Harry Targ
September 8, 2016
(With the
return to colleges and universities for the fall, 2016 term, the issues of
academic freedom have reappeared in the mainstream media. Recently a story was
published about a letter the University of Chicago sent to its incoming
students warning that all discourse was fair game, that “safe spaces” and
warnings of uncomfortable subjects would not be encouraged in the class room.
The hallowed idea of academic freedom was justified by University of Chicago
authorities and echoed by administrators at various universities. Ironically,
as two prior posted essays suggest, academic freedom has always been constrained
or censured in higher education, not by radical students demanding more
attention and sensitivity to issues of class, race, gender, sexual preference,
and violence at home and abroad, but those who oppose such discussions. The
defenses of academic freedom today are designed to stifle the demands for open
discussion on these issues rather than encourage them. The two essays written
and posted in 2015 illustrate this contradiction. HT)
***
THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF POLITICAL CONTROL AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM
IN HIGHER EDUCATION
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).
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 twentieth century, 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 a 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 Ayers, 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 (below), “Red Scares in
Higher Education: Rewriting the Narrative of Academic Freedom,” www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com,
May 21, 2015.)
