BY IAN LUSTICK
The following is the text of remarks delivered at a rally in support of academic freedom at the University of Pennsylvania on January 22, 2024.
First let me say that I have nothing against billionaires. While I can’t say that some of my best friends are billionaires, I can say that, from time to time, I have wished that I myself were a billionaire. And I do respect them for their evident skills. I am honored by and grateful for those generous and responsible donors whose support has helped make the academic institutions with which I’ve been affiliated as great as they are. Billionaires are extremely good at making money, at least in the context of the American system of market capitalism. That means, among other things, that they know how to give people what they want—not necessarily what they need, but what they want, or at least what they are willing to pay for.
We faculty members of the scholarly and pedagogical community that is the University of Pennsylvania are standing together here today because making as much money as possible is not what we know how to do, what we strive to do, or what we are charged to do. Our duty, our privilege, and our right, is to ask questions and try to provide answers, and then subject those questions, and those answers, to withering criticism, stringent tests, and to public, thorough-going, and replicative assessment.
We have not spent our lives learning how to make money, which is to say learning about how to get as high a financial return from public and private sources as we can for providing what members of our society say they want at any given time. We play a different role. Our responsibility to our country and its people is different, as are our rewards and the standards against which our performance is measured. We hunt for truth; not popularity; for knowledge and insight, not marketable products or techniques, even if our work lays the groundwork for them. We fashion, and help others fashion, better questions and better arguments about the answers to those questions than have ever been asked or devised. Some among us deepen and expand knowledge in domains of ancient interest to humans. Others among us invent and develop domains for exploration and learning that weren’t imagined even by immediately preceding generations. In this great endeavor, we all subject beliefs, whether inherited or currently popular, to systematic evaluation and critique.
We are here today standing against threats to academic freedom posed by those who seem to believe that knowing how to produce profits means knowing how to produce knowledge. But profits come from giving those with money what they say they want. Knowledge comes from asking questions about what the world is, and then judging the persuasiveness of answers to those questions, not based on whether the public or those with money like the answers or are willing to pay for them, but based on what logic, analytic rigor, and evidence can show about those answers.
We are a community dedicated to scholarship, science, teaching, and learning. The disciplines that we follow, and that bind us, are not speech codes, catechisms, or lists of truths and falsities, or some official stipulation of ideas that must be or must NOT be expressed. Military formations, religious orders, and businesses may all legitimately enforce such disciplines. But neither American higher education as a whole, nor the University of Pennsylvania in particular, can survive under such orders. Why? Because, as I’ve noted, the heart of our endeavor is the posing of questions and the definitional, research, and pedagogical decisions that always require us to close some questions as we open others. Yes, we do, in our individual classes, scholarship, laboratories, and seminars, regularly forbid certain questions from being raised. No seminar in advanced mathematics can proceed if participants are allowed to ask what a “lemma” is or why the sum of squares of two sides of a right triangle are equal to the square of the hypotenuse. But this right, to close off questions, is never exercised absolutely. It is done as a necessary part of focusing the attention of a scientific or scholarly community on questions that cannot even be posed unless the intellectual infrastructure for posing them is assumed to be common knowledge. And yes, good pedagogy also requires being sensitive to student needs as they encounter not only the wondrous but disturbing ideas, histories, and social dynamics that have formed and are forming our world. But how to solve those pedagogical problems is what we faculty members are charged to do, and what we are trained to do. Responding in classrooms to the real challenges that arise in this regard is not the job, nor was it ever advertised as the prerogative, of donors.
How to define terms; how to pose and set aside questions; and how to judge answers—these are what we have spent our lives learning how to do. When, here at the University of Pennsylvania, persons with money or political clout but with no established, peer-reviewed, understanding of particular disciplines, seek to prevent questions from being asked by imposing speech codes, by outlawing particular expressions, by ordering the proper composition of course syllabi, or by regulating the range of topics to be considered at conferences or symposia, they are posing a dire, even mortal threat to higher education in America in general, and, most poignantly, at the University of Pennsylvania in particular.
It so happens that the highest profile, most specific challenge to academic freedom at Penn, and at other universities in America, arises in the domain where most of my own scholarship, research, and teaching has focused. I am a signatory on the Jerusalem Declaration, a formula signed by hundreds of experts around the world on Jewish history, the Holocaust, Israel, and anti-Semitism. It says simply that “Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).” This declaration was offered as response to a tragically influential hoax known as the “IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism.” This pages long document, which focuses mostly on criticisms of Israel and Israeli policies which should be banned and criminalized, and which actually does not ever say what anti-semitism is, has been abrogated and condemned by those in the US and Europe, who originally framed it, as dangerous and misleading. What I want to emphasize is that there are powerful forces on this campus and off it trying to impose this catechism, this speech code, on our University, not just to prohibit answers to questions they don’t like, but to prohibit us from asking questions they don’t want asked. For example, by the regulations on speech they advocate we can ask whether Russia, or China, or Hungary, or the United States, or Iran are racist, but we are not allowed to ask whether Israel is racist. And, bizarrely, that means, we must use a double-standard when it comes to Israel. The same questions we ask of other countries may not be asked about Israel. Confoundingly, that means that to follow the IHRA guidelines we must make ourselves into anti-semites, since using a double standard toward Israel is, according to the IHRA catechism, yet a tell-tale sign of anti-semitism.
In the name of scholarship, intellectual integrity, and our own cherished university, we refuse to accept the limits they seek to impose on the questions we ask. Leges Sine Moribus Vanae! No one will be able to impose rules on the faculty and students of the University of Pennsylvania that contradict our sacred commitment to the production and transmission of knowledge. That is our mission, and the intellectual freedom required to fulfill it is our right.
Ian Lustick holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair Emeritus in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a past president of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association and of the Association for Israel Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Among his books are Arabs in the Jewish State(1980); For the Land and the Lord (1988, 1994); Unsettled States, Disputed Lands(1993); Trapped in the War on Terror (2006); and Paradigm Lost (2019).
“First let me say that I have nothing against billionaires.”
I find it interesting that the article starts with this sentence. The deeper reason, I believe, that this excuse seems necessary is that we lack a convincing theory of power.
One thing that such a theory would allow us to do, is to talk about power in general and no excuses to powerful individuals would be necessary. Such a theory would also allow us to discuss the question of how to best redistribute power in society.
Looking back over history since the founding of the republic, it seems to be clear, even if poorly conceptualized, that there has been an immense centralization of power. If we are not very careful, AI will accelerate this process even further. Thus, the question of how to decentralize and how to redistribute power should be one of the urgent questions of our time.
Ian Lustick’s well-stated distinction between the missions of wealthy patrons and their university clients is right on the money! Still, there is something a bit “academic” about believing that the donors will observe such distinctions. There may have once been a time when rich benefactors were relatively “disinterested,” at least in the sense that their benefactions were intended to sanitize their brutal reputations rather than to redefine culture. Andrew Carnegie’s Hall and his other benefactions were meant to erase memories of the Homestead Strike massacre and similar atrocities, not to empower him to select the musicians and the music. But there is something inevitable, isn’t there, about monopolists deciding to monopolize the production of ideas as well as of goods and services? The modern tycoon is a micro-manager who insists on getting “value” for his money. Marx would be surprised only that it has taken this long for the billionaires to make their intentions plain.
Thank you for this smart, brave, and interesting speech. I generally agree— but all the while I was reading I wondered why you seemed to avoid the matter of ethics or morality. Then, at the end, you went there but in Latin! How self-conscious was this move? Can you say anything about what I have observed? I really appreciate how you fit the question of that unfortunate definition into this larger framework about our mission as scholars and educators.
Well written article. I would like to add that most wealthy people who donate to a university or hospital do not do so in order to change the course syllubi or to appoint someone to the faculty. The problem arises by the ones who masqerade as simple donors but are pushing political agendas to undermine the values of free speech and intellectual integrity. It’s also important not to take donations from foreign countries with political agendas. They are not there for intellectual stimulation.