BY HANK REICHMAN
No sooner had I posted my piece on Scott Atlas, Stanford, and the Hoover Institution than I received from a colleague a link to an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Where Academic Freedom Ends,” by Harvard education professor Julia A. Reuben, also prompted, it seems, at least in part by the Atlas case. She argues that “because most analyses of academic freedom have focused on political rights, we have not been as attentive as we should be to the norms that ought to govern our speech as experts. We have interpreted academic freedom to mean that faculty speech should not be constrained in any way.” She urges a return to the AAUP’s founding principles in the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. While I have some quibbles with Reuben’s argument — especially, as I will argue shortly, with her characterization of AAUP policies — I am more in agreement than disagreement with her central point. Academic freedom is not free speech and should not be taken to protect professional misconduct and abuse of professional privilege.
That said, one statement in the article demands refutation. Reuben writes: “In 1970 the AAUP adopted a provision clarifying that standards of professional behavior should not be used to limit faculty members’ free speech.” In fact, quite the opposite is the case. Reuben here refers to one of several “interpretive comments” appended to the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The comment quotes directly from the 1964 AAUP Committee A Statement on Extramural Utterances: “The controlling principle is that a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position. Extramural utterances rarely bear upon the faculty member’s fitness for the position. Moreover, a final decision should take into account the faculty member’s entire record as a teacher and scholar.”
What constitutes “fitness for position?” Clearly one important criterion would be professional expertise and qualifications. By this standard the closer a faculty member’s expression as a citizen comes to that faculty member’s area of professional competence, the more likely it is to bear upon fitness. Some have even pointed out the irony that this policy seems to provide greater protection for extramural speech when the speakers have no idea what they’re talking about than for speech within the areas of their research and teaching. An admittedly extreme and obvious example that I and others have often invoked is the case of Arthur Butz, an engineering professor at Northwestern University and a prominent Holocaust denier. Because his loathsome views on the Holocaust have nothing to do with engineering and by all accounts he has never brought these views into the classroom, he has for decades now been protected by his university’s commitment to academic freedom. However, were Butz an historian of modern Europe, this would be an entirely different matter. In another case, a Berkeley tenured law professor published a book promoting creationism. It was universally panned, including by biologists at Berkeley, who noted that had one of their number taken such a stance disciplinary action might have been warranted. (Let me, however, hasten to add here that I thoroughly agree with Reuben’s important caveats that in all judgments of professional conduct “we need to proceed carefully and tread lightly” and that “the goal is self-regulation, not punishment.” I would also add that responsibility for self-regulation must reside with the faculty itself, not administrators and bureaucrats.)
The issue is not new. In, I believe, 1919, John Henry Wigmore, dean of the Northwestern University Law School and the AAUP’s second president, compared academic freedom to judicial immunity. A judge cannot be held liable “for a wrong done by him while acting on matters within his jurisdiction and as a judge,” he argued, therefore a professor should be immune from discipline “so long as he keeps within his own jurisdiction.” However, he emphasized, “the scholar must not expect protection if he goes outside of the field to which he is appointed.” The philosopher Arthur Lovejoy disagreed and it was his view that the AAUP embraced. Protecting public expression only in a professor’s area of competence, Lovejoy responded, would “make it possible for trustees who wished to eliminate from an institution an economist of whose economic theories they disapproved, to dismiss him because of an allegation of disagreement between their views and his own on political science or on the theory of evolution.” But — and this is critical here — Lovejoy also thought it wrong to fully shield professors for public comments even in their discipline, since that would protect them if the comments were, judged by disciplinary standards, “incompetent.”
Reuben argues that “we have fought hard for our speech rights as citizens, but we have assumed, thoughtlessly, that those rights apply when we speak as professionals.” I’m not sure who the “we” refers to in this sentence, but it should not be taken to refer to the policies of the AAUP, which have remained consistent on this question. Still, you’ll get little objection from me to the argument that too many faculty members confuse academic freedom with freedom of speech and that a tendency to assume that both must protect whatever an individual faculty member might wish to say in any context has sometimes taken hold, with troubling consequences. Reuben is correct that “the First Amendment is not an appropriate model for speech norms with respect to research and teaching, because it is intentionally neutral in regard to the content of speech.” Under the principles of free speech anyone, including a professor, is free to advocate all sorts of nonsense in the public square. But under academic freedom professors are not free to promote nonsense in the classroom or in their scholarship or, for that matter, in public expression that presents as scholarship.
Reuben concludes: “The AAUP’s original vision of academic freedom was not as an absolute right but rather as a professional privilege and responsibility.” This too is not quite accurate. For the AAUP’s initial vision of academic freedom was neither as an individual expressive right nor as an individual professional privilege. Here is how they put it in the 1915 Declaration: “It is, in short, not the absolute freedom of utterance of the individual scholar, but the absolute freedom of thought, of inquiry, of discussion and of teaching, of the academic profession, that is asserted by this declaration of principles.” In other words, to quote the introduction to my own forthcoming book, Understanding Academic Freedom, “academic freedom is not a civil right like freedom of speech, nor is it simply an individual employment benefit provided to those in a restricted number of academic appointments. It is, instead, a freedom belonging to the academic profession as a whole to pursue inquiry and teach freely, limited and guided by the principles of that profession.”
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I agree with these critiques of Reuben (and would make several more), but I am troubled by this exception to academic freedom that Hank suggests for “public expression that presents as scholarship.” I think this is a deeply flawed standard. First, very little public expression presents as “scholarship” even when it is informed by scholarship. How many tweets are “scholarship”? It’s far from clear what it means to write something that “presents as scholarship” or why we want to discourage that. Applying the standards of scholarship to non-scholarly expression is dangerous.
When we punish public expression related to a scholar’s expertise, and treat it differently than all other extramural utterances, we tend to discourage academics from expressing their views on precisely the topics that we should want academics to discuss the most. There is a belief that we will get better ideas if we simply threaten people with punishment if their ideas turn out to be “wrong” (which really means “unpopular”). I don’t believe that’s true. We need to defend all extramural utterances by academics, not merely those based on ignorance.
Yes, on second thought “presents as scholarship” was probably an awkward and unhelpful formulation. What I was trying to get at was something like public expression in one’s field of expertise (or one’s discipline) that may reflect on one’s fitness for position, e.g., the Butz example if Butz had been an historian of modern Europe, or that of a medical professor telling Fox News that injecting bleach to cure COVID would be a good idea (this latter has not, of course, happened — at least to my knowledge.)
By the way, applying the fitness standard to expression in one’s field is not about threatening people with punishment. It is about trying to uphold standards. No matter what the expression, any action taken must, as AAUP policy demands, “take into account the faculty member’s entire record as a teacher and scholar” with the scholar entitled to the full protection of academic due process.
Yet another straw in the wind. I too, when I read Prof. Reuben’s *Chronicle* piece, was immediately struck by the similarities between what she is saying and what I’ve been reading on this blog. As Prof. Reichman says, he and others at the AAUP are “more in agreement than disagreement with her central point.”
That point is the need to find new ways of dismissing or otherwise silencing tenured professors who, until now, have not easily been dismissed or otherwise silenced. It is not clear to me why these have apparently become a new existential threat to the academy, or the Republic, but there we are. No doubt reasons will be found, or contrived. They always are in these circumstances.
The only practical difficulty that will arise thereafter is if we seek to make even a pretense of applying the new standard impartially. To follow up on Prof. Wilson’s point, it would be interesting to calculate how many times Prof. Chomsky of MIT could have been fired during his working lifetime for injudicious, inflammatory or unsupported statements outside his area of expertise (linguistics).
However, I’m pretty sure that if Prof. Reuben gets her way, there would have been little chance of that. Likewise, Prof. Reuben is evidently confident that nothing she ever says or writes will expose her to whatever new sanctions will come down the pike. I’m not nearly as confident of this as she appears to be—Jacobin revolutions have a way of being followed by Thermidorean reactions—but only time will tell.
The fact, nonetheless, that there is a growing appetite, as evidenced by the *Chronicle* article and others like it, among the faculty for purges of their ranks based on speech and publication leads me to doubt that Prof. Reichman’s caveat—”responsibility for self-regulation must reside with the faculty itself, not administrators and bureaucrats”—will prove to be any safeguard at all.
To reiterate yet again a point I made in response to Humanities Professor’s comments on a previous post, there is no “new standard.” The very point of this post was to clarify that Reuben’s reading of the 1964/70 policy on extramural expression as “clarifying that standards of professional behavior should not be used to limit faculty members’ free speech” was inaccurate. The policy for more than a half century has been that such expression may only be subject to discipline insofar as it is relevant to a faculty member’s fitness for position. Humanities Professor is surely entitled to disagree with this position, but it has long been the stance of the AAUP. And I know of no real evidence to suggest that this supposedly “new” standard has been used over these many years as a means “of dismissing or otherwise silencing tenured professors.” Quite the opposite; it is quite rightly a demanding standard.
As for Chomsky, as the professor acknowledges, his controversial statements are totally unrelated to his academic appointment in linguistics and hence have no relevance to his fitness for such an appointment. And I know of no instance when his institution, MIT, has ever even vaguely suggested that they are so relevant or that they merit consideration of even mild discipline, much less dismissal. This is a straw argument.
Lastly, if there is an appetite among some faculty members for a “purge” of our ranks, it is not an appetite that I share. Quite the contrary.
Prof. Reichman appears deftly to be moving the goalposts—or else, a still more appalling vista, he may be inching microscopically closer to agreeing with me. He is quite correct in saying that there have been few examples in my professional lifetime (which is not quite as long as his, but long enough regardless) of the AAUP acquiescing in, far less encouraging, the dismissal of tenured professors for things they have published or said, whether in their personae as credentialled experts or not. He is more *au fait* with the history of the organization than I am, so he may be able to remind me of such cases of which I’ve forgotten, or am ignorant.
But that was then. A few weeks ago, Prof. Reichman suggested that a faculty-member at Cal State—no doubt basking in this latest demonstration of the Streisand effect—might legitimately be shown the door for “research misconduct” on foot of what I assume is his support for, or reliance upon, the publications of the late Prof. Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster. (I can’t be bothered to look up the offending article in question, but I’d make a shrewd guess, based on Prof. Reichman’s description, that that’s what’s involved.) Prof. Jennifer Ruth, enthusiastically supported by Prof. Michael Bérubé, then weighed in, asking “what new policies need to be rewritten [sic] or old ones revised,” to prevent “academic grifters” from continuing to find a safe haven within universities and colleges. And now we have Prof. Reuben, who would like “faculty members posing as authorities far outside their areas of expertise” to face “a public rebuke, prohibition on publishing in the association’s journals for a number of years, a temporary salary freeze or reduction, or, in severe cases, revocation of a Ph.D. or dismissal from a position.”
This is what I mean by “the new standard.” It hasn’t been much in evidence in the past few decades; it definitely has its enthusiasts now. If it were otherwise, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
And in this context, I submit that Prof. Chomsky’s career is entirely relevant. He does not erect a wall of separation between his speech as a professor (on linguistics) and his speech as a citizen (on everything else). Entirely to the contrary, he rejects the proposition that any such wall is required, because he denies the entire premise of “expertise” that Prof. Reuben would like to make into a criterion for regulating academic speech. As he has stated explicitly on numerous occasions, few, if any, claims to expertise by the professionally credentialled need or ought to be taken seriously by anybody else. In general, he believes, these are markers of conformity, cowardice, or self-interest rather than the possession of superior knowledge. If brought before one of the professional tribunals for which Prof. Reuben calls, he would not claim that he is an expert on the Middle East, or chemical weapons, or Cambodia. He would refuse to recognize the court. And in so doing, I believe, he would be entirely within his rights.
Reuben suggests sanctions and disciplinary actions, yes. But I don’t see a widespread eagerness to purge faculty ranks. I see a growing consensus that academic freedom isn’t the same as, and shouldn’t be the same as, free speech as well as a new awareness that there are cases where this– the difference between vetted speech and opinion — matters. Stanford Faculty Senate just passed a resolution criticizing Scott Atlas, for example. See IHE today. Is this resolution appropriate or inappropriate in your opinion, Humanities Prof? (Again, I wish you would have the courage to state your real name. Snark is so much easier when you’re anonymous.)
Well, if I had been leaning toward giving up whatever protection anonymity affords me, the injection of *ad hominem* commentary would be unlikely to change my mind. And I note that it does not in any way prevent Prof. Ruth from both forming and expressing moral animadversions concerning my character—which she is fully at liberty to do.
I’m not sure in what way the case of Dr Atlas, which I haven’t been following, is germane to the discussion. As I understand it, he is not a faculty member at an accredited university or college, but rather a limited-term fellow at the Hoover Institution, which is physically located on the Stanford campus but not part of Stanford itself. Following the reference provided by Prof. Ruth, I see that the Faculty Senate has expressed severe criticism of Dr Atlas’ views and expressions. For what it’s worth, though this is *obiter dicta* on my part, I think the Senate is perfectly entitled to do so, just as any other private individual or corporate body is so entitled. It doesn’t, as far as I can see, implicate academic freedom in any way, inasmuch as (i) the Senate is not calling for any punitive action against Dr Atlas; and (ii) even if it were to do so, its opinion as to whether Dr Atlas ought to continue to be employed by Hoover carries no more weight than that of any other third party.
I was, however, glad to see Prof. John Etchemendy, a former provost of Stanford, say in reference to the resolution: “I am troubled by the idea that a person who has those rights to speak and to assert certain things – however outrageous – have [sic] fewer rights to speak, given that they are Stanford faculty. I find that to be contrary to what is, I think, the highest value of the university, which is the value and promotion of free speech and open dialogue.” That is, broadly, what I think also.
Not that anyone is still paying attention, but it seems that Julia Reuben and Humanities Professor agree that academic freedom (at least as currently practiced) is essentially similar to our understanding of freedom of speech and the First Amendment. Reuben finds that problematic; Humanities Professor disagrees. My point, however, is that academic freedom and freedom of speech, while “close cousins” (a term I’ve employed many times, so I’m hardly moving goalposts), are not the same and, with respect to Reuben’s articulation of that position, the AAUP has never treated them as the same, despite her suggestion to the contrary.
As for my previous post on the CSUEB professor, Humanities Professor yet again mischaracterizes and distorts my views. If people don’t believe that, please go back and read what I posted and the exchanges that followed (https://academeblog.org/2020/11/02/complaints-about-professor-highlight-differences-between-free-speech-and-academic-freedom/). For the record, I haven’t the faintest idea who Richard Lynn was, nor do I much care. However, I do now know considerably more about the specifics of that case (which for me served as an illustrative example of a larger point and not as a true “case”) than would be appropriate to reveal in a blog post, but the issues are far graver than “research misconduct,” although one point that I made in that post was that the professor’s apparent claim that his work was independent “research” could (but only could) subject it to a different standard of review than if his remarks were strictly extramural. I then offered as a possible standard for distinguishing faculty members’ research from their extramural expression being whether or not the faculty member had submitted such research as part of an annual or other peer review. (I haven’t the faintest idea about whether that happened in the CSUEB case.) As it turns out, however, the bigger issues in this case concern classroom teaching, about which I was less aware when I wrote the original post.
Lastly, of course Chomsky “does not erect a wall of separation between his speech as a professor (on linguistics) and his speech as a citizen (on everything else).” But his employer, MIT, does, as it well should. Moreover, whatever Reuben may or may not think, the position that I have clearly defended here is not that faculty members should be held responsible for comments made outside their field of expertise. It is precisely the opposite. To refer back to my post, that would be the position that Wigmore took in 1919. Both the AAUP at the time and I reject that view and uphold the view articulated by Lovejoy and summarized in my post.
I am sorry that Prof. Reichman considers that I have misrepresented and distorted his position. For the record, I don’t think that I have. I believe, rather, that he and I are at cross purposes, inasmuch as what he insists to be a meaningful distinction is one that in my view will wind up making little difference in practice.
Whether the CSU case is an apposite one or not is something about which I’m unable to speak. Prof. Reichman brought it up; I didn’t; and all I know of it is what he has told us in these columns. Presumably he raised it because he thought it to be relevant in some way to his “larger point”—that when a professor publishes in his or her academic persona something his or her colleagues find outrageous, “it would be no ipso facto violation of academic freedom…to convene an appropriately constituted faculty committee to consider the professor’s employment status on the basis of charges of research misconduct.” The same, Prof. Reichman went on to say, may legitimately be done if such a professor “is presenting these ideas as truth” in the classroom.
My own “larger point” likewise had two components. The first was that this call for a system of post-tenure review of this kind would be a new departure in terms of the *practice* of the AAUP, at least in my own professional lifetime. (Whether it is theoretically consonant with some AAUP statement or policy of 1915, 1919 or thereafter is in my view beside the point: as Prof. Reichman correctly reminded me in a previous exchange, those statements and policies were not found inconsistent with the dismissal of many faculty members in the 1940s and 1950s, a precedent that I trust we’re not now seeking retrospectively to justify.) The second was that the definition at any given time of what constitutes self-evident truth or damnable error in the case of publication, and material relevant to the subject-matter or unpardonable axe-grinding in the case of teaching, does not descend with Moses from the slopes of Mount Sinai, but reflects all manner of disciplinary, institutional, cultural, and political pressures—which academics in the U.S. and elsewhere have in the past proven less than stellar at resisting. I know of nothing to lead me to believe that, especially in this era of hyper-polarization, it will be any more successful in doing so at present, or in the immediate future. Prof. Reuben’s expressed desire not merely to banish offenders from the academy, but to strip them of their doctoral degrees as a further punitive measure, is evidence enough of that.
To conclude where I came in, several weeks ago: I see no purpose in an AAUP that seeks to draw the boundaries of academic freedom more narrowly (and to pre-empt Prof. Reichman’s protestation that nothing of the kind is envisaged, he will, perhaps, provide us with a list of cases in which the Association has—since, say, 1970—called for the dismissal of professors rather than their retention. It will, I fancy, be a short one). There are more than enough forces working toward that end already.
I don’t know why I bother, but it is irksome at best to have someone persistently attribute to me words and ideas that I have not advanced. Nowhere have I said anything about “when a professor publishes in his or her academic persona” since that is a meaningless statement, muddling together research publication and extramural expression. What I have said is that, with respect to research and teaching, academic freedom is more limiting than freedom of speech, which was the original (and really sole) point of my post on the CSUEB professor, as indicated in the headline. As for speech as a citizen–extramural expression–it is only relevant insofar as it impacts a professor’s fitness for the position, which is quite a high bar. That was actually sort of the point of this response to Prof. Reuben. Similarly, I have never anywhere called for “a system of post-tenure review.” What I have said is that when professors are accused of academic misconduct they must be judged by a body of their peers, what for decades the AAUP has described in some detail as “academic due process.”
In that light, the 2007 AAUP statement Freedom in the Classroom declares: “with more than half a million full-time faculty in four-year colleges and universities teaching more than seven million students, it would seem statistically certain that sometime, somewhere, some instructor will step over the line. When that happens, sound professional standards of proper classroom conduct should be enforced in ways that are compatible with academic due process.” This statement could apply equally to research misconduct and to the rare occasion where extramural expression is alleged to reveal a lack of fitness for the position.
And, of course, the AAUP has never called for the dismissal of a professor and I certainly hope it never does. But where academic due process has been observed and there are no other violations of academic freedom (e.g., when the faculty committee itself steps over the line, which Humanities Professor is absolutely correct to note can be a significant danger–I can think here of the Ward Churchill case, on which faculty opinion was divided, or of some cases during the McCarthy era invoked previously by Humanities Professor), the AAUP will neither investigate nor otherwise intervene. There are no doubt some cases each year in which faculty members, including tenured faculty members, have been disciplined or even dismissed after appropriate due process procedures. At times AAUP staff have been involved in ensuring that such processes occur, other times not. But the AAUP has never recommended, nor should it ever, recommend, that a given individual be disciplined or dismissed or, for that matter, do we recommend the opposite outcome. We seek only to ensure that the faculty member’s rights have not been abused.
In many cases faculty members will, in good faith, disagree on the seriousness of an alleged violation. It is not the role, however, of the AAUP to take sides in such cases but simply to demand that our principles and recommended procedures be observed. In some cases, of course, abuse of those principles can be so flagrant that it is all but impossible to conceive of how a verdict of dismissal would not violate academic freedom, which is what usually leads to an investigation. But that is not always the case. (For an example of a case involving extramural expression, that of Joy Karega at Oberlin College, in which the AAUP declined to investigate a dismissal because the faculty member was provided due process and the extramural comments were deemed relevant to fitness, see my extensive discussion in chapter 3 of The Future of Academic Freedom.)
Humanities Professor is entitled not only to disagree with me but also to read my posts in the least favorable way, but I beseech the professor not to put words in my mouth or to mischaracterize the longstanding work of the AAUP. And while I don’t think we are entirely “at cross purposes” (actually, I suspect our differences may be narrower than the professor seems to think), I would be comfortable with the description of those differences found in the first paragraph of the professor’s latest reply.
With respect to my third paragraph above on the AAUP’s role in ensuring due process, let me add the following quote, which is in a document on Criteria for Governance Complaints, not found on the website: “As a faculty organization, AAUP must respect not merely the claims of faculty grievants but also the judgment of those faculty review committees which find that they cannot in good conscience support the grievances of faculty colleagues, however much they might desire to do so.”
Given the statement that “a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position,” I’d like to know how this would be applied to Ferris State’s suspension, criticism, and investigation of the right-wing science professor who, on his Twitter account on his private time as a citizen, expressed an opinion about banning certain groups from uttering the N-word and or making a statement about a “Jewish mafia”, among other things many of us may very well, and that the Ferris State administration certainly did, find right-wing and contrary to the value of racial and ethnic inclusion. This is written about in Inside Higher Ed here: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/25/ferris-state-puts-professor-leave-statements-covid-19-race?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=beb98dff77-DNU_2020_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-beb98dff77-197512601&mc_cid=beb98dff77&mc_eid=367fa1204f
You can read the Ferris State President’s response to the incident here, specifically stating that the professor’s viewpoints are not welcome and will not be tolerated because the University believes in being welcoming and tolerance:
https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/archive/2020/november/statement-eisler.htm
Are today’s versions of Professor Arthur Butz getting punished more often now, and should we protest this, or should we applaud this? (Or, will folks say that the faculty being punished today are not equivalents to Prof. Butz?) Does it depend on whether the professors being punished are right-wing or otherwise hold a minority viewpoint vs. a left-wing or majority view on campus?
I hope you will write a blog post on the Ferris State controversy. Thank you for considering.
It is possible, although I suspect quite unlikely, that this Ferris State case may come before Committee A, so I must refrain from direct comment on it. I will say, however, that if the university decides that the professor’s extramural comments do indeed render him “unfit” to teach, they should be required to make that case in an appropriate due process procedure. I will say, though, that this strikes me as a rather extreme example, since the professor’s reported comments are, in my experience, unusually offensive. Does such a level of offense alone amount to unfitness? Not for me to say.
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