Harry Targ
:Indiana University has sanctioned an outspoken professor at its
Bloomington campus after finding an anonymous complaint about his classroom
conduct had merit — likely making him the first professor to be punished under
Indiana's new intellectual diversity law enacted last year."
The Germanic studies professor…” told IndyStar that he believes
the university did not conduct an investigation to uphold its sanctions. And
considering some odd circumstances in his case, he said, he's concerned the
university is making an example out of him.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/utterly-chilling-iu-professor-sanctioned-090734837.html
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THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE OF
POLITICAL CONTROL AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN HIGHER EDUCATION: (a repost from December
1, 2015)
Harry Targ
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 the changing 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 (these were to include unpopular ideas). 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 controversial
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.
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(In addition, as this case suggests, individual students presumably have the
right under new Indiana law to report to administrative authorities what they
regard as transgressions in language and class materials that the student
finds offensive. Further, as reported in this case the “accused” has not been
accorded due process, that is the right to respond to whatever complaints have
been labeled against him.
This constitutes the most egregious form of chilling
academic discussion and debate in recent history).
