BY JOHN K. WILSON
Former AAUP president Cary Nelson wrote an essay for Inside Higher Ed last week, arguing that departments issuing statements critical of the Israeli government are violating academic freedom and must be silenced:
A department is an administrative entity, an arm of the university. Academic and professional standards for departments exist, such as that students and faculty members holding opposing views will be free to adopt their own positions and be treated with respect. Departments and their administrators are responsible for a series of professional decisions that are supposed to be politically neutral.
If departments violate those standards, as these departments have pledged to do, then it is reasonable for their governing bodies to act to ensure the integrity of the school, college or university as a whole — such as, if necessary, restricting the authority those departments have to make academic and personnel decisions.
The threat to academic freedom here comes not from departments issuing statements, but from Nelson’s “reasonable” call for “governing bodies” (a term that includes both administrators and trustees) to restrict departments from making “academic and personnel decisions.” Not only does Nelson want departments to be banned from speaking out, but he thinks an appropriate punishment is to take away their ability to make any decisions, including hiring, admissions, and curriculum–all of which is foundational to academic freedom.
Absolutely nothing in the statement Nelson denounces suggests in any way that students and faculty in these departments should be banned from disagreeing with the statement. A statement is just a statement. It’s not an act of oppression.
The notion that academic freedom requires the silence of anyone with authority is erroneous, impossible, and dangerous. It’s an error because academic freedom requires protecting dissenters from punishment, not neutrality and silence from those with power. It’s impossible because all sorts of necessary statements and positions by those in authority on campus (supporting diversity or affirmative action or free speech) would violate the rights of any individual students or faculty who might disagree. And it’s dangerous because once we accept Nelson’s logic that political statements are a form of repression that must be banned, all academic freedom is in big trouble. After all, departments are not the only entities making political statements–individual professors make a lot of political statements. A student is far more likely to feel intimidated by their professor saying something than a departmental statement, since the professor (unlike a department) controls classroom discourse and grading. If departments don’t have academic freedom because their political advocacy would silence dissenting voices, then why do professors have academic freedom when their political advocacy could silence dissenting students?
One of Nelson’s lines is especially dangerous on this point: “Students who hold other views face the bullying power of their professors.” A professor who expresses a political view is not a bully, and a collective statement by the majority of a department does not turn a statement into “bullying,” whatever that means. But Nelson seems to be suggesting that students who encounter any political statements by any faculty are victims of oppression. Nelson was the guiding force for the AAUP’s important 2007 report, “Freedom in the Classroom.” The report refuted the idea that “instructors must refrain from stating strong opinions.” That freedom is endangered by Nelson’s logic about “the bullying power of their professors.”
Nelson claims, “Presidents, deans and provosts need be especially concerned when a department implicates the university as an institution in political advocacy.” Departmental statements are their own, and they do not “implicate” the rest of the university in anything. As president of the AAUP, Cary Nelson many times had to confront the erroneous logic that professors should not be allowed to engage in political advocacy because it could implicate the university. Now he is invoking that same shoddy logic to attack political advocacy he doesn’t like.
Sadly, Nelson is not alone in his belief that departments must be silenced. In 2020, when the University of Chicago English Department announced that it would only accept students in 2021 within the subfield of Black Studies (something that is clearly an admissions decision that a department can decide), the administration announced that the Kalven Report applied to departments: “The principles of the Kalven Report apply not only to the University as a whole, but to the departments, schools, centers, and divisions as well, and for exactly the same reasons, i.e., these essential components of the University should not take institutional positions on public issues that are not directly related to the core functioning of the University.”
I disagree with the Kalven Report, which espouses the false belief that academic freedom is endangered whenever the university stands for anything. But nothing in the Kalven Report says that it is meant to apply to any subunit of the university, since the sole focus is on the central administration (which has the real authority, and it is using it in this case to try to intimidate the English Department).
There are many subunits of the university under its legal control which make collective statements all the time, including faculty senates, student governments, and student organizations, as well as departments and centers. Imposing a political cone of silence on all these subunits would pose a severe threat to free expression on campus.
Perhaps the most important aspect of academic freedom for departments is the right to criticize the central administration. If the administration is undertaking actions harmful to these departments or the university, the department should have the ability to speak out about it without imperiling individual faculty by forcing them to take a stand against their bosses. Departmental academic freedom can be an important voice for reform. The same is true for broader political statements (including criticism of threats to academic freedom). The ability of a department to speak out can not only magnify the attention given to a statement, but it can help protect individual professors from harassment and threats and retaliation they might receive if they individually spoke out.
Personally, I don’t believe in collective statements. I don’t like open letters, and I don’t want departments or universities to declare their political views because I don’t care about what they collectively think. I want individuals to speak out, and I want to hear directly from those people using clear language rather than some dumbed-down collective announcement. But I believe in the right of people to make collective statements even though I don’t like them. And the right of free expression must include the right to engage in collective action such as these statements, and the right of departments to speak.
If departments are banned from expressing viewpoints, it will not liberate individual faculty and students to speak; to the contrary, it will send a silencing message that political statements are improper and neutrality is the only proper position for an academic.
Nelson apparently mistakes anti-war protest with ethno-religious bias. This was the unfortunate error of the December 2019 Trump EO that equates criticism of the government of Israel, with criticism of an individual and to therefore support BDS, for example, is to invoke a charge of personal discrimination under Title VI (the intent of the “anti-BDS” lobby). It also conflates anti-semitism with an anti-zionsim, both re-characterizations of which are not logical, but reflect the larger lobbying efforts to so sanction–and suppress–political speech. Nelson appears merely captured by the same special interests. Interestingly, the University of Chicago’s president and trustee chairman, both pro-Israel activists, actually assigned Israel IDF officers to teach undergraduates in its College, which is a liberty that might draw a similar criticism raised by Nelson but aparently does not.
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/1/10/opposing-israeli-defense-forces-classrooms/
The notion that a departmental statement of principle regarding non-university events and policies would not inhibit the freedom of untenured junior faculty to dissent and pursue research and international contacts contrary to the departmental resolution is unbelievably naive. And the notion that such a resolution wouldn’t influence future hiring decisions is equally naive. There are already problems along these lines with informal departmental consensuses that have led to the effective exclusion of potential dissenters from being hired or tenured and a formal resolution would inevitably lead to an exacerbation of these problems. And that is clearly a threat to academic freedom. In my opinion Cary Nelson has this right and John Wilson’s statement here is totally divorced from reality.
As for the effect on students of such resolutions I might add a note from my own distant past when I was a prominent undergraduate opponent of the Vietnam War at the University of Michigan. At the time I was considering a career in Chinese Studies so I was taking a course in the Chinese language. A junior faculty member of the Chinese language faculty told me that the faculty had held a meeting to discuss failing me in the language course in order to block me from ever making a career in Chinese studies. Departmental resolutions like those being considered here would surely encourage similar discrimination against students who fail to fall in line.
What those professors contemplated was incredibly unprofessional and a violation of your rights and basic academic standards. Groupthink is always a danger, but a ban on resolutions doesn’t lessen the danger. I suspect that your professors would never have issued a resolution supporting the Vietnam War, and the greater danger is that a ban on resolutions promotes bias against academics and students like you with political views and encourages such discrimination.
Sorry, but I have no doubt that the professors in question would indeed have voted for a resolution in favor of the Vietnam War given their extremely strong anti-Communist beliefs. Nor am I convinced that the presence of such a formal departmental decision would not have swung the balance and resulted in my being given a failing grade for the course, instead of the very low pass that I was in fact awarded. And had there been such a formal departmental decision I also doubt that the junior faculty member who told me about the meeting would have had the courage to do so and risk having the people who would decide on his tenure application finding out that he had done so (something that could have come out had I known and appealed the failing grade)–so I would never have learned that the failing grade was a political decision.
> the greater danger is that a ban on resolutions promotes bias against academics and students like you with political views and encourages such discrimination.
I don’t think so. My view is that the proposed ban is not a good idea, and will cause more problems than it solves. But one of those problems is unlikely to be the exposure of people like Prof. Nadel to still more hazard than he has already had to face. Because he is of course correct in his larger point. In an atmosphere of intense politicization and polarization such as the present one, for an untenured or non-tenure-track faculty-member merely to refrain from adding his or her name to an initiative or petition to which the power-brokers in the Department are vociferously committed—far less to speak out against it—can be, and at times is, a career-ending decision. The spectacular, and indefensible, opacity of the modern U.S. university provides innumerable opportunities for those who combine self-righteousness with an appetite for vengeance to retaliate professionally against their more vulnerable opponents. Such individuals are not rare within the academy. Those of us who have sat on promotion and tenure committees will have seen evidence of this in action: sometimes politically motivated, sometimes not.
It is noteworthy how much more varied and free-ranging are the viewpoints expressed on the rare occasions when my university permits either a secret ballot, or the submission of anonymous responses in questionnaires.
Mr. Wilson, as usual, is carrying the banner for a form of absolute free speech standards, and I think, raises and resolves the issue correctly. What may be additionally noteworthy is that this academic “tribalism” and institutional solidarity, is exactly observable in corporations, and in government. Moreover, the well-stated “self-righteousness with an appetite for vengeance to retaliate” also culturally permeates our grade and middle schools, and high schools–which raises an issue as to whether we are witnessing an effective mass psychosis. Mr. Wilson seems to be holding up the sane end of the distribution, and reminding his colleagues what free speech means. Harvard Law’s Charles Fried uses the term “Ground Zero Rule” to describe the fundamental basis of free speech violation: it is the violation of free thought, and the imposition of standards, controls, censorship and burden, over content. “The essence of forbidden censorship is content control.” That Rule seems to have been violated here: a dispute over content is in play, and is merely of the same very old, very tired hypocrisy of selective speech standards. Mr. Wilson is, I believe, rightly calling it out. Whether the academy can self-police against a “ground zero” violation, is another issue.
I agree that Cary may have gone a bit overboard in characterizing as “reasonable” an administration’s hypothetical disciplining of a department for issuing a politically divisive statement that has nothing to do with the academic mission of the department. However, I’m not aware of any AAUP document or report that defines academic freedom as including the collective right of departments to engage in extramural utterance. Thus, I think it’s worth pointing out that, contrary to the implications of John’s posting, Cary’s position does not betray AAUP standards.
John, in your discussion of the academic freedom implications of Cary’s concept, you express confusion as to how “bullying” might apply in such a circumstance, and consequently dismiss it as a useful consideration. Please allow me to enlighten you. Over the past 15 years I’ve tried to help a number of faculty who are in trouble. These include adjuncts and full-time NTTF, but mostly tenure track faculty who have been denied tenure or tenured faculty who have failed their post-tenure reviews and who are being positioned (or so they fear) for termination. Although each of these cases resist a simple narrative, at their core each involves bullying, or mobbing. I understand that academia is a “hierarchical industry” charged with self-governance, and so one person’s bullying might be another person’s idea of persuasion, but bullying is nonetheless a huge problem in academia that will only be exacerbated if politically motivated (and otherwise irrelevant) departmental statements, or open letters, are condoned as a legitimate expression of collective academic freedom.
I’ll give you a report from the front. Last fall I published an editorial in the Boulder, Colorado, newspaper defending the academic freedom rights of John Eastman, a CU faculty member who had published an essay in Newsweek arguing that Kamala Harris was not legally eligible to run for vice-president. An open letter, eventually signed by 786 faculty members, had been sent to the administration. This letter condemned Eastman, urged him to reconsider his employment at CU, and castigated the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure (which the administration pointed to as justification for not disciplining Eastman for his essay) as not only dated, but leading “directly to acts of segregation and eugenics.” I didn’t have much sympathy for Eastman’s political views, but when I read the newspaper coverage of the open letter, I wished that somebody would step forward and at least defend the AAUP. Unfortunately, I was (realistically) the only local who could. My editorial, which explained the AAUP concept of academic freedom, was noticed by you and posted (I’m grateful to say) on this blog: https://academeblog.org/2020/09/09/academic-freedom-under-siege-at-cu-boulder/
I know that many readers of my editorial (as well as at least one commenter to the blog post) considered the editorial to be hideous. However, I was pleased to receive several grateful responses from CU faculty, including this one:
“I just wanted to thank you for your piece in the Camera. It is a very welcome rejoinder to McCarthyite culture that’s really taken over the campus in recent months. Indeed, faculty governance and activism have become an ongoing exercise in censorship and condemnation, wrapped in ill-informed sanctimony,
and led by people who, in an increasingly mob-like fashion, challenge their colleagues to join in these exercises or risk being condemned in turn… I don’t see an end in sight and I fear that the actual interests of the faculty are being compromised and our credibility much eroded.”
The major distinction between this response and others I received is that this was written by a long-time full professor who holds an endowed chair, is no stranger to the rough-and-tumble of faculty governance, and whose employment was, realistically, never endangered for holding his ground against the threat of being “condemned in turn.” But if he might be targeted for bullying and mobbing, please consider the predicament of professors who have less fiber to withstand shaming, or of contingent faculty who have no real academic freedom protections. Can we assume, as you apparently have, that their signing of a politically charged department statement, or open letter, is a voluntary act that represents an expression of their individual and collective academic freedom?
As it happens, we know how many of these faculty might react to such pressures. At CU-Boulder they signed the open letter like a loyalty oath.
I don’t think the AAUP has ever taken up the issue of departmental academic freedom, so I didn’t accuse Nelson’s approach of violating any AAUP standards. I also don’t believe that the AAUP has ever addressed bullying, but I think it’s a broad and ill-defined term that should not be used for formal punishments in academia, as I have noted:
https://www.aaup.org/JAF10/danger-campus-bans-bullying#.YL_0U_lKhPY
I agree that academics should think more before signing open letters. But even if you are correct that open letters promote a climate of bullying, the solution is certainly not a ban on open letters. And the same logic applies to administrators banning or punishing departmental statements. If you think these statements are bad, you should persuade faculty not to make them rather than punishing them for doing so.
I agree with Cary Nelson that we have entered “a new and dangerous phase in the politicization of the academy.”
Steven Lubet has written an analysis of Nelson’s essay and my critique at The Dispatch: https://thedispatch.com/p/how-academic-freedom-can-be-used
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