I came in late to the discussion on Armando's front-page post last night
Limits to Academic Freedom? Armando's reflections were prompted by a recent speech from Columbia University president Lee Bollinger, about disputes over academic freedom at Columbia and elsewhere.
Armando wrote that Bollinger had ventured onto "dangerous ground" in seeming to recognize some restraints on academic freedom, but felt that his proposals nonetheless sounded "reasonable."
As I'll explain on the flip, those interested in academic freedom--and those on the left more generally--need to be wary of this kind of "reasonableness," especially when attacks on the university are coming from well-organized right-wing groups outside the academy.
First, here are what I saw as Bollinger's key quotes:
www.nytimes.com :
"We should not say that academic freedom means that there is no review within the university, no accountability, for the 'content' of our classes or our scholarship," he said. "There is a review, it does have consequences, and it does consider content."
...
"The question is not whether a professor advocates a view," he said, "but whether the overall design of the class, and course, is to explore the full range of the complexity of the subject."
I'll concede that there is a certain common-sensicalness to Bollinger's statements--professors are allowed some "advocacy" in the classroom, and he asks only that they "explore the full range of the complexity of the subject." Well, sure--few academics are in favor of narrowness and simplification.
The troubling part is who gets to decide whether the "overall design of the course" meets that criterion, and under what circumstances. Is this sort of review now going to be a standard part of the academic process--professors are supposed to submit their syllabi and lectures for pre-approval for every course? I'm sure that's not what Bollinger has in mind. Rather, we're dealing with an ad hoc process where student complaints--if they're sufficiently loud and numerous--will lead to review of individual instructors and courses. That's what's happened at Columbia.
So what's wrong with that? Shouldn't students be permitted to complain? Isn't the only alternative, as Bollinger suggests, that there be no process for reviewing professors and holding them accountable?
Again, this might sound reasonable--but only if you divorce it from the contemporary political context. The attacks on "biased" professors are uniformly directed at professors on the left, and uniformly coming from the right. And they're coming not just from individual right-wing students in individual classes, but are being organized and sponsored by an institutionalized right outside those campuses (think Horowitz here, and the Boston-based "pro-Israel" group involved in the Columbia dispute).
To whatever extent individual faculties and universities should be self-regulating communities, their autonomy is fundamentally compromised when the institutionalized right gets involved. And Bollinger doesn't seem to get that. He says, according to the Times report, that "When there are lines to be drawn ... we must and will be the ones to do it. Not outside actors. Not politicians, not pressure groups, not the media."
Sounds reasonable, right? But again, there's a fundamental blindness here. It's not enough to claim authority to adjudicate complaints once they've arisen, and to ignore the role of "outside actors" in bringing and publicizing those complaints in the first place--which is exactly what we're confronting now.
As for those "outside actors"--let me close with some thoughts about David Horowitz's "bill of student rights." It's important to be clear about where this is headed. Right now, it's been introduced in various state legislatures, and applies only to state universities.
But it is not going to end there. The next step will be to introduce it at the federal level, and to make adherence to this "bill of rights" incumbent on any university that receives federal funding. And since every university suckles at some government teat or another, it will threaten all universities, public and private, throughout the nation.