Newsletter

January 2015

Freedom creep

Colleen Flaherty

Professors and students are usually the biggest
defenders of academic freedom and free speech on their campuses. But a pair of
new books argues that students and faculty members themselves are degrading
those values. Professors, one book says, are increasingly adopting notions of
academic freedom that are too expansive, leaving the academy open to criticism
from without. Students, meanwhile — says a second book — are increasingly
trying to clip speech with which they feel uncomfortable, threatening free
speech over all.

In Versions of Academic Freedom: From
Professionalism to Revolution (University of Chicago Press), Stanley Fish,
the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished Professor of Law and the Humanities at Florida
International University, argues that there’s been a slow but undeniable
academic freedom “creep” spanning his career. That is, where the term’s emphasis
was once on “academic,” he argues, it’s now on “freedom,” promoting a kind of
mythical notion of the professor as revolutionary. That creep helps explain what
Fish sees as various “schools” of academic freedom, for which he creates a
taxonomy in Versions.

The first school, of which Fish is a member (and
possibly the only member, he jokes), is called, “It’s just a job.” Fish says the
school rests on a “deflationary” view of higher education, one in which higher
education is a service offering “knowledge and skills to students who wish to
receive them.” So being a professor here isn’t a “holy calling” or
responsibility to advance world peace, Fish argues. Rather, it’s the
responsibility to educate students and advance knowledge “by contract and by the
course catalog” – no more, no less. And only work to advance those goals should
he protected by academic freedom.

This definition will be familiar to followers of
Fish, who in his books on academy politics and in regular commentary for The
New York Times has argued that academic freedom doesn’t exist beyond one’s
disciplinary expertise. It sounds limited, and it is. (Although it may be more
inclusive than it first sounds: Fish said in an interview that he couldn’t
“count the ways” in which the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had
“botched” the retracted appointment ofSteven Salaitaearlier this year,
including by violating his academic freedom. Since Salaita, the controversial
American Indian studies scholar, was making his offensive tweets outside of
class, Fish said, the university had no case for punishing him.) But Fish argues
that this version of academic freedom is the strongest, in that it best
preserves free inquiry.

“In the debates about academic freedom, one
point goes largely uncontroverted,” Fish says. “Inquiry the conclusion of which
is ordained before it begins is not academic; it is something else, and because
it is something else it does not deserve the protection of academic freedom.”

Fish says this definition
also stands up to
common criticism from legislators and
others outside academe who say academic work has become too political, and who
use that as a reason to continue to disinvest in higher education. Professors
have the obligation to “get it right,” and that means bringing politics into the
classroom only when they’ll advance learning – not stifle it before it starts,
Fish says. This protects the academy.

To prove his point, Fish
spends much of the book describing and then critiquing four other schools of
thought on academic freedom. The second, which he calls the “For the common
good” school, is most similar to the American Association of University
Professors’ definition, as articulated in its 1915 Declaration of Principles. It
also shares many principles with the “It’s just a job” school – such as that
instruction should be based on fact, not personal opinion. But this second
school claims a connection to democracy, Fish says, in that it is the academy’s
job, in part, to “train the democracy” by making public opinion “more
self-critical and more circumspect.”

The third, “Academic
exceptionalism or uncommon beings” school builds on that idea, maintaining that
men and women of high moral and intellectual character within the academy aren’t
necessarily subject to the same rules and regulations as everyone else. Case in
point? TheUrofsky v. GilmoreU.S. Fourth Circuit court case of 2000, in
which a group of professors employed at Virginia institutions argued that their
academic freedom was being violated by a state law that barred public employees
from looking at sexually explicit material on their work computers. While a
lower court sided with the professors, the circuit court overturned that ruling
to uphold the state’s right to ban its employees from looking at pornography at
work.

In Fish’s fourth school,
“Academic freedom as a critique,” adherents understand the academy as
“protection for dissent,” including dissent against the higher education’s
current boundaries. Academic freedom here is a necessary “engine of social
progress,” which makes it closely related to the fifth and final school in
Fish’s taxonomy: “Academic freedom as a revolution.” In this school, the status
quo reflects the “corrupt values of a corrupt neoliberal society,” and
professors must work to change it. Fish names Denis Rancourt, a former physics
professor at the University of Ottawa who practices “academic squatting” –
hijacking a course with a given syllabus and turning it into a workshop for
revolutionary activity – the “poster boy” for this last and most extreme vision
of academic freedom.

Most everyone else falls
somewhere between Rancourt and Fish, the author says. He attributed in an
interview the academic freedom “creep” to some of the displaced hopes professors
who were students in the 1960s still have for society, in that they’re using
their classrooms as places to effect the kind of change that proved illusory in
their youth. Fish sees evidence of that in the current Israeli academic boycott
movement, which he opposes, and the numerous court cases involving academic
freedom he dissects throughout the book. In most cases, he said, courts adopt
his view that academic freedom is limited to one’s immediate teaching and
research.

Challenging that is not
only foolhardy but detrimental to the academic enterprise over all, Fish said,
noting there are no real political “payoffs” for academic work.

“In the other schools,
especially [the last two], you make the university vulnerable to political
forces that either wish to defund or control it, and that will be so much easier
if university faculty attack their causes in ways that are blatantly political.
Someone can reason that if the faculty is acting political in the classroom,
then why can’t you react to them politically?”

‘Freedom From Speech’

Fish and Greg Lukianoff,
president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, haven’t always
been on the same side of free speech and academic freedom cases. But in his new
broadside,Freedomfrom Speech(Encounter Books), Lukianoff
describes what he sees another troubling “creep” in higher education: increasing
demands for censorship of potentially uncomfortable material. Lukianoff says he
is particularly troubled by this trend since it’s driven mostly by students —
whom he’s defended in free speech cases for most of his career.

“This year has been really
distressing to me because we’ve been at odds with students,” Lukianoff said in
interview. “I like working with students and so to see them on the other side of
the table kind of breaks my heart.”

The
First Amendment lawyer and author of several earlier works on free speech says
the recent, student-driven censorship phenomenon is a natural extension of the
desire to be comfortable. But while being physically secure on college campuses
is necessary for learning to take place, Lukianoff says, sometimes being
intellectually uncomfortable is also necessary. In other words, enforcing
intellectual comfort is fundamentally at odds with the goals of higher
education.

“The increased calls for sensitivity-based censorship represent the dark side of
what are otherwise several positive developments for human civilization,” he
says. “I believe that we are not passing through some temporary phase in which
an out-of-touch and hypersensitive elite attempts – and often fails – to impose
its speech-restrictive norms on society. It’s worse than that: people all over
the globe are coming to expect emotional and intellectual comfort as though it
were a right.”

Lukianoff continues: “This is
precisely what you get when you train a generation to believe that they have a
right not to be offended. Eventually they stop demanding freedom of speech and
start demanding freedom from speech.”

Some of the most troubling
censorship demands are what Lukianoff calls “disinvitations” of controversial
speakers to college campuses amid student protests. FIRE has counted some 257
such disinvitation efforts since 2000. More than half have happened since 2009.

In all, 111 of the efforts
were successful – meaning the speaker did not give his or speech. Some 75 of
those canceled speeches were due to universities revoking their invitations, as
the University of Michigan did last year toAlice Walker, who has been a vocal
critic of Israel.

Lukianoff said such
revocations are especially concerning because they mean that universities are
giving in to students’ demands. Instead, he said, universities should encourage
students to attend such speeches and further engage topics about which they are
passionate.

Similarly troubling to
Lukianoff is the recent push for trigger warnings in course syllabuses, to alert
students ahead of time to potentially sensitive material. In the book, Lukianoff
traces the origins of trigger warnings to the internet, where bloggers have used
disclaimers to alert their readers to sensitive discussions, such as those about
rape. Now students have begun to expect them in their courses, Lukianoff said,
infringing on the academic freedom of faculty members who may not want to use
them, and potentially shielding students from valuable educational experiences.
Lukianoff cited aproposed but tabled voluntary trigger warning policyfrom
Oberlin College that named Chinua Achebe’s classicThings Fall Apartas a
potentially triggering book.

Lukianoff said he’s hopeful
that the censorship trend will die down, but that he’s concerned about its
long-term implications for higher education, and the country.

“Ultimately, when you have
an environment where [it’s allowed], people clump together in self-affirming
cliques and that adds to the polarization,” he said. “It undermines campuses’ abilities
to deal with serious societal issues.”

InsideHigherEd, October 3, 2014.