The Right To Learn

“Over the past decade, the Right’s assault on American higher education has become openly authoritarian, taking as its model Viktor Orbán’s decimation of Hungary’s universities. The Right to Learn is the most compelling response to date—and one of the most important books ever published about higher education in the United States. Read it right now.”
—Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor, Pennsylvania State University, and author of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education

“This timely and urgent volume historicizes contemporary attacks on the right to read, think, and write, connecting the struggle for academic freedom to broader social and political movements for justice. By turns deeply personal and sharply analytic, contributors describe not just how we got here but, crucially, where we must go next in the fight for the world we want.”
—Emily Drabinski, 2023-2024 president of the American Library Association

“Book banning, education gag orders, threats to school boards and attacks on teachers: Where is it all coming from? Why? Read this bracing, essential book to understand—and to learn how you can help stop the wrecking of our public schools.”
—Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

Valerie C. Johnson is associate provost of diversity, equity, and inclusion and associate professor of political science at DePaul University in Chicago. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of race and class. She is the author of Black Power in the Suburbs: The Myth or Reality of African American Suburban Political Incorporation and the co-editor of Power in the City: Clarence Stone and the Politics of Inequity with Marion Orr.

Jennifer Ruth is associate dean in the College of the Arts and professor in the School of Film at Portland State University. She has written about academic freedom and higher education in publications such as the New Republic, Truthout, Academe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and Ms. Her most recent book, cowritten with Michael Berube, is It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom.

Ellen Schrecker is well known for her scholarship on McCarthyism and higher education. A retired professor of history at Yeshiva University, her latest book is The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s.

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