Do We Really Need to Rethink Academic Freedom? – The Bulwark

Its Not Free SpeechRace, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedomby Michael Brub and Jennifer RuthJohns Hopkins, 293 pp., $29.95

When the Higher Education Research Institute first surveyed professors at four-year colleges, the far right barely registered; just 0.4 percent of the respondents so identified themselves, compared to 5.7 percent who labeled themselves far left. While there were more conservative professors, 15.7 percent, they were dwarfed by self-described moderates, at 38.8 percent, and liberals, who had a plurality at 39.5 percent.

That was more than thirty years ago. In Its Not Free Speech, Michael Brub, a professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, and Jennifer Ruth, a professor of film at Portland State University, are asking whether academic freedom is being used as a refuge for white supremacists. Their answer is yes, an answer so damning that, they say, it should make us rethink academic freedom. So, whats changed?

Not the share of far-right professors. Thats still 0.4 percent in the most recent survey.

Other things have changed, but not to serve Brub and Ruths argument. There are now roughly as many self-described far-left professors (11.5 percent) as conservatives (11.7 percent). The ratio of liberals to conservatives has risen from a little over 2:1 to well over 4:1.

White supremacy in the academy wouldnt seem to merit book-length alarm.

But Brub and Ruth are dedicated defenders of academic freedom. Both have served the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as members of Committee A, which investigates complaints against universities and crafts policy documents and reports on academic freedom. This is not only hard, mostly thankless, work but also an opportunity to keep an eye on American campuses. When they say that the problem of tenured white supremacists is weighty enough to prompt new thinking about academic freedom, we owe them a hearing.

However, when we search Its Not Free Speech for reasons to think that the academy harbors white supremacists, we find a handful of cases. Theres Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, whose brand of nationalism implies that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites. Theres Bruce Gilley of Ruths own Portland State, who thinks not only that Western colonialism was defensible at times in the past but also that a colonial governance agenda, suitably modified, is right for our present. These cases have drawn much attention. But Brub and Ruths Exhibit A for the proposition that the problem here is unfathomably larger than any one Bruce Gilley or Amy Wax is the case of Gregory Christainsen. Brub and Ruth call this case central to their argument. Lets look at it closely.

Christainsen is a professor emeritus of economics at California State University-East Bay. He had been a full professor there for nearly 25 years when he took up, in writing and the classroom, race realism, according to which racial inequalities reflect natural inequalities. A 2014 anonymous student complaint did nothing to damage Christainsens good standing. He was not firedor rebuked, or censured, or disciplined. Christainsens case, say Brub and Ruth, shows the entrenched, unshakeable beliefs of the white supremacist professoriate.

The facts that Brub and Ruth volunteer show no such thing. They show something duller. Full professors are rarely reviewed with care. Anonymous complaints, whatever their merits, rarely trump decades of service. That may not be defensible, but its not a sign of white supremacys strength in out universities.

Brub and Ruth dont volunteer that when Christainsens work became more widely known, CSUs academic senate voted 32-1 to censure him for racist scholarly activity and requested that he be relieved of his remaining teaching duties, already limited since his early retirement in 2016. Just one person, a black colleague who had known Christainsen for 29 years, spoke against the resolution. CSUs administration didnt forbid Christainsen to teach, but he has apparently not been in a classroom since. More than eighty CSU professors, drawing in part on the Christainsen case, publicly urged the provost not to reappoint Christainsens department chair, Jed DeVaro. DeVaro was not reappointed.

Thats Brub and Ruths best shot at establishing the magnitude of the problem their book addresses. For this we need to rethink academic freedom?

Lets consider, nonetheless, the rethinking they have in mind. The case for academic freedom rests on the distinct way in which universities serve the public. The common good, says the widely adopted 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles, depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition. Trustees and legislators, the argument goes, should give professors the widest latitude in teaching, research, and their speech as citizens, because their intervention can undermine free inquiry. And free inquiry, although we cannot foresee its precise results, is a public benefit. This case flies only if people who might otherwise try to bend the university to serve their passions and interests bet, instead, that universities will serve us better as homes of reason than they will as carriers of someones creed.

Doubts about that bet often come from conservative outsiders, who think it nave. Academic freedom may be good in theory, they say. But in practice, it protects antiwar activists, or Communists, or critical race theorists, for whom universities are assets in a propaganda war. (This was the central argument of one of the ur-texts of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckleys 1951 book God and Man at Yale.) Its Not Free Speech is a sign that insiders have doubts, too. To many younger scholars, with whom Brub and Ruth sympathize,

ideals like academic freedom look like hazy, high-minded beliefs cherished by old white people oblivious to the way in which right-wing provocateurs . . . weaponize the freedoms they enjoy.

This threat, Brub and Ruth suggest, should provoke us to rethink academic freedom in two ways.

The first rethinking is more of a reminder. Academic freedom is not free speech. I enjoy free speech at my local park, where I can talk about whatever I like. In my classroom, I cannot, without drawing the disapproving attention of my dean, turn my Byzantine Art class into an extended meditation on Trumpism. As a historian, Im free to write The Holocaust Deniers Had It Right. But when my department denies me tenure because Im incompetent, I cant complain that my academic freedom has been violated. As a citizen, I am free to tweet, the college wont let me exclude bloodsucking Zionists from my course, but come grading season, I shall exact sweet revenge. But even fierce advocates of academic freedom will concede that such a tweet raises questions about my fitness that warrant investigation.

Academic freedom means not that there are no limits on what I can say but that limits are set by the demands of research and teaching, not the demands of trustees and the public. Brub and Ruth worry that many of their colleagues accept an excessively libertarian conception of academic freedom that renders such limits meaningless for tenured professors like Gregory Christainsen.

The second rethinking is more fundamental. Drawing on critical race theory, Brub and Ruth argue that just as purportedly neutral laws legitimate existing maldistributions of wealth and power, so also does the academys fetishization of a mythically neutral pursuit of truth provide cover for the powerful. For that reason, academics should abandon the pretense of neutrality. On the understanding of academic freedom that has prevailed for over a century, the university serves democracy indirectly by supporting the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators, moved by scientific conscience. On the understanding of academic freedom that Brub and Ruth propose, ideas are to be judged not only on how they reflect the best available arguments and evidence but also on whether they reflect a commitment to furthering democracy.

In practice that means that the faculty academic freedom committees Brub and Ruth assign the task of evaluating competence should think of competence both in standard disciplinary terms and in its democratic valence. Such committees will make judgment calls . . . that take into consideration the historical and political circumstances in which their universities find themselves. A classicists conspiratorial tweet about the faking of the moon landing, on this understanding, may require less aggressive intervention than his conspiratorial tweet about #StopTheSteal.

Brub and Ruth acknowledge that even in the narrow work of evaluating scholars in their own fields of expertise, professors go astray and mistake challenges to the present state of their field for incompetence. What then, of the broader work of evaluating the democratic valence of ideas in light of the historical and political circumstances that the university confronts? Experts in physics may make errors in judging their fellow physicists, but at least they are well equipped to judge. It is hubris to think that faculty committees are competent to assess the historical and political circumstances, then measure the harm to democracy that might result from a colleagues article or tweet.

In presenting their own judgments about our nations historical and political circumstances, and what we should make of them, Brub and Ruth issue standard but disputable pronouncements. Weve learned, they say, from social media that mass communication isnt a big coffee shop in which people exchange reasoned ideas. But weve known that since the adoption of the printing press. Weve learned, they say, from the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right, to doubt liberal shibboleths about . . . the so-called marketplace of ideas. But no thoughtful liberal holds that the metaphorical marketplace of ideas guarantees the triumph of good ones, any more than they hold that due process guarantees just outcomes, or that elections ensure wins for the good guys. Free speech, Brub and Ruth say, may have helped dissenters in the early 1990s, but since then the courts have decisively tilted the First Amendment in the favor of corporations and religious conservatives. Nothing they say subsequently earns them that decisively.

Throughout, Brub and Ruth depict liberals as lovers of abstractions who look past hard realities. Liberals dont get, for example that supporting free speech for Nazis is actually quite beneficial to Nazis. Aryeh Neier, who as executive director of the ACLU, defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, was a refugee from Nazi Germany. The Nazis murdered his extended family. But what does a fellow like that know about Nazis? What did the architects of the AAUPs 1940 academic freedom statement know about political illiberalism? Only we who have been stung by Facebook and Fox News understand that the old ways have failed.

That a myopia of the present this powerful afflicts academics like Brub and Ruth, who know more about the history of academic freedom than most, doesnt inspire confidence in faculty committees as guardians of democracy.

If thats the future of academic freedom, count me out.

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Do We Really Need to Rethink Academic Freedom? - The Bulwark