BY JOHN K. WILSON
A conference on academic freedom be
ing held this weekend at Stanford has spurred controversy over its perceived conservative bias and closed format. A group of more than fifty Stanford academics signed “A Closed Conference on Academic Freedom is a Contradiction,” a statement denouncing the conference for its lack of public access. While academics are free to hold closed events on any subject, a useful option for people to discuss ideas in a small symposium of experts, the conference agreed to livestream the event in response to the outbreak of criticism. An update on the statement claimed that “live-streaming does not at all solve the main problem: there is still no mechanism whereby any of the speakers can be challenged in any significant manner,” but those who watch the event are still able to challenge the speakers via public discussion, as I plan on my CollegeFreedom blog.
The critical statement is simply that, a critique, and one that makes good points about the irony of a one-sided conference that complains about exclusion while excluding dissenting voices. While there is no explicit call for censorship, the statement does declare that “if Stanford is to hold true to its motto (‘The Winds of Freedom Blow’), it should emphatically dissociate itself from an event that has done everything possible to stifle those winds when it comes to academic freedom.” If the president denounces this one-sided event, doesn’t that create an obligation to make daily denunciations of every one-sided event on campus? Instead of condemning either side, the university should protect the freedom of both the event’s organizers and their critics.
Interestingly, the conference organizers have put together a statement about academic freedom signed by many of the speakers and over 600 other academics. The statement notes that “increasingly, centers and ‘accelerators’ are devoted to political and policy advocacy, advocacy of the supporting ideologies, and suppression of competing ideas.” It is odd that a call for academic freedom denounces “policy advocacy” as if it were something they want restricted. And despite claims of idea suppression, the statement offers no evidence that this actually ever happens. Furthermore, the statement is itself coming from a center, the “Classical Liberalism Initiative” at Stanford’s business school, which organized the political and policy advocacy of this academic freedom conference devoted to pushing its particular ideology.
Another dubious accusation made in the conference statement asserts that “university bureaucracies demand that certain authors be included, and others excluded from reading lists and classroom discussion,” again asserted without evidence. I am not aware of any university bureaucracy that has banned a book from classes, or one that has forced professors to assign certain authors. And while it is true that Republican legislators have recently banned books from academic curricula, that topic is completely absent from the conference statement.
The conference statement’s proposed solutions are similarly flawed, declaring that “we call for all universities, academic associations, journals, and national academies to adopt the ‘Chicago Trifecta,’ consisting of the Chicago Principles of free speech, the Kalven Report requirement for institutional neutrality on political and social matters, and the Shils report making academic contribution the sole basis for hiring and promotion.”
The Chicago Trifecta presents certain problems. The University of Chicago’s adoption of its 2014 Chicago Principles (which I critiqued) has actually added a restriction to its speech code by turning “defamation” into a newly punishable offense. Regarding the 1967 Kalven Report, the Stanford conference statement argues that “the university and its administrative subunits must abstain from taking position [sic] on the political issues of the day.” Far from promoting free expression, this is a policy that can be used to suppress it. “Administrative subunits” is a euphemism for saying that faculty departments should be banned by the central administration from expressing their views, which the University of Chicago has explicitly adopted. The Kalven Report, intended to stop top administrators from silencing professors, has been twisted into a tool for top administrators to order the silencing of faculty.
The conference statement further claims that if a department makes any public declaration, it is “effectively branding as heretics—and even bigots—members who may question those causes.” In a free university, people get to make statements and other people get to criticize them. We do not burn heretics, but we also do not silence groups to protect the hurt feelings of heretics.
The 1970 Shils Report has many good components, advocating how “the capacity or incapacity of a candidate to attract financial resources or to ‘bring them with him’ should not be a criterion for appointment.” I welcome the Stanford business school’s attack on academic capitalism and applaud their support for banning consideration of grant money in hiring and promotion. But the Shils Report has its own flaws, particularly its assertion that “disruptive activities” are sufficient reason for banishment. This quality is especially alarming because of the University of Chicago’s repressive definition of disruption, which “includes but is not limited to obstruction, impairment, or interference with University sponsored or authorized activities or facilities in a manner that is likely to or does deprive others of the benefit or enjoyment of the activity or facility.” The vague language of the definition theoretically allows the administration to punish anything as disruptive conduct, another statement that could be used to silence and diminish protests.
It is my opinion that rather than copying the provisions of the Chicago Trifecta, colleges and universities instead ought to develop their own policies and statements, utilizing resources such as the excellent AAUP statements and FIRE’s model policies for student conduct codes.
Universities need to protect the right to dissent, rather than banishing political statements they do not like. I hope the academic freedom conference at Stanford provokes more discussion and more conferences with more diverse viewpoints in the future.
John K. Wilson was a 2019-20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies and the forthcoming work The Attack on Academia.
The point of this contradictory and frequently attention misdirecting blog post is not clear to at least one reader. It seems more ideological than scholarly….
The point of this comment is not clear to me. What is contradictory about it? Why do you think calling something “ideological” is an insult or meaningful? The point of the post is: There’s an academic freedom conference happening, and the critics and advocates of it are sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
You can read my analysis of the conference talks at http://www.collegefreedom.org
I’m a professor at Chicago and have come to think our approach is infinitely better than what prevails at my alma mater, the University of California, with which I see you have some affiliation. Consider departmental statements: the UC System encourages them, and we prohibit them. This is because “faculty departments” are not bearers of academic freedom rights: individual scholars and students are. Departments should facilitate the widest possible freedom of inquiry for their members, not impose particular views on them or make corporate statements which by their nature discourage dissent. And whatever you might think of our definition of disruptive conduct, we have not silenced protests. In my field, at least, we have many, many more conversations about controversial issues than occur at, say, Berkeley. Should that not be the test?
The question is, do we encourage faculty dissent when administrators order faculty departments to shut up? I’m skeptical of this conclusion. Regarding disruptive conduct, I have questioned whether badly written speech codes matter that much unless they’re enforced. But I think they do present a danger, and the University of Chicago should have the best policies protecting speech, not merely hope that bad policies are not enforced. Finally, I think conversations are one measure of openness, but they’re incredibly difficult to measure. How does one know that Chicago has more controversial conversations than Berkeley?
I agree we at Chicago should have the best policies protecting speech, and also should be reflexive about how well we are doing, so looking at disruptive conduct policy is a good idea.
No statement of an individual faculty member or group of faculty should be taken down. But why should a DEPARTMENT–which is in fact the university entity that grants tenure, raises etc., and so most able to coerce its members into signing statements or keeping quiet– bear any academic freedom rights of its own?
Anyway–please send me an email if you might, so I can be in touch directly.
My goodness! Do you really think there is no proof of exclusión of dissenting voices or politically incorrect books from academia? You must live in another planet.