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).
Cliches,
however shopworn, can retain their usefulness provided they continue to
describe their object with some accuracy. One cliche that has lost almost all
value is “speaking truth to power.” These days, it almost invariably is
attached not to an act of genuine courage but to its opposite, the spouting of
some politically favored bromide. (Mitch Daniels, “This climate change contrarian gives us
an important reminder about science in general, ”Washington Post, October 12, 2021).
To its credit, the
Purdue University Board of Trustees in 2015 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 formed 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 were now tenured faculty at universities
around the country. They 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, the environmental crisis. 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.
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 were 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.
Campaigns led by Lynn
Cheney, the former vice-president's wife, and former Senator Joe Lieberman from
Connecticut, included the creation of an organization called the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni. 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
other 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.
Furthermore, in a
recent book Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola, (“Free Speech and Koch Money:
Manufacturing a Campus Culture War,” Pluto Press, 2021), argue that today the
most fundamental question that supporters of real academic freedom should
address is what politically motivated and economically powerful forces are
raising the issue of academic freedom and individualism and what newer
supporters mean by these terms. From the standpoint of these authors, vast resources
of the Koch Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, their think tanks and support
groups, advocate an higher education that celebrates individual freedom and the
virtues of western civilization “while denying the existence of actual material
and historical legacies of racial, gendered, and class-based exclusions,
marginalizations, and violences.”
In short, Wilson and
Kamola argue, these powerful economic interests in US society today seek to
remake higher education to celebrate “individuals maximizing utility within the
freedom of immaculately self-regulating markets.” And, for them, “manufacturing
a campus free speech crisis” uses the traditional language of academic freedom
to stifle scholarship and debate on issues and traditions of scholarship that
have been growing to equip students with a more accurate understanding of the
past and the present. And educational spokespersons like President Daniels,
cleverly misuse the apt phrase “speaking truth to power” to defend those who
wish to stifle real debate on issues of educational and public policy
significance.
One would hope that the
new defenders of free speech and academic freedom, such as Kathleen Parker and
the Purdue University Board of Trustees did in 2015, 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.
An
earlier version of this essay was posted on May 21, 2015.
