On October 12, the University of Chicago held a symposium on academic freedom. Its purpose was state: “There is where we stand, and this is what are going to defend.”
The conclusions provided by this blogger are revealing. Take a look-see.
“It is absurd to think that it requires a special form of heroism for administrators to stand up for academic freedom. . . . The simple fact that Columbia for years had a central administration that saw it as their routine duties to dismiss such complaints [against faculty members].” Provost Jonathan Cole would “tell them that a university has a duty to protect the right of the faculty to speak. . . . these were his duties, and he was just being dutiful.” He noted about administrators: “they can support first-rate scholars” (such as Finkelstein, Mossad) “or they can capitulate to third rate thinkers from the outside.”
Akeel Bilgrami, Philosophy Professor, Columbia
“[Academic freedom is] more important today than it used to be.” The reason? For the past century there was in print media “the world of public intellectual debate and written dissent” and “most of the writers and polemicists were not academics, they were not professors. . . . We are moving out of that era. There are very few public intellectuals today who have a private income that can let them say what they want and be damned.” As a result, “the university becomes a much more important space as a place where you can say dissenting things.” This is why he is so alarmed by “the nature of university cowardice in our time.”
“The famous demand for balance . . . How ridiculous can this get?”
Tony Judd, NYU
“Why are certain strategies more likely to achieve their goals in the US?” The answer: “The university no longer conceives itself as an institution whose primary goal is to reveal truth. Rather, the university conceives itself as an institution that sells product” and “Faculty members themselves are conceived as producers and as products.” Gordon concluded, “Finkelstein was considered a product, one that became a liability rather than an asset.” By contrast, in Israel there is “unionization and standardized salaries.” As a result, “Those at the helm of American universities are more accountable to” trustees and donors and parents “rather than the true university constituency, the faculty and students.” Administrators “behave more and more like corporate executives” and “they are also not invested in democratic processes.” Most American universities are “ruled without basic checks and balances.”
“There’s always going to be external influences on universities. There’s always going to be faculty and admininstrators who are complicit with these influences. The question is, what can we do within the university to…take the universities back into our own hands, and make sure administrators are accountable to us.” Gordon noted, “Only then will we be able to stop the external influences.” Gordon concluded, “We have failed them….We have watched them make the university into a corporation, and we have not stood up and said, ‘enough.’”
Neve Gordon, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
“In my view, most of this talk about civility is a red herring.” When universities “recruit war criminals” (Kissinger, Kirkpatrick, Rumsfeld) and “professors in our best universities advocate torture and the automatic destruction of villages after a terrorist attack,” civility seems beside the point. Finkelstein concluded, “Emily Post’s rules of etiquette, however real the question, is a meaningless sideshow, or a transparent pretext for denying a professor the right the teach on the basis of his or her political beliefs.”
Norman Finkelstein
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4 thoughts on “Academic Freedom”
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I’ve got mixed feelings on this one. On one hand, I favor free speech and a market for ideas. Christians has usually been on the short end of the censorship stick in the modern world, (e.g., when Francis Beckwith, one of the most brilliant evangelical scholars of our generation, is denied tenue at Baylor (of all places) it makes little news, and when a man who was once the head of IU’s genetics department is canned because his research on adult stem cells was too successful and his promotion of that success too loud, it made no news) so I’m in favor making sure there are as few people wielding such sticks as possible.
But how are we to decide what is scholarship and what is mindeless twaddle? Surely something is not brilliant because it is controversial or seditious. To take the only professor I know who has been actually fired as an example, I ask if it is “scholarship” to falsify one’s records to create a native american heritage, call the victims of 9/11 “little Eichmanns,” and go around suggesting that the Jews caused 9/11.
A rejoinder that the accademy should be the judge of its own scholarship offers me little comfort. If only scholars can judge other scholars, it seems that we have an in-group here that can never be proven wrong because the retort will be “you’re not a scholar, so you don’t understand, so stop meddling in our affairs and infringing our freedom.” I can’t help but notice that the only “incidents” cited in this conference are a couple of writes who all deal with Israel/Holocaust issues and that doesn’t convince me that the sky is falling.
Here’s the dilemma: the main reason for accademic freedom is a belief that free debate is most likely to lead to the truth because the truth is inherently stronger. Classic Aristotle/Milton. But is the true, or just a slogan? (If there’s any question I like to hear you, a non-Aristotelian, answer, that’s is). If it’s not true, then open debate sometimes permits falsehood to triumph. So, do we live with falsehoo? That’s not cool. So, we let someone wiser moderate the debate. Classic Plato. Except I don’t believe that either, because I don’t think those “wiser” people can be trusted, and “false” speech will soon look much like “speech which criticizes our platonic guardians.”
Of course, I don’t like
But you’re being too ahistorical in your response. The problem is not necessarily academic freedom, I would argue, as much as the commercialization of the Academy. We can ALL agree that that’s NOT a good thing.
That’s what I found so interesting about those observations. That the commodification of learning is the problem that all academics — secular or sacred — need to tackle in the 21st-century.
Ahistorial. Not the first critique that I would expect to my posts. “Too cynical” and “rotten grammar” came first to mind. Would you care to elaborate on “ahistorical”—it’s not something an ex-history major likes to be. 🙂
I stand (so far) with my comments on academic freedom and the dilemma between pure freedom based on a belief the truth will trumph (Aristotle) or some “wiser” source censoring (Plato). You will probably have Burkean view, but then, I am not a Burkean.
That said, I agree with you that commodification of a *university* education is a growing problem. I’m all about the Market as the least objectionable way to solve many problems, but I also believe in “Sphere Sovreignty” and think the market doesn’t give us the best results in learning. I see the “commodification of learning” as a major force in other problems. Take grade inflation. People assume “I paid $150k for a Ivy league degree so that I could get a job, so I am owed top grades to make me marketable.” Or the retreat of major professors from the classroom and shuffling teaching off onto GAs; it comes from a view that the teacher is expendable and the prof needs to be researching to boost the University’s market value. University labs are becoming ever-more dependent on winning patents for their research, which in turn is making professors in many of the sciences much less willing to share research and circulate material for peer review. Problems all.
This is way over my head, but Chris Hedges would agree with these very serious concerns. Finklestein was ‘punished’two ways: by losing, both his right to teach in a Unversity he loved, as well as having his Israeli visa cancelled. I think that was disgusting. The man’s opinions so disturbed ‘touchy people’ that ‘it was the end of the world.’ I do love the Jewish people. Some of them can be so mean to their own. Young adults enter university so full of dreams and so vulnerable to soak up ‘wrong messages’like sponges. What happens to their healthy intellectual development, freedom of thinking, and creativity, when universities shut all that down by turning them into ‘ end products’. I think parents need to think more carefully, where they send their kids. Aren’t Universities one arena where America’s ‘ intellectual temperature’ can be taken? How many truly ‘Liberal Arts ‘insititutions are there left in America? Intersting post!