On Thursday afternoon, students, professors and faculty gathered in the University of Michigan’s Student Activities Building to hear guest speaker Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author and professor of history at New York University, present on her personal experience and academic exploration of “Intellectual Freedom in an Authoritarian Age” as part of the 35th annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom.
The DMN Lecture honors three former faculty members — Chandler Davis, Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson — who were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954, which was investigating communism on university campuses. Invoking their constitutional rights, they refused to speak. Former University President Harlan Hatcher assured the committee the University would not employ communists and fired the employees.
The lecture began with remarks by Faculty Senate Chair Derek Peterson, who compared this aspect of the University’s past to its recent actions. He said the University is more willing to stand up to conservative demagogy, citing the University’s protection of faculty members from backlash over their comments on far-right activist Charlie Kirk.
“Earlier this year, two members of the faculty here at U of M published uncomplimentary comments about the murdered activist Charlie Kirk,” Peterson said. “There was a firestorm of outrage in conservative media. Thankfully, President Grasso and the U-M regents stood firm against calls in conservative media for the dismissal of our colleagues from the faculty.”
However, Peterson said the University still bends to some conservative demands and ideals, particularly in the case of disciplinary actions against pro-Palestine protesters under recent changes to the Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities.
“I repeatedly expressed our collective unhappiness about the ill-considered and hasty modifications which were made last year to the Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities, which put in place a punitive process to police and control student activism,” Peterson said. “And I’ve expressed my conviction that the ongoing prosecution that is (against) pro-Palestinian students under the revised SSRR is an embarrassment and a discredit to our institution.”
University Provost Laurie McCauley expanded on Peterson’s introduction and said the University community would have to adapt these principles of intellectual and academic freedom to today’s political and social climate.
“This lecture calls us to think about what that renewal means in the current time, how we protect open inquiry, how we model intellectual courage for our students and how we sustain an environment where ideas can be explored freely and respectfully,” McCauley said. “This year’s theme of ‘Intellectual Freedom in an Authoritarian Age’ asks us to consider how these principles hold up when the world around us grows more polarized and less tolerant of dissent.”
After these two introductions, Ben-Ghiat took the floor for the main portion of the event with a story about her recent experience with repression of intellectual freedom under President Donald Trump’s administration. Ben-Ghiat said the UN Naval Academy selected her to speak at their annual Bancroft Memorial Lecture, where she would have focused on militaries under authoritarian rule in countries including Chile, Italy and Ukraine.
The Heritage Foundation, The Daily Signal, The Washington Times and Republican Party members of Congress sent a coordinated, collective letter to the Naval Academy, pressuring them into cancelling her lecture given her public stances against Trump.
Ben-Ghiat said this example highlights what she describes as the United States’ current state of moral collapse.
“Authoritarianism, whenever it descends into moral collapse, frees people from the idea that they should tell the truth, accept facts and respect others as individuals,” Ben-Ghiat said. “Agency and autonomy is part of their agenda. You have to get rid of this if you’re going to have an authoritarian state.”
Ben-Ghiat said moral collapse can lead to the process of hollowing out, where the government leads institutions to abandon their own beliefs and become passive tools of the government.
“The terrifying thing about authoritarianism is the hollowing out of government institutions,” Ben-Ghiat said. “We hear a lot about the hollowing out process, where institutions become tools of the leader or the party. This is just the start. It’s very, very tragic. They abandon their conscience and their belief in their own critical faculties and they reinforce the state suppression of solidarity and the rule of law. Ultimately, authoritarianism requires you not only to betray others, but really also to betray yourself.”
Jean Hong, associate professor of political science and professor of Korean studies, expanded on the idea of self-betrayal in the subsequent panel. When she was a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong said a national security law passed in 2020 suppressed dissent, particularly in universities, which led to self-censorship in the classroom.
“We found ourselves self-censoring out of discomfort and out of feeling unsafe,” Hong said. “I admit, I self-censored myself as well, not because of fear, but because of concerns for students, concerns for colleagues, concerns for my colleagues from mainland China or (who) have families in mainland China.”
Ben-Ghiat said the government enforces silence by removing materials that might inspire critical thinking.
“This is why, in the Joe Biden years, Republican states started claiming that students who read about institutionalized racism slavery would have emotional distress, and that was a bad thing,” Ben-Ghiat said. “What they were doing was taking away materials that might spark the conscience, be reminders of people for recognizing injustice and wanting to do something about it in the world. That all of that is dangerous for authoritarian stability. So the histories had to go, the readings had to go, the books had to go.”
Ben-Ghiat said educational institutions are front-line targets of those who seek to destroy democracy because authoritarian states prioritize a long-term political structure and aim to make education a place to imbue people with authoritarian values and reward conformity.
“Universities are prime hunting grounds for autocracies because they train the next generation of leaders, and leadership is very important to autocracies,” Ben-Ghiat said. “This is why they don’t just change the curriculum — they change the university structures. They change personnel, large-scale policy changes. So they don’t only change the contents of learning to reinforce their ideological agenda, but they seek to remake the purpose of education.”
Karima Bennoune, U-M professor of law, said the resilience of universities is important to maintain academic and intellectual freedom.
“As a professor of international human right laws, it is perhaps entirely unsurprising that in my view, one of the most important jobs of U.S. universities today is to respect and defend human rights within our institutions, in our society and in the world around us both through the rigorous intellectual and scientific work that is done here, but also in the way that we operate,” Bennoune said.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, LSA junior Connor Lewis said the lecture was a reminder that there is always a path of resistance.
“A key part of standing up to authoritarian dialogue is to advocate information, to spread information, to not just bend to fear,” Lewis said. “And that’s a lot of what we talked about, just taking whatever action you can.”
Ben-Ghiat ended her lecture by expressing her hope for intellectual freedom in the United States.
“One of my maxims is never underestimate the American people,” Ben-Ghiat said. “I truly believe that the United States has the potential to defeat this autocracy and come out of it with a stronger, more just and more democratic system.”
Daily News Contributor Hannah Bodnar can be reached at bodnar@umich.edu.
