THE
AFTERMATH OF SEPTEMBER 11: IDEOLOGICAL DIVERSITY AND THE
UNIVERSITIES' ROLE IN ACCOMMODATING
IT
Jan Narveson
Presented at the annual SAFS meeting
(May, 2002),
in a symposium
entitled: Academic Freedom in the light of September 11.
My first thought when a student rushed in and told me about the WTC
attack was, “Well, we’re in for it now!” What worried me was was the
government response to this. Partly, of course, it was to send soldiers
to Afghanistan and such, which was not a surprise, and whether it was a
good idea is irrelevant to the present panel. But most of what I was
referring to is what has actually transpired: huge restrictions on the
liberties of Americans, visitors to America, and more or less as
many people as possible, in many annoying ways. The American
administration has said many things, too, that strongly suggest that
anyone even speaking up against its policies is a traitor, more or
less, and the cops will be watching out for them.
Overreaction is what government, especially democratic government, is
mostly about. We can hardly be surprised, though we can be unhappy,
that all these restrictions have been put in place. The interesting
question for us theoreticians is: when and why are restrictions on
liberties appropriate? And for the purposes of this panel, the
question is, when and why restrictions, if any, on specifically
academic liberty is appropriate.
This question is much complicated by the fact that all of us in Canada
are, in effect, public servants. In a private university, restrictions
on academic activities could be imposed by the institution’s terms of
reference. For example, back in the days when Wilfrid Laurier
University was Waterloo Lutheran University, its faculty were forbidden
to “advocate atheism, secularism, materialism, and agnosticism” or some
such list, though they were allowed to “discuss” them. When you were
hired there, you signed something to the effect that you would refrain
from those things. So instead they hired people who advocated Marxism,
Maoism, and of course faithful adherance to the Crown of Canada,
whatever.
The example of Marxism is not entirely facetious. Indeed, it
exemplifies a fundamental problem with the whole idea of academic
freedom. Namely: we are all in thrall, totally, to the general goal of
Truth: of advancing human knowledge. Being so, it is simply not true
that people can say just any old thing in academia. Anyone who
knowingly advocated what is false would be flaunting this fundamental
academic ideal, obviously. In the special case of plagiarism, where it
isn’t what is said that is false (perhaps) but rather, that the person
who claims to be the author is not in fact so, we rightly think that
corrections may be imposed.
Anyway, it is not often, I think, that people in academia do say what
they know to be false, just like that. Very much more often, though,
they say what they should have known was false, if they would just
think about it for a minute or two. Now, we want to say that the cure
for this, insofar as there is one, lies in the presence of academic
peers who will lunge forward and point out their mistakes. This
expresses a hope that is surely honored more often in the breech than
in the observance. But the question raised by this, surely a most
serious one, is whether the institution should do any more than that.
We are inclined to think not, of course. But we don’t actually believe
that, and for good reason.
For example, we surely hire new people in a department on the strength
- to some degree ranging up to pretty nearly 100% - of their research.
And that research, we hope, is itself evaluated on the basis of its
contribution to human knowledge, meaning in plain language that we
think that what the researcher says in his publications is,
considerably or largely, true, or near it, or at least likely to be so,
or at least plausible. We discriminate, quite properly, against the
ill-informed, the incompetent, the fuzzy-headed, the hopelessly vague.
Again the example of Marxism will serve well. There was a time when
some people actually thought Marx was basically right. We know now that
he was wrong, demonstrably, definitively. Marx, as a contributor to
economic knowledge, is dead. Anyone who applied for a job in the
philosophy department at my university on a platform of plain
old-fashioned Marxism would be shown the door, promptly. The same
person would have been enthusiasticaly embraced in earlier days, even
though Marx’s ideas were just as wrong then as they are known now to
be. The point is that “we” didn’t know this at the time, and “we” do
now. (I speak here as a starry-eyed academic utopian, to be sure; no
doubt there are still some few who cling to the dead Marxist dogmas.)
OK, now: the point is that the general goal of academia imposes obvious
criteria of selection on appointed personnel, both staff and students.
In academia, you can say whatever you please, provided that you are
honestly and competently attempting, in saying it, to contribute to
human knowledge.
A good deal else is said in the halls of academia. For example, a fair
amount of verbal energy is expended in joshing with colleagues, finding
our way to the Department of Gerontology, overseeing the coffee supply,
and so on. All of this is perfectly OK, we think, within broad limits
imposed by the need to get one’s student’s papers graded and one’s own
papers written, and so on.
But what about political activity on campus, or off-campus but engaged
in by academics - students or professors? Here things are less clear.
We had once upon a time, at U of W, a professor of psychology who was a
dedicated Maoist; he went about campus putting up ads about the evils
of capitalism, etc., etc.
So far as I know, there was never any restriction on this imposed by
the university’s administration. Could or should there have been? There
could, of course, have been a problem about available bulletin-board
space, and priorities for allocating same. But we would not account
that as a restriction on academic freedom, as such, even though, of
course, it is. (Lack of astronomical budgets is always a restriction on
academic activity, but it is not a restriction on academic freedom.
Making it impossible for researcher A to pursue subject S because we
just don’t have the money to support it is not the same as forbidding
him to do it because his research is incompetent, biased, stupid, or
too crazy to be worth supporting; and neither is quite the same as
forbidding it on the ground that his theses are false.)
After Sept. 11, there has been a huge amount of discussion, on e-mail
lists and elsewhere, about the meaning of the WTC attacks and various
components of their aftermath. One special subject, which I am guilty
of having devoted rather too much, probably, of my time to pondering,
is a special aspect of the professed motivation of the attackers,
namely their claim to be pursuing “God’s (aka Allah’s) will” in the
process. That inspired me to write a couple of articles (so far)
restating the ancient case (it’s due to Plato originally, after all)
for why those claims have to be false. It cannot, I suggested, be true
that god or the gods are in favor of actions like this, inciting some
of his subjects to murder a good many other of his subjects who are, by
any sort of familiar or rational criteria, innocent of anything except
perhaps the crime of not sharing the attackers’ religious views. The
intention of this activity was to explain something that might possibly
have been unclear to some people. For example, some people think that
morals can be “founded on” religion. That is a view which, looked at
carefully, can be shown to be impossible, despite its being,
apparently, very widely held. (Since it is, even among otherwise quite
intelligent people, the arguments of people like Plato and myself are
still worth restating, I think.)
Nevertheless, a good many people in the contemporary world are ready to
impose injury and death on a good many others for religious reasons.
Let us now imagine that there is, within the jurisdiction of some
government, a school of some sort which was devoted to teaching its
students to do precisely those things for those reasons. Here is a case
where thought, such as it is, stimulates actions, and actions of a
particularly dangerous kind. Suppose that you, the High Potentate of
that kingdom, thereupon concluded that the school in question should be
shut down, its teachers reassigned to safer activities, or perhaps
confined to jail, its students subjected to a program of reeducation,
and similar measures. Is this something on which the advocate of
Academic Freedom should look with disfavor? I confess that I am hard
put to say that we should.
Persons of very different political persuasion than myself have often
enough insisted that academia must be socially responsible, etc. Those
who say that usually mean that the academy should inculcate some
variety of Marxism much more vigorously than they already are; or,
contemporarily, that it should be industriously spreading, say, the
gospel of environmentalism, or multiculturalism, or egalitarianism,
even more thoroughly than it already is. The examples certainly suggest
the problem, big time: Can academia be “socially responsible” without
obliterating academic freedom?
It does seem to me that it can be irresponsible to protect, under the
banner of freedom of speech or academic freedom, terrorist schools (to
take a very relevant present case in point). A recent experience of
mine suggests some other things as well. I participated in what was
billed as a “debate” with a man in the Islamic community hereabouts
(specifically, at U of W). “Secularism vs. Islam”, was what they billed
it. It soon became fairly clear, however, that this was apparently
going to be literally a “debate” in a sense in which debates, I think,
have no place in academia - namely a sort of verbal war in which the
purpose was to make verbal points regardless of their relevance,
insight, etc. What I had hoped it would be, this being a university and
all, would be a symposium - that is, a forum in which arguments were
presented for identifiable positions, the holding of which by various
people was contingent on their being perceived to be true, and the
arguments for which were intended as precisely that: sets of
propositions, whose premises looked to be and were claimed to be true,
and whose conclusions were claimed to follow from those premises. When
you have an academic argument, what should be the case is that when
somebody comes up with a sound argument, you accept its conclusion.
True premises, valid reasoning - once we’ve got that far, there is no
option but to accept the conclusion thus supported. And so, if that
conclusion is inconsistent with what we believed before, then we must
change our minds. Or at least, we accept the responsibility for finding
out where the premises are, after all, in error, or the reasoning
invalid after all, contrary to first appearances.
In principle, it seems to me, public events purporting to be about
issues of intellectual interest, and held at universities, should
always be understood to be symposia in the above sense - not “debates”.
And when they reduce to name-calling and the like, it seems to me, the
university’s authorities could be justified in imposing order. Having
said that, of course, we come up against the awesome problem of keeping
any official university action in this direction from being an
over-reaction. It is easy to imagine sets of rules imposed by
university administration that would be a lot worse than the disease
they are designed to cope with. Not having any ready idea of just what
such rules would look like, I would hope that a general affirmation
that on-campus meetings on topics of public interest should be carried
on in a civilized way, and that violence, both nonverbal and even, in
severe cases, verbal is eligible for suppression.
Too often, of course, in universities on both sides of the border,
people proposing controversial theses have been treated to highly
unacademic receptions, or have been turned back at the doors. And here,
it seems to me, we should agree that the controversality of those
views, as such, is absolutely no ground for such exclusion. On the
contrary: universities owe it to the presenters of such theses that
they be heard and, as may be, refuted or not on grounds of relevant
arguments, and nothing else.
On the other hand, if it is clear that the point of some allegedly
public discussion is to organize assassinations, or other violent
attacks on persons and property, then the university has every right to
prevent such things, and if need be to clamp down on them
retroactively.
Well, suppose that what is billed as a theory or viewpoint implies that
it is the duty of all persons in good moral standing to kill, or assist
in the killing, or at the very least not to interfere with the killing,
of all members of some religious (or ethnic, or whatever) group?
The right response to this is, for one thing, to do some moral theory
and patiently explain why there are good reasons for denying that there
can be any such duty. But of course a rub here is that the members of a
religious (or other sort of ideological) group might itself be telling
its own members to get out there and kill members of the first group.
The correct formula is that we tolerate all and only religions, or
other ideologies, which tolerate all and only religions which tolerate
others. Intolerant religions and ideologies not only do not need to be
tolerated but, in the light of 9/11, ought not to be tolerated, and
this has to be made extremely clear. In the “debate” referred to above,
it was repeatedly pointed out by members of the audience that Islam
rejects the separation of church and state. My response to this is that
they’d better think twice about that view, for if it were true, it
would be grounds for expelling all Muslims from our shores. All
religions and ideologies must tolerate all others; none may aspire to
getting control of the reigns of power, to exercise in the name of
their particular creed.
That the 9/11 sort of thing is possible, and historically has happened
often enough, is excellent reason for imposing a regime of religious,
and more generally, ideological, freedom, which entails an obligation
on the part of all participating religions or ideologies to respect the
differing ideologies of others. This should be seen to be a fairly
obvious point, and those who, upon contemplating these words,
immediately react as if here is just one more intolerant religion, need
to get their thinking caps on. The moral and political outlook of
western society is, indeed, liberal in the sense just enunciated. But
the point is, we are right about this: so long as we think that
governments should be operating in the interests of the people they
govern, and not in the interests of some special parties among them,
then we have no rational option but to insist on tolerance. We in
academia get to insist, in addition, on intellectual discipline and
clarity. The two, I think, work together.
The trick, then, is to maintain an environment in which ideas can be
pressed, and examined and judged, on the basis of their strictly
academic virtues, while attempts to disrupt these processes by
violence, both physical and verbal, be frustrated. It’s an old problem
that has perhaps become significantly more pressing in these troubled
times. We should be able to solve it without seriously suppressing the
very liberties we stand for.
Jan Narveson is a professor at the
University of Waterloo in the Department of Philosophy, also a SAFS
member.
