Academic freedom, 2000 and after

Radical Teacher, Winter, 2001 by Richard Ohmann

What is the present condition of academic freedom? I say it's pretty vigorous, and will later explain why. Critics of "political correctness," whose voices are louder than such as mine, have for a decade shouted that academic freedom is weak: that it has been subverted by doctrinaire leftists and feminists who intimidate conservative or maverick scholars, disrupt their classes, persuade -- administrations to ( adopt repressive speech codes, and so on. (1) There are such events; the 1990s brought us books stuffed with them. But if you scan the news in an evenhanded way, you will not see such a pattern. In roughly the first six months of 2000, for example, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran about twenty stories of professors under fire. (2) Three match the stereotype of politically correct repression: a San Diego State professor denied tenure in African American Studies because, by her account, she was not "black enough" (but she won a settlement in court); vigorous protests at Princeton against Peter Singer's position on euthanasia; and the burning of an agricultural facility at Michigan State for its supposed work in foisting biotechnology on the Third World. Three others would be a stretch, for PC sleuths: a scholar at Cal State Long Beach accused of holding Jews responsible for the Holocaust; a Columbia Law professor criticized by students and then the school's Dean for using offensive examples (e.g., fetus murder) in an exam; and a faculty member at Florida Atlantic who sued over a sexual harassment charge (she lost in court).

And then, for symmetry, three stories raise questions about pressure from the right: a gay faculty member fired by a Catholic college (it claimed that was not the reason); George Mason University's conservative "Board of Visitors" (=trustees) intervening to place two traditional courses in a new curriculum; and Michael Sperber of Indiana University raking unscheduled leave because of intense heat, including death threats, from alums and others loyal to the egregious basketball coach, Bobby Knight, whom Sperber had criticized.

The remainder of the stories are about faculty members fired or suspended or denied reappointment for alleged offenses of one kind or another. The list includes two bizarre cases (one professor charged with using grant money to buy heroin for his subjects; another fired after pleading guilty to a child pornography charge--I take no position on the validity of such accusations, which are of course often vague or loaded with ideology). The other cases are humdrum, sad, and not very instructive: eccentric or rebellious professors in trouble with their bosses for. . . what? Typically the administration or department says unprofessional conduct or inadequate performance on the job; the professor says, being critical of the administration or department.

This sampling does not support the fears of the Right, as expressed for instance in the Republican platform ("At many institutions of higher learning, the ideal of academic freedom is threatened by intolerance"). In fact, the sampling doesn't clearly warrant any conclusion about academic freedom, 2000. My opening question calls nor for a snapshot but for a narrative reply: that's how it was then, this is how it is now, these are the forces that changed it. Such a narrative might be converted into a prediction: the same play of forces will take academic freedom farther along the same (dismal/hopeful) path; or those forces are changing, and with them the course of academic freedom.

Well, a number of stories in that form are now circulating. E.g., "In the late 1960s and after, leftists, feminists, and other dogmatic groups eroded academic freedom, which is fragile now and will continue to sicken." Or, "staunch defenders of academic freedom have put down the assaults that weakened it for two decades, and its prospects are now good." Or, "the Culture Wars had little effect on academic freedom, which is and will be healthy enough, unless the Right is allowed to create a new McCarthyism." Or, closest to the story I would myself tell, "1960s movements greatly expanded academic freedom, but the Right's counteroffensive has been telling, and will, along with cutbacks, probably reverse the gains of recent decades." A listener to these contending stories, and more, will suspect not just that the tellers see recent history through different political lenses, but that they mean different things by "academic freedom."

And certainly a contest has gone forward over the scope of that idea, as well as over who's trampling on whose rights and sensibilities. Daphne Patai speaks for many when she complains that

The battle cry of 'academic freedom' is still aimed at assaults from outside the academy--no longer McCarthyism, but now corporatization and privatization. Yet encroachments on academic freedom from inside--speech codes and antiharassment policies, for example--are tolerated, indeed welcomed, and that the concept of academic freedom has in this way been thoroughly debased.