BY JOHN K. WILSON
More than one hundred professors at Princeton have signed a letter proposing reforms in the wake of Black Lives Matter. The letter contains a lot of good ideas (which I suspect is what the signers support), but unfortunately it also has one particularly bad idea: “Constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.”
This is not a difficult call. The proposed rule is a terrible idea, and a clear violation of academic freedom. Regulations of racist publications (and, even broader, “incidents”) are a real threat to free expression, even when faculty are the ones assigned to endanger academic freedom.
Andrew Cole, a professor of English at Princeton, wrote a defense of the letter and offered his analysis of academic freedom. Cole argues: “In free speech, you can say most anything. In academic freedom, you can’t. It’s not anything goes, and it’s baffling that so many conflate ‘free speech’ with ‘academic freedom’ — because the University itself certainly doesn’t. It regards research to be a matter of faculty conduct and, where appropriate, disciplinary response: ‘Members of the Princeton community have a duty to foster a climate that encourages ethical conduct of scholarly research. They also have a responsibility to report if ever they encounter serious indications of misconduct in research.’”
Unfortunately, the belief that free speech and academic freedom are radically different concepts is a common mistake, even within the AAUP. In reality, academic freedom and free speech are very close cousins. Academic freedom is the application of free speech principles to the academic context, and academic freedom protects an enormous amount of free speech for faculty. As Cole correctly points out, “serious indications of misconduct” can be investigated and punished. But except for that rare occurrence, research is protected by a very broad understanding of academic freedom. Expressing bad ideas in research (or what someone thinks is racist) is not punishable unless it meets the strict terms of research misconduct. You can be evaluated for bad research during hiring and promotion decisions, but not punished for bad research in a disciplinary decision. That’s an absolutely crucial distinction that Cole ignores.
Cole claims that racist research counts as research misconduct: “The University is also clear to describe as ‘misconduct’ research that is, to take one example, ‘a threat to public health.’” He goes on to point out that “racism is factually a “‘threat to public health,’” including “murderous policing” and racial disparities in longevity.
The mistake Cole makes here is contending that any research with bad ideas is therefore misconduct. The logic Cole uses is this: Professor X argues for Idea Y. I think Idea Y is harmful to public health. Therefore, Professor X’s research is harmful to public health and a form of misconduct.
Clearly, the intent of the “misconduct” rule on threats to health is to prevent dangerous research when the research study causes direct harm to the subjects. It was never meant to apply to research which expresses support for political views that someone thinks are bad and will therefore harm people.
If Cole’s interpretation of misconduct were true, it would pose a severe threat to public health by discouraging research on issues of public health. Suppose someone did research on defunding the police. If they support defunding, someone can bring them up on charges of misconduct because defunding police leads to higher murder rates. If they oppose defunding, they can be blamed for supporting “murderous policing.” Either position could be a threat to public health, depending on your beliefs. Who will get fired? Maybe the one with unpopular views.
It’s also noteworthy that the proposal Cole defends is not limited to racist ideas that harm people. It applies to all research deemed racist, even if it’s a study of literature with no conceivable threat to public health.
Cole claims, “is anti-Black research or anti-Latinx publication “ethical”? The University must pose this question.” No, the University must not pose this question. By declaring that only research deemed “racist” is subjected to special scrutiny, Princeton would be creating an indefensible standard. Why not also ban “sexist” or “homophobic” research? Indeed, why not just make it universal and ban “wrong” research with “bad” effects?
The whole point of academic freedom is to reject this approach. If you punish all “racist” or “bad” research, it will inevitably have a chilling effect on professors who want to challenge the status quo. Even if the faculty evaluating these cases are thoughtful and reasonable, how many professors want to be brought up before the “racism” committee and have their thoughts investigated for possible racism?
Cole may find it tempting to say that racist research is evil, and he doesn’t mind if it gets silenced. But who gets to define racism? Plenty of critics of Israel are accused of anti-Semitism and racism, and they could quite easily occupy most of the complaints to a “racism committee.” Even if the committee never punishes them, the label of being “racist” could be used against innocent professors and silence important research about race. Supporters of Black Lives Matter are commonly accused of anti-white racism, and it is possible that the racism committee would be occupied with complaints about their views.
We already have a way to punish racist research: Criticism. Everyone is free to denounce everyone else for their racist ideas. If you don’t like racist research, call it out and convince others that you’re right. But a separate system to punish faculty for racism is an awful idea that threatens academic freedom.
I note that Princeton claims to have 1261 full and part-time faculty. Considering that a number of people who signed the letter in question are post-docs, grad students, emeriti and others who are not among the 1261 faculty, it might be that fewer than 8% of Princeton faculty have endorsed the letter. That’s not an overwhelming level of support — even though, as John K. Wilson notes, much of the letter is a call for reasonable change with good ideas. I wonder if the controversial proposal to create a HUAC-style committee serves both to assuage some faculty, but also to offer a negotiating chip to the administration.
The portion of the Princeton proposal that my pal John K. Wilson states is “a terrible idea, and a clear violation of academic freedom,” may not be so onerous. Spelling out exactly what constitutes racist behavior, speech, or even course assignments (i.e., requiring students to read HUCKLEBERRY FINN or the Declaration of Independence [because it was written by a slave owner]) would be a marked improvement over the current subjective system.
Yes, there is certainly the possibility of a HUAC-styled Inquisition that would gut Academic Freedom (which is what we have now) but at least there would be a “rule book” by which professors would know what was verboten and what was acceptable. In theory, such a list of “deplorable” acts might also be able to spell out the penalties for violating the “laws” and might make distinctions between egregious behavior and an inadvertent “MICRO-aggression.”
For example, had I known in advance that the term “the hood” (urban neighborhood) was considered an offensive appropriation of Black vernacular by a White professor (who had worked for decades in minority communities), I never would have used it. I was forced to resign my adjunct Full Professorship at CCNY over use of that term — by the department Chair who had told me all about “hood behaviors.” Read all about it here:
https://www.academia.edu/23593134/A_Leftist_Critique_of_Political_Correctness_Gone_Amok_–_Revised_and_Updated
This is a very thoughtful post. Thank you Frank. At my university I accompany faculty who are under investigation for various discrimination charges. There is a lack of faculty involvement in the entire process and this makes faculty members more vulnerable to capricious discipline, not less. Furthermore, the really egregious stuff (not inadvertent missteps) gets protected because universities don’t want mess with the outspoken tenured professors who are looking for a fight. Well-meaning, non-litigious-oriented faculty end up being the least protected. More faculty governance in this area would be very welcome.
John, You write, “Unfortunately, the belief that free speech and academic freedom are radically different concepts is a common mistake, even within the AAUP. In reality, academic freedom and free speech are very close cousins. Academic freedom is the application of free speech principles to the academic context, and academic freedom protects an enormous amount of free speech for faculty.” If there is disagreement within AAUP, then there are real things to discuss here. There is no “in reality” that you have special access to.
I suspect that many of the signers of the Princeton letter did so not *despite*, as you surmise, but in full support of its proposal regarding a committee to look at racist research and design guidelines for how to think about what such research might be. Are there dangers to opening up a less absolutist approach to academic freedom? Yes. If handled responsibly, there are also real gains possible both ethically and in terms of the integrity of the knowledge we work to create and disseminate.
Jennifer–I don’t think that my acknowledging the fact that many people in the AAUP disagree with me is a claim that I have special access to the truth. I’m happy to argue about points where people want more argument, and I encourage people to read some of the various ideas about academic freedom (including Jennifer’s book, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom)
I point out that not all signers may endorse this provision simply because the letter is a very long, detailed document, and not every word is necessarily embraced by every signer. But you may be right, that most people who signed this want a less absolutist approach to academic freedom, whereas I want a more absolutist (principled) approach because I think the fight against racism is best served by not restricting research on racism. Not only do I think the dangers are a serious threat, but I don’t see any ethical or integrity gains from trying to punish racist speech rather than seeking to argue with it and criticize it.
Thanks John. I will work on something this weekend that perhaps Academe blog will post so we can continue this conversation. I am reacting to the way you phrased your sentences, which did very much suggest that there is one objective reality that you have access to. You called the position that academic freedom and free speech should be clearly distinguished an unfortunate “common mistake” and that “in reality . . . “.
as an anonymous commentator who often disagrees with John Wilson, I have to say here that I think he has not gone far enough.
the problem with the Princeton proposal is that it pretends there are objective facts about what is and is not racist research. this presumes a lot about what the qualify of “racism” is. the problem is that it is objectively clear that we do not all agree even on the basic conception of racism. if we can’t even agree on that–and i’m not sure we should–how can we possibly agree on what racist research is?
I disagree with Wilson on the overlap between free speech and academic freedom. As I read the AAUP documents on academic freedom, the goal is to assure that faculty have total freedom to pursue research, and that freedom attaches to many different parties: to the individual first and foremost, but also to departments, institutions, and professional associations.
right now, for example, many fields close to biology consider eugenics, very broadly speaking, to be unacceptable. here, academic freedom rightly attaches to disciplines and departments. disciplines are doing their jobs when they say that eugenics is racist pseudoscience.
there are still problems: there are subdisciplines (“evolutionary psychology” is one such now) that develop specifically to advance racist ideas that are unacceptable in the main disciplines they are part of. this remains a real problem, though institutions have, in my opinion, the academic freedom and governance responsibility to decide whether or not to allow programs in those fields to flourish.
that is *already* a kind of “star chamber” that exists well distributed in the administration of universities. historic racism is one of the areas that it does address, and should.
but a specific “star chamber” outside all other administrative protocols to review individual professorial research is wholly incompatible with academic freedom. it takes governance power away from disciplines and institutions and puts it exclusively in the hands of whomever gets appointed to that committee.
let’s get down to brass tacks. I think it might well be the case that, according to my definitions, research into fields like criminology, predictive policing, algorithmic behavior modeling, and much else, would qualify as “racist.” I don’t work in those fields. Should I really be allowed to second-guess entire fields of study from my own inexpert perch? Of course I am allowed to comment on that research and should. but to subject it to institutional sanction, rebuke, or even retaliation?
one other example: I can think of several “hot” areas of ethnic conflict in the world where both sides have credible, publishing researchers who accuse the other side’s research of being inherently racist. The thought of giving Hindu researchers the power to say that all Muslim-Pakistani research is “racist,” or vice versa, or the same in Israel-Palestine–both of them actual hot issues on campuses today–truly makes a hatchet job of any kind of research independence a person could imagine.
No. These structures, to the degree that they are acceptable, already exist, and must exist, within disciplines, fields of study, and departments, and only latterly at larger institutional structures. In the grossest sense, institutions already can’t tolerate obviously racist research and don’t. But past that grossest sense, “fine grained” becomes “highly subjective and context-dependent.” And as someone else I rarely agree with Conor F., wrote in his Atlantic piece on this issue, it isn’t really a surprise that nobody could point to any research from the past 15 years that would have met this test. That shows that, rather than emerging from a real unaddressed problem (in contrast to much of the rest of the letter), this particular demand is about establishing authoritarian control over independent thinking that is in principle anathema to everything universities stand for. Academic freedom is about being free to think. If you do not believe that your fellow humans *must* be free to think and to make up their own minds, you do not believe in education. Even if someone hates, believing that I have the right not to serve them consequences for expressing it–I do–but to *make* them think otherwise is a form of disrespect for others that cannot produce the respect for others its advocates claim they want.
Unfortunately, the letter does NOT propose a committee “to look at racist research and design guidelines for how to think about” that research. It proposes a committee to “oversee the investigation and discipline” of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication. In short, a committee that could discipline (i.e., punish) a faculty member if it deemed her publications unacceptable. Not a tenure and promotion committee, making legitimate assessments on the basis of clear criteria, but a special committee designed to sniff out (investigate) and punish (discipline) whatever it deems “racist.” Quite different from what you imply.
Okay, maybe I soft-pedaled the proposal. My sense that a faculty committee designed to *both* offer guidelines and to “oversee the investigation and discipline” could be a significant improvement on the current situation at most universities nonetheless remains. I would ask you to think more about your language when you distinguish between a “legitimate” committee and what you imply is a kind of Committee of Public Safety sniffing out and summarily executing counterrevolutionaries. Faculty oversight does not need to look like that, does it? The AAUP calls for faculty oversight and engagement at all kinds of levels. Anyway, I have written something that hopefully clarifies my position and hope you’ll run it here on Monday.
Research should be evaluated on the basis of whether the methodology is sound and whether the conclusions are supported by evidence and argument. Research that fails to meet these standards should not be published, which may have serious consequences for the researcher, but even then there is no reason for disciplinary action. Here’s an example of how incorporating nonacademic criteria into the evaluation of research undermines the academic integrity of the publication process and the academic community.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/transgenderism-transracialism-and-feminist-orthodoxies_b_593ee918e4b014ae8c69e2fa
Re.: “Research should be evaluated on the basis of whether the methodology is sound and whether the conclusions are supported by evidence and argument.”
Who would disagree with that noble and idealistic sentiment? Only pseudo-“P.C.” students, colleagues, and academic administrators who are hell-bent on finding “insensitivies” and “MICRO-aggressions” everywhere they can. That’s who.
Indeed, some “SJWs” are now saying that the very nature of evidentiary scholarship is suspect as a methodology born of “white supremacy,” as are reason and logic.
Finally, I was an Editor-in-Chief of two separate blind-refereed scholarly journals, and was well aware of the publication policies of my predecessors and those who followed me in that role. While I followed the editorial guidelines summed up above by David Moshman — “Research that fails to meet these standards should not be published” — some other editors were not so strict and scrupulous and used an ideological litmus test to adjudge submissions. A “party line” was developed that favored certain topics, authors, and ideas to the exclusion of other approaches — and whether or not scholarly standards of evidence and argumentation were met.
The writer is quite correct as to the distortions in standards that such a proposal would create; and like so many faculty “group letters,” it indeed likely represents a fringe, and one likely centered among Humanities and Social Science (I doubt Princeton’s fine electrical engineering department is up in arms over such distractions).
But Mr. Wilson may underestimate just how destructive such a special interest initiative is: it is too late to change any faculty minds, but the effect on young students is almost criminal as to the level of cognitive predation such an initiative creates. Moreover, ‘BLM’ is a confirmed terror and criminal political organization: what are Princeton faculty doing even sanctioning such a lawless radical group? More, where are Princeton’s administrative leaders? If they’re like most of their peers, they’re hiding in their basements with a mask on, waiting for someone to tell them it’s safe to come out. This is ultimately a leadership problem, and the modern university is rudderless. As for faculty, apparently, the AAUP is hands off any agenda from the Left, and is completely infiltrated ideologically. Send our kids back to campus? You’ve got to be kidding. That has become an act of effective endangerment of minors and a breach of civil fiduciary duty by guardians and parents–that’s how bad the university environment has become: not only is your young son or daughter being put at risk cognitively, but if the university complex has its way, they will be used as effective ‘guinea pigs’ for testing, monitoring, antibody serum, and vaccination–and paying $50K or more a year for the privilege. I’m afraid the modern university has finally forced the hand of adult intervention.
Charlie Kirk from Turning Point USA is also I’m afraid (I don’t ignore his opportunism) completely right: his “DefundU” campaign is gaining major momentum: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/conservative-group-launches-divestu-to-redirect-donations-away-from-liberal-colleges; https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/travel-photos/charlie-kirk-on-call-to-defund-americas-colleges-and-universities/vi-BB16QbE3.
As for “cognitive predation” by faculty upon our youth, I’m reminded of what has become the official motto of the radical Left faculty agenda, by Harvard Law’s unfortunate Duncan Kennedy: “Find ways to use your normal classroom interaction as a political tool, as a political weapon, as an aspect of political activist practice.” Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School, SALT Conference on Goals in Law; and see Kennedy, First Year Teaching as Political Action, 1 J.L. & Soc. Prob. 47, 49, 52
Regards, ’96, The University of Chicago; ’84, The University of Texas at Austin
Pingback: The Promise of Princeton’s Racism Committee Proposal | ACADEME BLOG
John –
Seems to me that you elide a very significant point here.
Freedom id speech and academic freedom are somewhat related, but also different in key aspects.
Primarily, free speech has a government enforcement component. Academic freedom does as well in a sense, but a very different sense. An academy “government” has the right to determine for itself what comprises unwelcome speech. A member of the academy has the option to abide by those restrictions or not. But they still have the option for freedom of speech outside that community.
Would you have it that an academic community would not have the right to determine for itself which speech acts it is willing to countenance? If someone chose to stand in the center of the campus with a bullhorn and should racial epithets, would the university not have the right to exclude that person from its community? Should I not have the right to act in alignment with other community members to determine which acts I’m willing to tolerate? Should I not be able to determine with others that such a speech act is not something we want to encounter in our community?
Should you have the right to determine that your ability to say whatever you want trumps my ability to create my own academic community? By what moral or ethical hierarchy does your preference in that regard assume authority over mine?
Obviously, determining the lines between what is and isn’t acceptable speech in the community is a fraught process and not one to be taken lightly.
But as said above by others, more clarity in that regard is preferable to less clarity, IMO.
Joshua makes some good factual statements above but at some point ideology creeps in and he assumes that everyone shares the (yes, I’ll call it) Stalinist mindset against absolute FREE Speech.
For instance, yes, “free speech has a government enforcement component,” especially at state colleges. And, yes, “academic freedom does as well in a sense, but a very different sense.” Ans, sure, “an academy ‘government’ has the right to determine for itself what comprises unwelcome speech.” However, just because a college “government” has the right to censor faculty and students doesn’t mean that they HAVE to do so. Why don’t universities live up to the Free Speech standards implied in the First Amendment, with the few limitations (libel, slander, incitement to riot, etc.) already covered by case law? Why not live up to the ethos in Justice Brandeis’s famous statement: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is MORE speech, not ENFORCED SILENCE. Only an emergency can justify repression.” So far, NO ONE has ever challenged the jurist’s wise words; I’d like to see someone condemn Free Speech with Brandeis’s words in mind. (And please don’t tell me about “hate speech.” There is no such legal entity!!! The “Supremes” have ruled on this at least three times.)
As for Joshua’s questions — “Would you have it that an academic community would not have the right to determine for itself which speech acts it is willing to countenance? If someone chose to stand in the center of the campus with a bullhorn and should [I ASSUME YOU MEAN “SHOUT”] racial epithets, would the university not have the right to exclude that person from its community?” — my answers are YES and NO, respectively. I would countenance such expressions of Free Speech. Others could grab a bullhorn and call the bigots “racists” (and worse); in fact, “SJW” types already do call everyone under the sun “racists,” even if the targets of their scorn do not actually say anything remotely racist.
The idea of academic freedom is complex, but from the start it has meant a couple of things: 1) the academic community should self-govern; and 2) individuals in the academic community should have some near-absolute freedoms that are not overturned by the academic community. Core to academic freedom are freedom of teaching, research, and extramural utterances. A professor’s teaching, research, and personal opinions are not subject to control by majority rule of the academic community unless they violate clear professional norms (which extramural utterances rarely can do). The university’s commitment to free speech also includes an even stronger protection for people to express their views on campus outside of a professional context of teaching and research.
Obviously, I don’t have the power to impose my idea of freedom over your embrace of censorship for the ideal of a university. But I would offer some cautions: historically, censorship is the tool of repression and totalitarianism, and you should be leery of thinking that you can use it for a noble goal. And calling the use of censorship a “fraught process” is a bit of an understatement. What will happen when the people progressives support (such as critics of Israel or opponents of white privilege) are called racist? And what is the goal of this censorship? If you think censoring racists gets rid of racism, I have a history of the world that contradicts you.
The university free speech and academic freedom contention has just been subjected to an interesting test case this weekend by University of Chicago political science professor Adom Getachew (Ph.D, Yale) in her New York Times essay, “Colonialism Made the Modern World. Let’s Remake It. This is what real “decolonization” should look like.”
In it, she declares recent criminal violence is just the “opening acts” of destruction, and BLM’s crime, mayhem, larceny, burning and physical attacks is justified. She declares: “This historical reckoning is only the first step.” She issues an effective call to arms for worldwide destruction (i.e. “real de-colonization”) and is recruiting college students to become the effective new Bolsheviks in her Marxist worldview.
In my reading she meets the clear and present danger test while making implied threats to White students, or to others ideologically unaligned. It is an explicit militant activism that white-washes the criminal BLM organization, and perhaps most ironic in a university setting, seeks to silence and crush political dialogue. Her essay may a warning flare to students, parents and corporations.
See the brilliant essay–one of the finest in the history of the WSJ, “The Captive Mind and America’s Re-segregation: Idol smashing and cancel culture are part of a broad ideological project to dominate society,” 1 August, The Wall Street Journal, by Dr. Andrew A. Michta, Dean, College of International and Security Studies, the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. He argues that BLM and related agitation and crime, “carry the seeds of violence unseen in the U.S.” Library archive version: https://archive.is/JP00A
So: Is this still Ms. Getachew’s academic freedom, or is it domestic terror, clothed with the garb of academic credentials, under the institutional sanction of the University she is employed by? Who is doing the terrorizing, and who championing totalitarianism?
In my reading, it could turn into a landmark case in free speech, or at the very least, a test case in “self-regulation.” From where I sit, the University of Chicago, hardly alone, has abdicated free speech law, and any academic freedom rules, and surrendered to special interests.
I admire your liberal if generally enlightened free speech philosophy, but where do you put your foot down, Mr. Wilson? Left readers here will likely find her argument seeming to comply still with their academic sensibilities of decorum, from her clever use of euphemistic language. But what is the “plain meaning” interpretation?
I wouldn’t send a young college student within a mile of her “classroom.” To do so could be negligent.
Regards, ’96, The University of Chicago; ’84, The University of Texas at Austin; ’83, Yale College
Getachew’s essay is a perfectly normal opinion endorsing a protest movement and fully protected by academic freedom. To call it “domestic terror” is absurd. This doesn’t come remotely close to “clear and present danger.”
In a large sample N, yours is the first received to assert that position. BLM is not a “protest” movement. It is a highly organized and financed political party criminal terror operation, deployed to disrupt, destroy, vandalize, and terrorize the civilian population, and law enforcement. The university writer not only endorses such terror, crime and destruction of property, but calls for more. It would be fascinating to have you defend that such actions, and the writer’s sympathetic facilitation, is “normal” and “fully protected.” This raises another fascinating question as to what “normal” means to a self-regulating academy. Apparently it means whatever the academy believes is convenient, and whatever its members say that conform to such convenience. There are, it seems, no rules and no standards whatsoever.
Pingback: What Princeton Professors Really Think About Defining Racism - Non Perele - News Online
Pingback: The Princeton Faculty's Anti-Free-Speech Demands | Korea Trend News