MIXED PERSPECTIVES

Academe, Sep/Oct 2006

ANDRIS BARBLAN, SECRETARY GENERAL, MAGNA CHARTA OBSERVATORY

The AAUP report on academic boycotts is a good defense of academic freedom that keeps the individual at the center-as if freedom were some kind of personal treasure to cultivate along with one's own talents and desires, a door to he kept open in all circumstances to the many possibilities one can use to move as he or she wishes, be it in physical, social, or ethical terms. Once this individualistic premise is agreed upon, everything follows-even the lack of criteria to consider Hitler as evil or at least unfortunate. The debates on Vietnam in the 1970s or on South Africa in the 1980s become exceptions that are difficult to explain.

Such a stand, at a time of social, physical, and intellectual horrors, can only he sustained if academics enjoy a protective device-the university-that keeps politics away to allow for neutral scientific opinions and safe judgment, or should I say judgment in academic safety. Academia then seems to respond to the world outside rather than to be responsible for the world it is part of. If the AAUP is an organization bringing together individuals, such a position makes sense when it supports the liberty of members to explore the known and the unknown. It makes all the more sense that it is grounded in a long American history of personal dissent vis-à-vis powers of class and privilege.

In 1998, Slobodan Milosevic, then president of Yugoslavia (in fact Serbia and Montenegro), decided to break potential dissent in the university world by requiring an oath of allegiance from all professors and by imposing rectors of his own choice. Since the 1960s, the universities of Yugoslavia had been members of the Association of European Universities (CRE), in which they had played an important role by keeping alive some links between the universities from western and eastern Europe, a role they lost after 1989 and the fall of the Merlin wall. All universities of Serbia and Montenegro were faithful members of the CRE and regular participants in its semiannual meetings. The reaction, however, was immediate in 1998: the Yugoslav universities' membership was suspended because they had lost their autonomy (in CRE terms), and other members were invited to cut official links with them.

Professors ousted from the classroom for refusing to sign the oath went out to teach their students in the open, on the streets of Belgrade, Nis, or Novi Sad. The police and the army intervened, inducing dismissed teachers to set up the Alternative Academic Education Network (AAEN), a nongovernmental organization that organized clandestine teaching for the next few years. AAEN received support from European partners discreetly encouraged by the CRE, which had established a fund to support democratic activities and to keep open the potential for dialogue between Serbian-speaking universities and the Albanian-speaking institution in Pristina. AAEN still exists today as an important part of Serbian civil society, and an Albanian-speaking university has taken over the old Univereity of Pristina, which was created as a bilingual institution in the 1960s before the Albanian-speaking group was expelled in the 1990s, leaving a Serbian-speaking university thriving next to a semiclandestine Albanian-speaking network of higher education.

Although the term "boycott" was never used, the CRE organized an academic boycott: Serbian university' representatives were no longer welcome in European gatherings, dues were no longer collected from Serbian institutions, and other CRE members were invited to forget the cooperation agreements signed in earlier days. Moreover, the CRE encouraged the people fighting against their "authorities." If the AAUP is an association of individuals, the CRE was an association of universities or collectives. Politically ravaged universities had to be ostracized, but individual staff and students refusing the breach of autonomy could be helped. The club of the universities of Europe felt that excluding the black sheep did not contravene sacred university privileges-rather to the contrary.

Can lessons be drawn from this example? Here are some paths for exploring differences between the collective and individualistic approaches to autonomy and academic freedom.

Etymological Detours

The word association (of university professors or of European universities) is built around the Latin term socius, sometimes equated to companion, the prime member of medieval trade guilds. An association is an agreed-upon togetherness, where the consensus on specific aims makes the group more than the sum of its members. The association has an added value going beyond a simple collective. When this added value is forgotten, disparaged, or betrayed by a member, the association usually has ways to exclude the defaulter.

Societies tend to accept variations of behavior, up to a certain point at least, before excluding. In fact, these social relations are relative to the group's organization and fears (anguish for survival) as well as to earlier models of collective development (the history of the group). Can such a group impose behavior-and on what grounds-or must the person differ at the risk of exclusion when claiming other references than those of the community? When do dissenting values take precedence over those of the community? When is the university the community we want to uphold? When is it wiser to separate oneself from it, especially when universities are called on to bring a diversity of contradictions under an overarching unity that does not suppress variety hut gives it common sense? Vaclav Havel, in 1995, challenged European leaders of higher education to live up to the meaning of universitas-when understood as "turning to the one," in Latin, ad unum vertere-by helping society to make sense of the meaning of its place in the universe and its people to understand the sense of their existence, thus extending their margin of life choices, that is, their freedom and responsibility.