April 2003
December 9, 2002
Over the past several weeks,
President Bollinger and others have received a substantial number of e-mails
and letters demanding that the University dismiss Professor Tom Paulin
who is visiting Columbia from his position at Oxford. A more limited number
of e-mails and letters have arrived calling for the University to abandon
its recruitment of Professor Rashid Khalidi, a distinguished professor
at the University of Chicago’s Middle Eastern Studies program. Professor
Paulin has been accused of strong and hurtful speech about middle eastern
politics. Professor Khalidi has also been accused of holding offensive
political views. President Bollinger has asked me to respond because although
the cases in question involve individuals, the principles involved go to
the heart of the role of the university.
We should not forget our
own history and look to it for guidance. Periodically, in times of actual
or perceived national crisis, Americans have been asked to consider the
appropriate balance between the rights of individuals and the need for
national security. The Alien and Sedition acts of 1789, President Lincoln’s
suspension of the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the Espionage
Act of 1917, the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, and
the Smith and McCarren acts during the McCarthy period, all stripped Americans
(or some Americans) of some of their most basic civil liberties in the
attempt to ensure national security [1]. In each instance, the curtailment
of freedoms, which may have seemed necessary at the time, became in very
short order almost universally adjudged by the courts, by legislators,
by subsequent American Presidents, and by historians and legal scholars
to have been excessive and overreaching, unnecessary if not futile, a subject
ultimately of national shame and regret.
Universities themselves have
certainly succumbed from time to time to these moods of the nation. During
the cold war years of the 1950s, some universities dismissed faculty members
for their political beliefs, for their past political affiliations, and
for “offensive” speech and publications. And even at universities such
as Columbia where professors were
not fired, the possibility that universities would bend to
external pressures and make political beliefs a litmus test for academic
employment had a chilling effect on discussion and research. Today, we
are facing similar pressures to silence or influence speech by those who
are offended or frightened by its content.
At moments such as this,
debate and other forms of civil conversation should increase rather than
decrease. Intellectuals and scholars must engage each other and broader
audiences, whether or not they happen to be experts in national affairs,
foreign policy, or constitutional law. When the national toleration
of dissent and discourse is at its lowest ebb, the voices at universities
must be heard, especially the voices of those who have been given special
protection to speak without fear of reprisal the tenured faculty.
If I have been struck by anything in the aftermath of 9/11, it is the paucity
of public debate within academic communities over questions of war, of
peace, of our responses to terrorism and their effects on our civil liberties.
Universities are unique institutions
at which unfettered speech is not only tolerated but also encouraged. When
there is civil, yet tough minded debate over conflicting ideas, it becomes
a critical part of the education of students and faculty in the university
community; it becomes a model for discourse in other institutions; and
it promotes a true democratic order. For some time now the Supreme Court
of the United States has limited the territory of impermissible speech.
In Gertz (1974), the Court held that “under the First Amendment there is
no such thing as a false idea.” The Court explained its position in terms
consistent with John Stuart Mill’s views in On Liberty. The Court said,
“‘however pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction
not, on the conscience’ of legislators or judges or voters, ‘but on the
competition of other ideas’”[2]. I don’t think that there is any question
that current Supreme Court doctrine protects the speech and writings of
Professors Paulin and Khalidi. What is at issue here is perhaps less about
“rights” than about the right thing to do in responding as individuals
to the ideas of others, and in responding as an institution of higher education
endowed with power, not unlike that of government, to reward and punish
members of its community.
The mission of a great university
in our society is to create and disseminate new knowledge through research
and teaching and to lead debates that
have broader implications for peoples’ values, ethics and behavior. Without
freedom of expression, we are doomed to accept received wisdom and current
dogma. In our society, the high calling of intellectuals and scholars is
to challenge received wisdom, political correctness, and intellectual complacency;
to be skeptical about claims of “fact” and “truth;” to question presuppositions
and biases of others as well as their own. The growth of knowledge, insight,
and understanding is better served through the clash of ideas than through
the blind acceptance of dominant ideologies and the silencing of criticism.
In fact, without free exchange we cannot distinguish between truth and
falsity. Those who believe they can define what speech is “good,” or “evil”
what speech is “true” or “false,” and what speech is causally related to
specific violent acts taken in other parts of the world are mistaken about
their own enterprise. Truth rests less in product and more in process.
Some topics of debate are
straight forward; others are complex and full of emotions, ideologies,
fears, that are derived from the past, but often reinforced by an unwillingness
and fear of opening the subject and one’s own mind to the possibilities
of alternative explanations. The university is one of the only places in
our society that is constructed with these kind of clashes of ideas at
the center of its discourse even though they may cause hurt and hostility.
And these clashes are not limited to political and social activities. They
extend to scientific and humanistic debate as well. One of the functions
of a university is to teach its students the value of tolerating sharply
divergent points of view – a lesson that cannot be learned if differences
of opinion are not permitted to coexist.
Of course, professors who
enjoy the liberty of free and unfettered inquiry and speech also have responsibilities.
As the Columbia University Faculty Handbook notes, “they must bear in mind
the special obligations arising from their position in the academic community.”
These norms enjoin members of the faculty to use the classroom for open
discussion and not for purposes of proselytizing or for lectures or discussions
in which the power and authority of the professoriate is used to limit
discussion to a single point of view.
People who would have us
fire or censure professors because of their political opinions and remarks,
often fail to understand that they are the current beneficiaries of a predominant
point of view. But if content and ideology become the basis for hiring
and firing decisions at universities, the tables can turn quickly. The
moment has never yet failed to arrive when the prosecutors become the prosecuted.
People must be able to imagine that their thoughts, beliefs and speech
might make them the victims of the unbridled power of the government of
a university or of a nation.
In the past, even as many
other national institutions gave way, Columbia withstood pressures both
from without and within to sanction speech, to enact speech codes or to
dismiss professors who expressed controversial political views. Columbia’s
defense of its faculty and students is, after all, a defense of its own
mission, a mission that we will not abandon today any more than we did
yesterday. Columbia’s history of steadfast defense of thought and speech
is a source of pride to us today. We trust that in years to come faculty,
students, alumni and even those who now find fault will look back on our
University’s history of tolerance for difference with that same pride.
[1] The distinguished constitutional
law professor, Geoffrey Stone, has recently written on the history of the
tension between civil liberties and national security needs and has reviewed
the specific history of the cases mentioned here.
[2] This quotes an observation
made by Geoffrey R. Stone (p. 29) in “Dialogue,” which is a discussion
of the history of the First Amendment in Lee C. Bollinger & Geoffrey
Stone, Eternally Vigilant Free Speech in the Modern Era. Chicago,
Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Jonathan R. Cole is Provost
and Dean of Faculties, Columbia University.
This item is available
on the Campus Watch website, at http://www.campuswatch.org/article/id/399
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