Profiles in Academic Courage
By 
I’m sure most of you are familiar with the death of academic freedom in Texas:
Gov. Greg Abbott directed Texas A&M President Mark Welsh to fire a professor whom a state lawmaker had blasted on social media for discussing gender identity in a children’s literature course — and Welsh listened.
In an email to Texas A&M families Tuesday night, Welsh said he directed the provost to fire the professor for teaching about gender identity when it wasn’t clearly stated in the course description.
“This isn’t about academic freedom; it’s about academic responsibility,” Welsh wrote. “We must ensure that what we ultimately deliver to students is consistent with what was approved.”
Oh wait, that Mark Welsh?
During a speech in September, Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh spoke passionately about how the roughly 143,000 service members who are part of the other services’ air arms cannot fulfill all of the missions carried out by 690,000 active-duty, Guard and Reserve airmen.
“I’m getting really frustrated with hearing over and over again this comment about ‘Why do we need an Air Force?’ ” Welsh said at the Air Force Association’s Air and Space Conference. “You’ve got to be kidding me. We’re not past that yet?”
“There is one Air Force in America and you’re it,” he added. “So let’s shoot this one in the head.”
But a guest columnist for the Boston Globe has proposed doing precisely what Welsh says is anathema to national security: abolishing the Air Force.
“The wind-sock has shifted,” James Carroll wrote in a Jan. 6 column. “Instead of tinkering around the edges of a bloated, unaffordable, and often ineffective national security establishment, the time has come for a major reinvention — starting with the Air Force. Off it should go into the wild blue yonder.”
Carroll could not be reached by press time. His piece relies heavily on arguments made by Robert Farley, author of the upcoming book, “Grounded: The Case For Abolishing The United States Air Force.”
Farley told Air Force Times that he is arguing the Air Force should be merged with the Army and Navy, not firing all 690,000 airmen. This move would allow the military as a whole to shrink by eliminating redundancies among the services.
Farley, a professor at the University of Kentucky, thinks the military should go back to how it was structured before the Air Force became an independent service. Ultimately, such a move would curb how often the military would be used, he argues.
What I will say of Welsh is that he’s by no means the least qualified senior military officer to serve as a university President; most officers of a senior rank have a panoply of engagements with higher education and Welsh is above the median, having effectively led the Air Force’s professional military education bureaucracy for a time. I will also concede that I am not a fan of fighting battles that cannot be won, and it’s quite likely, given how the right wing noise machine was mobilizing and the nature of Texas politics, that this was a battle that Texas A&M as an institution was going to lose no matter what Welsh did. Finally, it’s been obvious for some time that the Senior Administrative Class considers academic freedom and the faculty in general to be an annoyance to the real work of the university; Welsh is not meaningfully different in this from most other big university presidents.
But that said… it doesn’t look to me as if he even gave much thought to putting up even symbolic resistance, either because he substantially agreed with the criticism or because he didn’t see reason to fight. That’s going to hurt Texas A&M as an institution in the long run, not to mention Texas as an economic concern. It’s long been believed that state universities would be able to survive hard core conservative state legislatures because of their economic importance, but that worm has definitely turned in much of the country.
Additional posts by Harrison on Monday and Tuesday — which the lawmaker said took place after the videos of the student and McCoul — purport to depict audio of President Welsh talking with the student.
In one of the clips, Welsh told the student that meetings with “the professor, the department head, the dean all went pretty well.” He said the university doesn’t want students signing up for courses without knowing what the content will be, and added that after reviewing the class, his recommendation was to “call it what it is” and make it for “professional-track people who want to study LGBTQ literature.”
The student interrupted and asked if he approved of LGBTQ studies at Texas A&M. Welsh said “only two” courses in the field were taught at the university. He added that “there is a professional reason to teach some of these courses,” including for careers like clinical counselors or jobs in government where “you want to understand the issues affecting the people that they’re going to treat.”
In another audio clip appearing to include Welsh, he asked the student about her intention for meeting with him and voiced his suspicion that the student was “trying to pick a fight.”
“What do you expect us to do, fire her?” Welsh asked, to which the student replied “absolutely.” He cut in with “well, that’s not happening,” and then the clip stopped.
Welsh’s view had apparently changed by Tuesday, however. In his statement, he said a children’s literature course taught this summer “did not align with any expectation of standard curriculum for the course.” He said College of Arts and Sciences leadership “worked with students to offer alternative opportunities for students to complete the course,” and said he made clear that going forward, “course content must match catalog descriptions.”
Very interesting… Welsh started out on the right track but it seems likely that he got a talking to from someone… presumably in state government? Board of Regents? Whoever it was he turned tail pretty quickly.