Harry Targ
Purdue University has become the
first public institution of higher education to adopt a free speech policy
called the ‘Chicago principles,’ condemning the suppression of views no matter
how ‘offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed’ they may be. (Tyler Kingkade, “Purdue Takes A
Stand For Free Speech, No Matter How
Offensive Or Unwise,” Huffington Post,
May 15, 2015).
“Colleges and universities often
boast of their diversity in terms of race, sex, gender or sexual orientation,
but too often they fail to encourage diversity of thought.” (Kathleen Parker, “In Name of Free
Speech at Purdue, Beyond,” Lafayette Journal
and Courier, Thursday, May 21, 2015, 7A).
To its credit, the Purdue University
Board of Trustees recently passed a resolution defending free speech on its
college campus. The new policy was strongly endorsed by the Purdue President
Mitch Daniels who, quoted by Parker, condemned universities that spawn “a bunch
of little authoritarians with an inverted view of our basic freedoms.”
While the policy is correct, the
implied narrative of the threat to academic freedom and diversity of thought as
coming from the Left, progressives or liberals, constitutes an extraordinary
rewriting of the experience of a hundred years of higher education. Any serious
revisiting of the history of the modern university shows clearly that the
ideas, disciplines, purposes of higher education have been shaped and transformed
by money, power, the perceived needs of United States national security, and
conservative ideology.
For example, Ellen Schrecker
documented the enormous impact that the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s had on
higher education in her book, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the
Universities (1988). She interviewed academic victims of
McCarthyite attacks on faculty at prestigious universities. They were
subpoenaed to testify before state legislative or Congressional committees
about their former political affiliations and associations. As was the
requirement of the times, those ordered to testify could not just admit to
their own political activities but were obliged to give witness against others
whom they may have known.
Some victims were former members of
the Communist Party, others were signatories to petitions supporting the
Spanish loyalists during their civil war, and still others had supported
banning atomic weapons. Perhaps the most troubling element of the Red Scare
story was the fact that university administrations refused to defend those of
their faculty who were attacked. Furthermore, Schrecker reports that some
university officials demanded that their faculty cooperate with these committees.
Her subjects reported that they received little or no support from
administrators because officials wished to protect their universities from
funding reductions.
Since the end of the Cold War, some
scholars have begun to examine other aspects of the anti-communist hysteria as
it related to the academy. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, in Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism:
1945-60, addressed the multiplicity of ways in which funding priorities,
rightwing assaults, official pronouncements from government officials, lobbying
efforts by big business groups, and shifting electoral political currents
affected and shaped the content of academic programs since World War II.
For example, disciplines then, and
now, have been shaped by dominant "paradigms," or approaches which have
included assumptions about the subject,
aspects of the subject that deserved
study, theories that were most
appropriate for understanding the subject of the field, and the methods that should be used to study
subjects in the field. Most important, all the social sciences and
humanities adopted views of their disciplines that did not challenge ongoing
U.S. Cold War assumptions about the world. In each case, dominant paradigms of
the 1950s and beyond constituted a rejection of 1930s and 1940s thinking, which
were shaped by the labor and other struggles of the Depression era.
In the words of scholar Henry
Giroux, the military-industrial-academic complex influenced personnel
recruitment and retention and the substance of research and
teaching. Disciplines with more ready access to research dollars -- from
engineering to psychology -- defined their research agendas to comport with the
interests of the government and corporations.
However, students in the 1960s began
to demand new scholarship and education. Opposition to the Vietnam War
particularly stimulated demands on professors to rethink the historical
character and motivation of United States foreign policy. William
Appleman Williams and his students, the historical revisionists, articulated a
view that the United States practiced imperialism ever since it became an
industrial power. Classrooms where international relations and foreign
policy were taught became "contested terrain" for argumentation and
debate between the older and more benign view of the U.S. role in the world and
the view of the U.S. as an imperial power.
The contestation spread.
Students demanded more diverse and complicated analyses of race and racism in
America, patriarchy and sexism in gender relations, and working-class
history. Every discipline and every dominant paradigm was subjected to
challenge. The challenges were also reflected in radical caucuses in professional
associations and even in some of the more upright (and "uptight")
signature professional journals. As a result there was a diminution of
Red Scares in higher education, for a time.
The spirit of ideological struggle
in the academy diminished after the Vietnam War and especially after Ronald
Reagan became president. Reagan brought back militant Cold War policies,
radically increased military expenditures, declared Vietnam a "noble
cause," and developed a sustained campaign to crush dissent and reduce the
strength of the labor movement. The climate on campus to some degree
returned to the 1950s.
However a whole generation of 1960s-trained
academics was now tenured faculty at universities around the country.
They had institutionalized programs in African American Studies, Women's
Studies, Peace Studies, and Middle East Studies. Critical theorists
populated education schools, American Studies programs, and other pockets of
the university. Faculty continued the debate with keepers of dominant
paradigms, created interdisciplinary programs, and developed programs shaped by
key social issues such as racism, class exploitation, gender discrimination,
and war.
But by the 1990s, a new version of
the Red Scare was surfacing. Some conservative academics and their constituencies
talked about declining standards they said were caused by the new
programs. Others criticized what they regarded as an insufficiently rosy
view of United States history. They claimed that the United States was
being unfairly condemned for the killing of millions of Native Americans or
because slavery and racism were presented as central to the history of the
country. They formed academic associations and interest groups to defend
against critical scholarship.
Then David Horowitz came
along. Overseeing a multi-million-dollar foundation funded by rightwing
groups, Horowitz launched a campaign to purify academia of those who had
records of teaching, research, and publication that he saw as unduly critical
of the United States, ruling political or economic elites, or the global
political economy. He opposed those scholar-activists who participated in
political movements or in any way connected their professional and political
lives. And he opposed those academics who participated in academic programs
that are interdisciplinary, problem-focused, and not tied to traditional fields
of study.
Horowitz published a book in 2006, The
Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, in which he
presented distorted profiles of illustrative faculty whom he believed violated
academic standards. Most of those identified either engaged in political
activity and/or participated in interdisciplinary scholarly programs that he
found offensive: Middle East Studies, Women's Studies, African-American
Studies, American Studies, and Peace Studies.
In conjunction with the book and
similar assaults on those he disagreed with on his electronic news magazine,
Horowitz encouraged right-wing students to challenge the legitimacy of these
professors on college campuses and encouraged conservative student groups to pressure state
legislatures to endorse so-called "student bill-of-rights
legislation." Such legislation would have established oversight by
state legislatures of colleges and universities, especially their hiring
practices.
In conjunction with campaigns led by
Lynn Cheney, the former vice-president's wife, and former Senator Joe Lieberman
from Connecticut, an organization called the American Council of Trustees and
Alumni was created. As Giroux summarized it, ". . . ACTA actively
supports policing classroom knowledge, monitoring curricula, and limiting the
autonomy of teachers and students as part of its larger assault on academic
freedom" (Giroux, The University in Chains,
Paradigm, 2007, 162).
Horowitz, ACTA, and others conservatives
who attacked the university targeted visible academics for scrutiny and
persecution. Ward Churchill, a provocative professor of Ethnic
Studies at the University of Colorado, was fired after a university committee
was created to review his scholarship because of controversial remarks he
made off campus. Norman Finkelstein, a DePaul University political
scientist who had written several books critical of interpreters of Israeli
history and foreign policy, was denied tenure after a coordinated attack from
outside his university led by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.
Distinguished political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt became the
subject of vitriol and false charges of anti-Semitism because they published a
long essay and book analyzing the "Israeli lobby." More recently, the
University of Illinois reversed its contractual relationship with Professor Steven
Salaita who posted electronic messages strongly critical of the state of
Israel.
In addition,
the new Red Scare has reinforced and legitimized the dominant paradigms in
various academic disciples and created an environment of intellectual caution
in the academy. While the impacts are not easily measurable, untenured
faculty cannot help but be intimidated by the public attacks on their senior
colleagues. The system of tenure and promotion in most institutions is
vulnerable to public pressures, individual reviewer bias, and honest
disagreements among faculty about whether published work and teaching is worthy
of promotion and tenure. Therefore, just as the administrators and
faculty of the 1950s felt vulnerable to outside assault on their institutions,
those passing judgment on today's faculty might see the necessity of caution in
hiring and retaining faculty whose perspectives are new, different, radical,
and engaged.
In short,
the real threats to academic freedom and free speech on college campuses have
almost always come from those who wish to defend the status quo in scholarship,
teaching, advocacy, foreign and national security policy, and the way the
economy is organized.
One would
hope that the new defenders of free speech and academic freedom, such as Kathleen
Parker and the Purdue University Board of Trustees, will defend faculty who are
critics of various public policies and the prevailing distributions of wealth,
income, power, and unequal privileges based on class, race, gender, and sexual
orientation. This would be an historic change from the practice of silencing
progressive voices in higher education.
