Por Ashley Smith
If we lose free speech, we lose freedom of the press and freedom of association as well as our ability to address grievances. Image by Getty and Unsplash+.
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Trump administration has launched a McCarthyite assault on freedom of speech. The government, corporations, and institutions have censured, suspended, and fired workers from Jimmy Kimmel to the Washington Post’s only Black woman columnist Karen Attiah and others in almost every imaginable occupation for telling jokes, making statements, or posting critical comments on social media.
Even before Kirk’s assassination, the New McCarthyism was gaining steam. In one of the worst instances, Texas State University fired tenured professor Tom Alter for the crime of speaking at an online socialist conference. Far right grifter and self-declared “anti-communist cult leader” Karlyn Borysenko violated the conference’s protocols, recorded Alter’s speech, edited it to distort his comments, and shared her doctored video on social media, which then went viral.
President Kelly Damphousse responded by summarily firing Alter without due process, violating his First Amendment rights and academic freedom. Alter is a beloved teacher, author of the widely acclaimed book Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas, and a member of the Texas State Employee Union.
CounterPunch’s Ashley Smith here interviews Alter about his firing and the campaign to overturn his dismissal and reinstate him with full pay and benefits and without censure or restrictions.
You have just been fired from Texas State University for speaking at a socialist conference. What happened? What was the university’s justification for firing you? Has discipline or firing of this sort ever happened before? Isn’t this a threat to First Amendment rights and academic freedom for everyone?
On September 7, I participated in the online Revolutionary Socialism Conference. I gave a talk during the session titled “Building Revolutionary Organization Today.” At the beginning of my talk, I identified myself as a member of Socialist Horizon and the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU). I consciously did not identify myself as a faculty member or employee of Texas State University (TXST) during my talk. I gave the talk over Zoom, from my home, on a Sunday morning, during my own time.
Unbeknownst to conference participants and in violation of the conference rules of no recording or streaming, an online social media grifter recorded the conference. This person is a self-described fascist with horribly antisemitic and anti-queer views. The next day the fascist grifter called a campaign for my firing from TXST.
Two days later, while I was at my son’s soccer practice, I received a text from a local San Marcos community activist group chat drawing my attention to TXST President Kelly Damphousse’s public statement announcing my immediate termination. That’s how I found out I was fired. Damphousse stated that he “was informed about controversial statements that were made by one of our faculty members at a conference” and accused me of “inciting violence.”
Upon seeing this I immediately returned home and found that I had been cut-off from my TXST email. I later found an email from the university Provost in my personal email notifying me of my termination. The provost’s email also refers to my participation “at a recent conference.”
After a review of the conference video, the university determined that I “have engaged in conduct that jeopardizes the health and safety of our university community. You have also engaged in conduct that reflects inappropriate and poor judgement as a faculty member at Texas State University.” The reasons outlined in the provost’s email are the University’s justifications for firing me.
Repression of academic freedom, even that of tenured professors, is not something new in the US. What makes my case different is that there was no due process, not even a predetermined sham process. I was a tenured professor at a public university; this entitles me to due process according to TXST policy and state law.
This is in addition to protections afforded to me and all Americans by federal Constitutional rights. My firing is a threat to everyone’s first amendment rights and specifically all educators’ academic freedom. If I can be fired without due process and in violation of my democratic rights, then all our democratic rights are in serious jeopardy.
What makes this threat to our rights even more alarming is that President Damphousse in citing the conference video in connection to my firing has capitulated to a self-described fascist. This erodes the basic underpinnings of a free and democratic society.
How have your co-workers, union, and students responded? What does your defense campaign look like? What has been the response from the university bosses to the outpouring of support for you and other targeted professors?
While my firing by TXST was quick, the response of students to my firing was even quicker. I was fired on a Wednesday evening and on Thursday students spontaneously protested my firing on campus. Student-led protests on campus lasted for five school days, calling for my reinstatement and defense of free speech. The spontaneous student protests have subsided, but they have launched a long-term campaign in defense of free speech, which includes the demand “FREE DR. ALTER.”
My two unions, the TSEU and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) also came to my immediate defense. The TSEU is a statewide union representing all employees of the state of Texas. The union quickly started circulating a petition calling for my reinstatement and has taken this campaign to campuses across Texas. The AAUP has provided legal assistance and statements of support.
Everyone, everywhere, join a union! If my firing results in increased union membership, that will be a win. Statements of solidarity and offers of support continue to pour in. They have come from academic associations and community organizations of all kinds. My email inbox is flooded with so many messages that I am unable to answer them. I want people to know that I have seen your messages, and they are keeping me going. Thank you.
Needless to say, members of Socialist Horizon were there at the beginning and put taking care of me and my family first. Now with the help of other socialist and working-class left organizations a broad united front national campaign is being organized. This campaign will not only defend me but anybody else facing politically motivated attacks from the right.
International solidarity has been extended to my campaign as well. For example, I received a message of support and solidarity sent from the flotilla currently on its way to provide humanitarian aid in Gaza.
As for the university bosses’ response to the vast amount of support and solidarity I have received in defense of due process, academic freedom, and democratic rights? Who knows. You will have to ask them and question their judgement as to why they sided with a fascist.
This seems to be part of a broader assault on higher education in Texas. Other professors have been disciplined and fired at different institutions. Is there a pattern to this? Who’s driving the attack and what is their aim?
I agree my firing is part of a broader attack on higher education in Texas. A professor at Texas A&M was fired for teaching about gender identity. In the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, primary and secondary school educators in Texas have been targeted by state agencies for posting negative opinions of Kirk on their social media pages.
Students at public Texas universities, including TXST, have been expelled or forced to withdraw from school for using their free speech rights in opposition to public vigils for Kirk. This is only a rapid acceleration of long-standing attacks on free speech and diversity on college campuses in Texas.
During the past few years, university programs in Texas based on equality and diversity have been eliminated. And the Texas legislature has limited free speech on campus to only members of the university faculty, students, and staff. Though as we have seen in my case and those of student protesters, administrators still decide who actually gets free speech, even when we speak off campus.
There is a pattern to these assaults. The far-right conservatives who now govern Texas have a particular view of the world, one driven by capitalist reactionary ideas and profit. Their baseline of society is one that is naturally white, straight, patriarchal, and adherent to a deeply conservative form of Christianity. Others who do not fit this baseline are tolerated, and even accepted in certain circumstances, as long as they do not challenge this baseline.
Everything and everyone else are a threat that must be repressed. Hence they find no contradiction in defending free speech for people calling for attacks on trans people, while denying free speech to students protesting the genocide of Palestinians.
Texas has long been a diverse and transnational space. Yet, during most of Texas’ history first as a republic and then as a US state, it has been controlled by Anglo elites who concocted a one-sided, celebratory history of heroic Anglos taming a wilderness and triumphing over “savages” and non-white people to justify their rule.
Well, the far-right’s baseline does not reflect the reality of Texas today, which is incredibly diverse. And the heroic Anglo narrative of history has been exposed as a fabrication. Studies often recognize Houston as being the most diverse city in the US in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and languages spoken. Other areas of Texas are not far behind in reflecting this diversity, though some areas do not.
I honestly love living in Texas because of its diversity—its people, food, and culture. Though Texas can also be cruel. Texas universities in recent years began to reflect the diverse reality of society in Texas and sought to meet the multifaceted needs of such a society. This became too much for the far-right to bear so they launched their assault on higher education. They aim to return Texas society to their baseline.
Your firing is part of a much larger attempt to transform higher education in this country. It began under the Biden administration with the repression of Palestine solidarity activism among professors, staff, and students. Trump has now turned that incipient McCarthyism into an attempt to purge the universities not just of left wing but also liberal professors and programs. What are they doing and why?
The attack on higher education needs to be placed in context. Working-class and middle-class people in the US are now suffering from high prices, high rents and mortgages, and a predatory health insurance system. The corollaries to this are increased attacks on women’s rights, queer people, immigrants, destruction of the environment, and a rise in police brutality especially against people of color.
Meanwhile, we are undergoing an incredible wealth transfer from working people to billionaires. This is due in part to US imperialism beginning to lose its dominant position in the world economy to rival capitalists around the world. To maintain profit levels, capitalists have to plunder the working class.
What has been the role of the university in a free society? Public universities as classically liberal institutions are entrusted to be centers of education. They have also been at the forefront of scientific research and new technologies. To accomplish this, they must be open to a diverse array of people and ideas, with open debate, acceptance, tolerance, and free speech. They are not to be centers of indoctrination.
Universities have not always met this charge. Yet in recent decades, universities have made significant strides, mainly because of movements of workers and the oppressed. Students could now take courses in gender and women’s studies, Chicano studies, African American studies, and labor history. Universities have gone from being accessible to only the children of the wealthy and middle class to now being increasingly open to working-class students, though at the cost of crippling student loan debt.
All the while, the university served its primary function in a capitalist society of producing a professional and managerial middle class for capitalist production needs. With capitalism in crisis and a shrinking middle class, what then becomes the function of a university in a capitalist based economy?
Through a bipartisan effort of both Democrats and Republicans, public universities are being run less as places of learning and more as a business. Many public universities have high acceptance rates with low graduation rates. The university receives tuition money with students receiving not a degree, but student debt.
With universities as centers of learning, open debate, tolerance, and free speech, the possibility exists that students might become sensitive to the suffering of other people and question an economy based on profit over people as well as the role of the US military around the world. This does happen occasionally, as we witnessed with the large number of student protests against the genocide in Palestine in the spring of 2024.
University administrations with support from state governments and the Biden administration cracked down, many times violently, on campus protests against genocide. The struggle for a “Free Palestine,” while front and center and vitally important, has become more than a national liberation struggle in the Middle East. Just as the Black Civil Rights Movement was the center around which all other struggles of the 1960s revolved, the Palestinian liberation struggle today is the axis of fighting for free speech, against war, and for social, economic, and environmental justice.
Liberal Democrats like Biden are generally for diversity and tolerance. But at the same time are totally devoted to capitalism, so much so that when diversity and tolerance threaten capitalism, they toss diversity and tolerance out the window. We saw this in the Biden administration’s complete support and enabling of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians, including his support for cracking down on student protestors. Trump has no such liberal qualms. He has launched an open campaign to turn universities into centers of far right indoctrination, purged of any dissenting beliefs. Any that resist face defunding.
In addition to the assault on higher education, my firing is also part of a broader international right-wing campaign of accusing people of inciting political violence as a way of repressing dissenting voices. We see accusations of inciting political violence thrown at everyone from the Irish hip-hop trio, Kneecap, because of their unwavering support of Palestinian liberation, to me, because of my support for working-class political organization.
How should faculty, staff, and students respond to this New McCarthyism? What traps should be avoided? How does resistance on campus fit into the broader resistance against Trump’s attempt to impose authoritarian rule in this country?
We are witnessing an open assault on higher education and a march toward authoritarian rule. I obviously became a target in this march. I have always believed and practiced that we must use our rights, or we will lose our rights. Well, I used my rights and lost my job.
If there is a trap people could fall into, it is censoring themselves and not exercising their rights. If you do that, you have done the right’s job for them. We must not surrender our rights but use them collectively. I will say over and over again, join a union, especially on our campuses. The more people who join the labor movement, the more we can transform our unions into instruments of class struggle and liberation.
Resistance on campus is part of the broader resistance against attempts to impose authoritarian rule in the US. Universities due to their very nature are centers of free speech. The crackdown began when administrators targeted student, faculty, and staff speaking out and organizing against the genocide in Palestine on campus.
Now, after Kirk’s assassination, Trump, university bosses, and corporations are targeting faculty and students for exercising their free speech on a wide number of political issues. If we lose free speech, we lose freedom of the press and freedom of association as well as our ability to address grievances. This is a fight we cannot lose.
Finally, what can people do to support your struggle? And what can they do to support others facing discipline or termination?
The outpouring of support for my struggle has been incredible. Large numbers of people, unions, and organizations rightfully see my struggle as part of a broader fight for democratic rights against the rising tide of fascism in the US. There are a couple of petitions that people can sign, one by the TSEU and another on Change.org. There is also a GoFundMe to keep my family going during this difficult time.
Statements of support and in defense of free speech are also highly welcomed from unions, academic associations, community groups, and political organizations. Please do the same for other faculty, staff, and students facing attacks. Every single fight for our rights is part of our collective struggle. Solidarity is the only way to win.
It is also very important that we get organized. Join a union. If a union does not exist at your workplace, organize one. Join a political organization you feel represents your beliefs. I am partial to socialist organizing that connects all the struggles of working-class people in a quest to build a society free of class division that’s genuinely democratic and meets human needs.
Overall, if you hear about a fight for economic, social, and environmental justice, join it. Our future depends on mass struggle for collective liberation here in the US and throughout the world.
Ashley Smith is a socialist writer and activist in Burlington, Vermont. He has written for various publications including Harper’s, Truthout, Jacobin, and New Politics.
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