Harry
Targ
December
1, 2015
And at college after college in recent years, students have
rallied to block appearances by speakers whose views don't jibe with current
campus orthodoxy. Most of those speakers are conservatives. (Rem
Rieder, "Campuses Need First Amendment Training," USA
Today-Journal and Courier, November 29, 2015, 8B).
(An
update on conservative campaigns in defense of “free speech.”)
Stories about academic freedom and free speech have been appearing in newspapers more frequently over the last few weeks. And curiously enough political actors on and off campus who traditionally have been least likely to be concerned about these subjects are becoming its major advocates.
Historically,
universities, like most institutions in society, have been designed by and
served the interests of the dominant powers. Higher education in the United
States from the seventeenth century until the civil war educated theologians
and lawyers to take leading positions in the political and economic system. As
the nation was transformed by the industrial revolution, universities became
training grounds and research tools for the rise of modern capitalism. Young
people, to advance the needs of a modern economic system, were educated to be
scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and managers. Economists were produced
to develop theories that justified the essential features of capitalism.
After
the rise of the United States as a world power in the 1890s, higher education
increasingly included studies of international relations, weapons systems, and
the particular mission of powerful nations in the world. In sum, the
historical function of the American university since the 1860s has been to
mobilize knowledge and trained personnel to service a modern economy and a
global political power.
The
conception of the university articulated by intellectuals through the
centuries, however, also implied an intellectual space where ideas about
scientific truths, engineering possibilities, ethical systems, the products of
culture, and societal ideals would be discussed and debated. During various
periods in United States history, during and after the Spanish-American War,
the Progressive era, World War I and its aftermath, the Great Depression, and
the Vietnam War era, for example, the university became the site for
intellectual contestation. But during most periods of United States history
unpopular ideas introduced in the academy by faculty or students were subject
to repression, firings of faculty, and expulsion of students. This was
particularly true during World War I and the depths of the Cold War.
It was
out of the many forms of repression that faculty and student associations
advocated for the idea of academic freedom. Articulated by philosopher John
Dewey early in the twentieth century and formalized by the American Association
of University Professors (AAUP), the principle, not the practice, was enshrined
in official statements by both university administrators and faculty.
Despite
the broadly endorsed tradition faculty were purged from universities during the
1940s and 1950s, not primarily because of their teaching and research
activities, but because of alleged political associations off campus. Others
were fired or did not have contracts renewed because their teaching and
research challenged reigning orthodoxies about economics, politics, and war and
peace. In the 1960s, universities sought to restrict the free speech rights of
students as well.
For a
time as a result of the tumult of the 1960s, universities began to provide more
space for competing ideas, theories, approaches to education, and allowed for
some discussion of fundamental societal problems including class exploitation,
racism, sexism, homophobia, and long-term environmental devastation.
But by
the 1990s, reaction against the expanded meaning of academic freedom set in.
The National Association of Scholars was created by political conservatives to
challenge the new openness in scholarship and debate on campus. Right-wing
foundations funded David Horowitz to launch a systematic attack on faculty
deemed "dangerous." Horowitz unsuccessfully tried to organize
students to lobby state legislators to establish rules impinging on university
prerogatives as to hiring of faculty and curricula. Politicians targeted scholars
deemed most threatening including such noted researchers and teachers as Howard
Zinn, William Ayres, Ward Churchill, and Judith Butler. The attacks of the last
decade were based more on the ideas which "dangerous" professors
articulated than their associations.
Since
the upsurge in police violence against African Americans and terrorist attacks
on Planned Parenthood, and rising Islamophobia and homophobia, a new generation
of student activists has emerged challenging violence, racism, sexism, and homophobia.
Students have protested against police shootings everywhere and they have
linked the general increase in violence and racism to the indignities they
suffer on their own campuses.
In
response to the events at the University of Missouri, student activists around
the country have brought demands to administrators challenging the many
manifestations of racism and other indignities experienced at their schools.
The response at almost all colleges and universities has not been to address
the demands raised by students but instead to change the discourse from the
original issues to the protection of academic freedom and free speech. In
other words, university administrators and media pundits, as the quote above
suggests, have swept student complaints under the rug and have used the
time-honored defense of academic freedom and free speech to ignore the reality
of racism, sexism, and homophobia. The defense of free speech has become a
smokescreen.
Academic
freedom and free speech must be defended. But it must be understood that today
those who most loudly defend them are doing so to avoid addressing the critical
issues around class, race, gender, homophobia, and violence that grip the
nation and the world.
(For a
more detailed rendition of political repression in higher education see Harry
Targ, "Red Scares in Higher Education:
Reinventing the Narrative of Academic Freedom,"
Diary of a Heartland Radical, May 21, 2015.)
[Harry
Targ taught foreign policy,US/Latin American relations, international political
economy, and topics on labor studies in a Department of Political Science and a
program in Peace Studies. He sees connections between theory/education and
political practice. Targ is a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), the
Northwest Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO),and the Lafayette Area Peace
Coalition (LAPC). His book, Diary of a Heartland
Radical, can be ordered at http://stores.lulu.com/changemaker
