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Immediately after September 11, the
American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded by Lynn
Cheney and Senator Joseph Lieberman, published a report accusing
universities of being the weak link in the war against terror
and a potential fifth column. As if the general hint at treason
was not enough, an appendix to the report listed the names of
117 "un-American" professors, staff members, and students,
and the offending statements they had made.
A few months after ACTA's study was disseminated, Daniel Pipes,
the director of a think tank called Middle East Forum, launched
a blacklisting internet site called Campus Watch, which publishes
dossiers on scholars who criticize US policy in the Middle East
or Israel's treatment of Palestinians. On the website one finds
a "Keep Us Informed" section, where Pipes encourages
students to inform on any professor who deviates from "correct
conduct." Some have obediently complied.
These initiatives marked the beginning of a well-orchestrated
attack against academic freedom in the US. In mid-January of
this year, the Bruin Alumni association offered students $100
to tape leftwing professors at the University of California Los
Angeles. The idea was to expose radical professors who "[proselytize]
their extreme views in the classroom." 24-year-old Andrew
Jones did not wait long and created a website featuring a hit
list of 30 professors he considers the top extremist, leftwing
offenders.
As Beshara Doumani, a history professor at the University of
California Berkeley, points out in his compelling introduction
toAcademic
Freedom after September 11, Pipes and friends have cynically
appropriated the liberal terminology of the New Deal and civil
rights eras, employing code words such as balance, fairness,
diversity, accountability, tolerance, and not least, academic
freedom in order to justify the enforcement of a political orthodoxy
that undermines these very values.
The book describes this new assault on academic freedom in detail,
distinguishing the current wave from the one launched by Senator
McCarthy. As Stanford University Professor Joel Beinin observes,
the geographical and political context has obviously changed,
so that if in the 1950s scholars who offered a dissenting analysis
of the Soviet Union and Cold War were decried as traitors, today
it is Middle East specialists who are being accused of treason.
But the main difference between the two academic witch hunts
is that today private interest groups and not the government
are running the show. Of course, the major players within these
think tanks have unhindered access to the corridors of government
and are frequently successful in influencing high-ranking public
servants; yet the resources for the campaign to de-legitimize
academic dissent and to control the production of knowledge come
from opulent think tanks.
In addition, the strategy employed today is different from the
one used during the McCarthy era. The future of academic freedom,
Kathleen J. Frydl predicts in her chapter, will not be determined
in the courts but by budgets, whereby those who challenge the
powers that be will be cut off from resources, while knowledge
will be privatized and become the property of those who have
the assets to produce it. The measure of academic freedom, she
continues, will not be calculated according to who is fired by
the university, but by who is hired -- those who appear to be
intellectually recalcitrant will simply not be allowed to enter
the academic gates. Finally, tenure will no longer guarantee
academic freedom, since job security will be destroyed. Tragically,
all of the processes described by Frydl are not part of some
distant and theoretical future, but in the past years have infiltrated
the higher-education system.
Doumani's timely volume not only provides the reader with an
analysis of the very real assault on academic freedom as well
as several important documents that pertain to this assault (in
the appendix), but also assembles three chapters by Robert Post,
Judith Butler, and Philippa Strum who discuss, respectively,
the historical roots of academic freedom in the US, its philosophical
underpinnings, and its legal structure.
Post, a law professor at Yale and a former general counsel of
the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), takes
the reader on a fascinating journey, tracing how academic freedom
first developed as a result of efforts to institutionalize a
set of employer-employee relationships in a university setting.
He shows how the principle of academic freedom emerged in the
US not as an individual right, but rather as the price the public
must pay the academic community in return for the social good
of advancing knowledge. Scholars are granted the freedom to conduct
research upon the understanding that this is the way universities
can provide meaningful contributions to human knowledge and the
search for truth.
Post notes that this is precisely the reason why the International
Studies in Higher Education Act (HR 3077) that was passed in
Congress in October 2003 contradicts the principle of academic
freedom. This Act aims to establish a powerful advisory board
to oversee International Studies programs which receive federal
funding, authorizing the board to review course material, curricula,
and faculty hires and make funding recommendations to the Secretary
of Education. Two seats on the board are reserved for personnel
from national security agencies. Post concludes that this Act
could ultimately transform International Studies into programs
that merely promote opinions held by the people who provide funding
and therefore undermines the social function of the university
as a free market of ideas that advances knowledge.
Post adds, though, that academic freedom does have constraints
which are determined by professional norms concerning, for instance,
the quality and methods of research. This claim triggers Judith
Butler, whose profound chapter problematizes Post's descriptions,
demonstrating that he does not fully take into account the historicity
of academic norms.
In her brilliant essay, Butler shows that the emergence, transformation
and sometimes disappearance of academic norms not only change
our conception of what constitutes research and knowledge and
how we conceive truth, but also shifts and blurs the boundaries
between academic freedom and first amendment rights, between
professional and extramural expressions, and between individual
rights and institutional prerogatives. She underscores that one
of the roles of academic freedom is to allow and even encourage
scholars to critically interrogate the legitimacy of academic
norms, the very norms which according to Post serve as the boundary
of academic freedom. Because the tension between academic norms
and academic freedom can never be overcome but only negotiated
in different ways, it creates a paradox. Butler would probably
say this is healthy, since such paradoxes can expand intellectual
frontiers and spur the production of challenging new ideas.
All of which brings us back to Doumani's introduction, where
he persuasively argues that the question is not only how to preserve
academic freedom but also what to do with it. It is time, he
says, "to engage as public intellectuals the domestic and
international movements for civil rights, democracy, and justice...
Let us speak and act before it is too late."
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