiven if they missed the most recent episode in the growing international tensions over academic freedom and freedom of speech. As we huddled for warmth, lit candles in the dark, and worried about access to clean water during the most severe winter storm in recent memory (while still carrying out the many adjustments we’ve had to make in our professional and personal lives during the COVID-19 pandemic), National Public Radio reported on political turbulence in and around the French university system. “The French academic world,” NPR told its listeners on 21 February, “is in an uproar after President Emmanuel Macron’s minister for higher education ordered a report into what she called Islamo-leftism in the nation’s universities.”
NPR correspondent Michel Martin brought this news home to her U.S. audience by placing it in the context of recent debate over how U.S. history should be taught, specifically highlighting the New York Times “1619 Project,” and reactions to it. In the U.S., the debate has centered around competing understandings of the place of slavery in the origins and development of the nation. In modern France, the context is the distinct, yet related, debate over the legacies of French imperialism and la lutte de liberation nationale (“the struggle for national liberation”), which was fought—well, I enter the words in Google, Google completes the phrase—in Angola, Algeria, in Africa, in Asia and in Africa, in Indochina, in Guinea, etc.
In the French higher education system, universities are public institutions with degree programs open to any student who has obtained a baccalauréat or its foreign equivalent. Let’s sit, for a moment, on those words, “or its foreign equivalent,” because this phrase refers to the 275 million people who speak French around the world, and who earn secondary degrees equivalent to the baccalauréat that is the standard for France’s population of just over 67 million. Embedded in this access to French universities for those in the Francophone world are the many, increasingly divisive, legacies of what was called impérialisme during the 19th century.
The 20th-century lutte de liberation nationale continues in many ways as culture wars both within French universities, and in debates over what they ought to be teaching. As James D. Le Sueur, Professor of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, told the National Press Club in Washington, DC (22 January) “Old but re-vivified identity debates abound as pro-integration forces rally their troops in defense of ‘laïcité’ (read: separation of [Catholic] Church and State).” In the world of French universities—and the debates about them—this controversy over laïcité overlaps with increasing tensions over academic freedom and freedom of speech.
While snow fell on Texas in February, these culture wars came to a critical point. French Minister of Higher Education and Research, Frédérique Vidal, instructed the CNRS (The French National Centre for Scientific Research) to investigate allegations of “Islamo-gauchisme” (roughly “Islamo-Leftism”) in French universities. Six hundred heads of universities signed an open letter, denouncing, as NPR put it, “what they called a sterile controversy over the issue of Islamo-leftism,” which they see as “an attempt to delegitimize certain fields of research like post-colonial studies.”
Recognizing the need to defend academic freedom in French universities as an important cause in its own right—and perhaps seeing its resonances with debates over what ought to be taught in higher education in other parts of the world, including the U.S.—two hundred Anglophone intellectuals (I included) signed a second open letter. This letter puts the key points directly: “First, the state has no right to censor research by academics who draw on their expertise to advance the production of knowledge… Second, the approaches now under attack were inspired by some of the most brilliant minds of the French philosophical, literary, and sociological traditions… Third, those responsible for higher education should address the pressing need to find concrete solutions to the problem of racial discrimination in France, rather than carry out a witch hunt against researchers.”
Further, the letter’s authors highlight the benefits of broad access to a university system committed to rigorous standards of academic freedom. “As scholars working in the United States and elsewhere,” they write, “we carry a great intellectual debt to France for training thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Hélène Cixous, Aimé Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.” The letter’s signators—including such institutions as California Scholars for Academic Freedom, the Society for French Studies (based in the UK), the Western Society for French History (US), the French Colonial Historical Society (international), The Society for the Study of French History (UK), the Council for European Studies (International), and the Committee on Academic Freedom of the British Society for Middle East Studies (BRISMES, UK)—make the key point that higher education has historically been a space where the voices of those whose communities have suffered from systems of oppression (such as imperialism and chattel slavery) can flourish. If they create discomfort for figures like Frédérique Vidal, the path forward is further debate, not a push to silence critical perspectives.
International academics’ opinions are interesting news in France. A week ago, Le Monde published the Anglophone intellectuals’ letter. As a Texas spring smiles on us, it seems well worth our while to consider the arguments of French academics, and the lessons of these recent events in France. In doing so, I think we will recognize our good fortune to be able to engage in dialogue and debate at a university committed to the mission “to create new knowledge, to embrace a diversity of people and ideas, to foster cultural and economic development, and to prepare its graduates to participate fully and freely as citizens of Texas, the nation, and the world.”
Dr. Elizabeth Bishop joined Texas State’s History Department during 2008 with a PhD from the University of Chicago. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in her areas of her scholarly expertise—the history of the Middle East, Postcolonial Arab history, the history of the Global Cold War. You can visit her profile here.