As regulars are no doubt aware, my wife and I are both employees of the Defense Department. The Trump administration’s various actions to force people out of federal service naturally impact us. Both directly and indirectly, they also affect my posting here.
Despite being hired mostly remote well before COVID, my wife now has to be physically in her office at the Pentagon eight hours every weekday. This, naturally, adds several hours to her workweek, since she’s now fighting DC area traffic twice a day. To mitigate this, she’s leaving very early but that means that my most productive writing time is now spent getting the kids off to school.
While it at first appeared that the national security workforce would be spared, it has now been announced that the Secretary expects to cut 8 percent from the Defense budget each year for the foreseeable future. So, despite her being tenured into the civil service and my having “tenure without tenure” in the excepted service, our jobs are far from safe.
And, of course, the administration is specifically targeting folks who are less than loyal to President Trump. This means that, effectively, I no longer have academic freedom.
According to the longstanding definition of the American Association of University Professors,
Academic freedom is the freedom of a teacher or researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss the issues in his or her academic field, and to teach and publish findings without interference from administrators, boards of trustees, political figures, donors, or other entities. Academic freedom also protects the right of a faculty member to speak freely when participating in institutional governance, as well as to speak freely as a citizen.
Since entering the profession as a doctoral student way back in 1992, I have always acted as though I were protected by that tradition. Even in my time outside academia, from leaving Troy in the summer of 2002 to starting my current position in the summer of 2013, I held myself to the profession’s standards when writing on matters tied to my expertise, including trying to signal clearly when I was speaking as a non-expert.
The AAUP’s longstanding principles also demand that professors in good standing be granted tenure to further protect themselves after a period of no more than seven years at an institution. While my employer does not comply with that, there is a longstanding norm of “tenure without tenure.” That is, renewal of our (usually 3- or 4-year) contracts is expected.
In the eleven-plus years, through three presidential administrations, multiple defense and service secretaries, and countless university presidents and school directors, I have never felt constrained in my writing. I’ve criticized U.S. presidents, secretaries of defense, and service chiefs here, on various social media platforms, and in more visible publications, often quite forcefully, and never once come under fire from leadership for it.
Under present circumstances, however, I have considerably less confidence in my job security. Not when people are being targeted for simply doing their jobs in ways the current administration disfavors. Civil servants whose jobs are protected by law are being fired by the tens of thousands and, by all indications, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
This was already going on at the state and local level in some parts of the country. Governors, legislatures, and governing boards have been targeting tenure and trying to dictate classroom speech for quite a while now. I suppose it was inevitable that it would happen at the federal level.
As the late great Kris Kristofferson wrote, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” Alas, as a 59-year-old with a mortgage and two kids still in school, I am less than fully free.
I haven’t fully figured out what this means in terms of my ability to write here and elsewhere. While I will never publish things that conflict with my beliefs, I will almost certainly be considerably more constrained until circumstances change.
