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Monday, June 19, 2006

Freedom’s just another word

Late last week I came across some trenchant criticism of the “flaws” in my essay on academic freedom, courtesy of Scott Talkington blogging at Winds of Change.  I responded briefly in that blog’s comments, as I am sometimes wont to do, but I kept thinking about one passage in particular:

Michael then addresses the testimony of National Association of Scholars President, Stephen Balch, to the Select Committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (Nov. 9, 2005):

More seriously, Balch is drawing on the history of affirmative action and employment discrimination law in order to argue that universities should make good faith efforts to hire people more to his ideological liking. This is a common theme in right-wing attacks on universities, especially among those critics who have become alarmed that affirmative action has gone too far, insofar as fully five percent of all doctorates are now awarded to black people.

The implication that racism is attributable exclusively to the conservative opposition is a meme so dear to the left that it inevitably proves irresistible. So perhaps we can excuse Michael for being “in the tank.” But I think Dr. Balch was employing irony to make the point that there are distinctly credible arguments against such notions as “multiculturalism” that have been effectively silenced within the academy due to the dominance of a contrived ideological formulation, insisting on the “inherent racism” of privileged cultures.

Now, I don’t quite know what Talkington means by “multiculturalism,” because he seems to have some very strange ideas about it: “Most people,” he writes earlier in the post, “believe ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ are simply synonyms for ‘variety,’ rather than products of the cultural remapping of Marxist ideology produced by the Frankfurt School.” And damn, I looked all through my copy of The Dialectic of Enlightenment for Adorno and Horkheimer’s work on diversity and multiculturalism, but I must be missing something.  (He’s right, though, that every professor who has ever criticized multiculturalism has been silenced.  Effectively!  Sometimes with actual silencers.)

But I do know what Talkington means when he says “the implication that racism is attributable exclusively to the conservative opposition is a meme so dear to the left that it inevitably proves irresistible.” I have a clue about what he means when he says “perhaps we can excuse Michael for being ‘in the tank.’” And I can smell what’s cooking when he follows these remarks with this tidbit:

S. M. Lipset, who with Everett Ladd produced one of the seminal studies of academic bias, The Divided Academy, once said that in the 1960s and ‘70s, when he and Ladd conducted their analysis, the ends of the competence spectrum were relatively immune to social pressure in hiring, tenure and promotion. That is, people of extremely high ability were hired and promoted irrespective of their ideological views or race, while those of manifestly low ability simply didn’t make the grade no matter how ideologically servile or white they were. But for the vast majority in the middle their “ability to fit in” was the primary determinant of hiring, tenure, and promotion.

In response, I wrote:

Well, thanks for excusing me. It’s awfully generous of you, if a bit smug and high-handed. But you really should acquaint yourself with more of Balch’s work before you attribute “irony” to his testimony. He and the NAS have been fulminating about so-called “racial preferences” and “quotas” for twenty years now, just as you do here—even though, as I point out, only 5 percent of all doctorates in the U.S. are awarded to African-Americans. Balch is quite serious about opposing affirmative action for women and minorities while proposing it for conservatives, though it is not clear just how we’re supposed to determine a job candidate’s conservatism in the course of the search. Likewise, Kenneth Lee’s remark about conservatives facing “clear practices of discrimination in American academia that are statistically even starker than previous blackballings by race” is meant quite seriously. That remark is pretty strong evidence that the right’s sense of victimization is real, as is their delusional sense that they have it worse than black folk ever did. Strange that you didn’t mention Lee’s statement here, in the course of suggesting that Balch was just kidding.

As for the state of academe before 1970, just keep in mind that white guys back then were competing with 44 percent of the population for jobs, and the jobs in higher education were plentiful. Professors back then were not uniformly people of “extremely high ability,” as Rutgers professor George Levine admitted when he wrote, “When I got my degree from the University of Minnesota [in the late 1950s], almost all my colleagues, no matter how dumb they were, got at least three job offers.”

The rest of Winds of Change’s comments thread is pretty low-grade stuff, full of complaints that poor Larry Summers has been driven out of academe and that poor Richard Herrnstein probably would’ve taken a lot of heat for his very scholarly book The Bell Curve, had he lived to see its publication.  But then Talkington, who styles himself the “Demosophist,” chimes back in, to chastise me a second time:

The idea that one might oppose racial and gender quotas without being a racist or a bigot is apparently something that, for want of a more neutral term, you don’t grasp. This, in itself, is a whisper of the sort of bias we’re talking about.

I was so enthralled by the phrase “for want of a more neutral term” that I adopted it myself:

This response is, for want of a more neutral term, intellectually dishonest.  I’ve written about affirmative action in the past, and my own criticisms of it are a matter of public record (and Nick Gillespie of Reason found those remarks to be fair and balanced, for what it’s worth, though most of his commenters didn’t understand why someone would discuss the history of affirmative action in a review essay on books about the history of affirmative action).  Plenty of people, including many liberals, oppose quotas.  But most sensible—and honest—people know what’s wrong with the claim that conservatives in academe now have it worse than African-Americans ever did.

As for your invocations of academic freedom “with obligations”—that is, with the obligation to hire more conservatives:  thank you for making my point for me.  Honestly, though, I think I did just fine on my own.

That last paragraph was a response to Talkington’s closing argument, which sounded something like this:

In summary, I can conceive of but three methods to correct the dysfunctions noted above: open or veiled quotas based on ideology that attempt to ensure ideological diversity; some abrogation or alteration of the common conception of “academic freedom” to include revocation of tenure; or some institutional arrangement that allows the creation of new departments or programs that can open career paths for competent people of more traditional classical liberal values. Or perhaps some combination.

Of course, anyone who is liberal, in the classical sense, will oppose quotas and will recognize the dangerous precedent they set. That leaves the latter two. It’s important to recognize that freedom must be balanced by obligation of some sort, and that this is less a matter of principle than necessity. If academia were populated by people wise enough to perceive this necessity themselves there’d be no problem. But since it apparently isn’t, we may need to open the door to markets by ending or attenuating the practice of tenure. I regard this as a loss, so perhaps we could try something else first?

We may need institutional arrangements that at least establish the conditions for a credible contest between the “multi-culti left” and the classically liberal or even theo-conservative right, in order to infuse a little wisdom into the self-satisfied academy. If academia wants relevance, this may be the price.

So there’s your conservative academic freedom in a wingnutshell: because academe is not populated by people wise enough to understand their obligation to undertake affirmative action programs for the classically liberal or even theo-conservative right, we need to consider “some abrogation or alteration of the common conception of ‘academic freedom’ to include revocation of tenure.” That will be the price of academe’s “relevance.” It’s good to know Talkington regards this as a loss: Nice university you have there.  Be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Now, why do I bother arguing with people who, as I say, are already making my point for me?  Because there are two important issues at stake.

The first is that the right-wing fulminating about “racial quotas” in academe is really quite weird when you come down to it.  Once again with emphasis, folks, when we talk about African-Americans in academe we are talking about five percent of all Ph.D.s.  Talkington, swinging and missing this point completely, writes, “the paucity of new black PhDs in the academy has been shown to be more closely related the paucity of black candidates in PhD programs, a fact that quotas or quota-like strategies probably won’t cure.” Yes, Scott (since we’re on a first-name basis here), I’m aware of the paucity of black candidates in Ph.D. programs.  That’s precisely why I think right-wing fulminations about “racial quotas” in this context are so bizarre.  My goodness gracious, it’s not as if the professoriate is being overrun by scholars of tint.  For the record, however, since the point has been missed twice already: the fact that conservatives whine about all the preferences given to black folk, and the fact that some conservatives believe they have it worse than black folk ever did, does not necessarily mean that those conservatives are racists.  It merely suggests that they might—just might—be overreacting a tad to that five-percent black presence in the professorial ranks, for reasons about which it would be irresponsible to speculate.

On a related note: Talkington refers in passing to “the sort of genuine discrimination that’s leveled at ‘ethnic traitors’ like Thomas Sowell or Jean R. Cobbs.” Again, I know I’m awfully slow on the uptake when it comes to right-wingers’ beliefs about liberals and black people, but I’ve just never understood the claim that liberals criticize black conservatives like Sowell because they’re “ethnic traitors.” The problem with Sowell is not that he deviates from some mythical party line; as most informed people are aware, many African-Americans are socially conservative on a wide range of issues.  Rather, the problem with Sowell is that he has become a third-rate hack, as I pointed out—politely!—in my treatment of his book (from that same Nation review). 

And for Ba’al’s sake!  Are liberals supposed to refrain from criticizing black conservatives because they’re black?  What in the world would that look like?  “Privately,” says one white liberal to another, “I think Shelby Steele’s latest book is the work of a crude, ranting ideologue.  But I’m not going to criticize him, because he’s black, you know.” Now there you’d have yourself a racial double standard, folks.  The fact that white liberals criticize black conservatives is evidence not of liberal duplicity but of simple, single-standard consistency.  We criticize conservatives of all genders and races and sexualities, especially when they slander us!  (Indeed, this humble blog criticizes crude, ranting ideologues of all kinds!)

OK, now for that second issue.  I’ve had my fun with poor old David Horowitz in the past, and I confess that in my dealings with matters Horowitzian, I have sometimes indulged my abiding love for Monty Python.  As Mark Bauerlein notes on Phi Beta Cons, “Berube is solidly to the Left, he slips into sarcasm too often, and he’s made several of the contributors here the object of criticism. But amidst all that there are some substantive points.” Now, that may sound a tad condescending to some of you, who might think it’s possible to be on the left, to employ sarcasm, and to criticize some of the Phi Beta Cons while making some substantive points, but I take it as a mark of grudging respect; it certainly beats being praised for the quality of one’s prose while having one’s essay drained of all its propositional content.  And clearly, there are more measured and credible critics of academe than Horowitz out there:  your Mark Bauerleins and your Erin O’Connors are vastly more civil and circumspect than the sclerotic Horowitz, who, as you probably know, has lately devoted himself to championing Ann Coulter as a “national treasure.” In a recent post, O’Connor writes,

I’m not a fan of mockery as a mode of analysis myself—like Timothy Burke, I dislike intemperate, snide, and snarky criticism, no matter what side of the debate it comes from. I also dislike how, in the current polarized climate, one person’s snark is another person’s temperate utterance. That this is so points both to how little communication is actually taking place in our debates about higher education and to the importance of free, unfettered debate. We might all be talking past one another much of the time, but that’s far better than one side trying to silence the other.

While it’s laudable that Professor O’Connor no longer has the enthusiasm for Horowitz that characterized her early work as a blogger (which I found stunning years ago when I first started reading blogs, though that’s no excuse for my losing my temper with her back in 2003), I have to say I just don’t understand her temperate, well-spoken, and civil complaint about the fact that the University of Louisville has created an Audre Lorde Chair in Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality.  Maybe I’m obtuse about such matters, but when O’Connor writes,

It seems safe enough to assume that the Audre Lorde chair is reserved for a black woman, even though that would hardly increase the “variety” evoked by the job description. One can only conjecture—but one can also conjecture with some degree of certainty—what the politics and even the sexuality of the new holder of the Audre Lorde chair will be. Audre Lorde, it’s worth remembering, described herself as a “Black lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” A dedicated activist, she was once described by Mario Cuomo as a woman whose “imagination is charged by a sharp sense of racial injustice and cruelty, of sexual prejudice.” It seems safe to assume that the ideal candidate for the Audre Lorde chair will likewise be a black lesbian feminist activist. I could be wrong. The Audre Lorde chair might end up going to a straight white male whose idea of activism is to recycle and take public transportation—but I doubt it. What’s more likely is that such men know they need not apply.

. . . I have two responses.  One, she’s got a point: I’m a white guy, and I’m fond of recycling and public transportation, and I’m not thinking of applying for this chair.  Two, so what?  I mean, how many Audre Lorde Chairs do there have to be in this country before conservatives start complaining about them?  Only one, apparently. 

O’Connor explains:

So what’s the issue here? I have no problem with Audre Lorde—in fact I quite admire her and possess a well-worn copy of The Cancer Journals. And I certainly have no problem with either women or minorities or gay people or activists holding jobs in the academy. What I do have a problem with is the manner in which being female, or non-white, or gay, or politically engaged, can function as a job qualification within academe. It’s not just that jobs such as the Audre Lorde chair seem to be reserved for academics with particular biologies and beliefs (how else could such a chair be honorably filled?), but that those biologies and beliefs are tacitly treated as part of an overall scholarly package. This is identity politics in action: the idea that professional excellence cannot be separated from personal characteristics, or even that it includes certain personal characteristics, is simply assumed in certain academic fields. I might be less annoyed by job descriptions such as this one if there were also, say, advertisements for the Christina Hoff Sommers Chair in Equity Feminism, or the Friedrich Hayek Chair in Liberty Studies. But there aren’t. This sort of thinly veiled demographic screening only runs one way in academe—even though political correctness is a myth and even though accusations of liberal bias in the academy are totally unfounded..

Well, some people might question whether Christina Hoff Sommers has achieved the kind of intellectual stature that merits a chair endowed in her name.  That Hayek guy, however, he’s in the clear. 

But can O’Connor be serious about this?  She would be less annoyed by an Audre Lorde Chair if there were ads for a Hayek Chair?  You know, at some point I don’t care how “temperate” someone claims to be: if that person is complaining about an Audre Lorde Chair on the grounds that there are no comparable positions in academe for scholars wanting to study Hayekian economics and social thought, they’re just not playing by the rules of argument recognized by knowledgeable, responsible people.  And quite apart from O’Connor’s violation of the protocols of serious argument here, there’s also the element of ingratitude—yes, ingratitude.  Ingratitude for all the hard work done by the John M. Olin Foundation over the past thirty years.  I mean, the good people at the Olin, a charitable nonprofit explicitly charged with spending the Olin inheritance within one generation, have been crazy busy creating endowed chairs, entire programs, and even a brand new libertarian discipline called “Law and Economics,” all for the benefit of conservative scholars, and do they get any thanks, I ask you?

Is the Pope a black lesbian activist?

Don’t get me wrong.  The day that someone creates a John M. Olin Chair in Law and Economics and writes the job description in such a way as to suggest that a black lesbian feminist activist would be the ideal candidate for the job, then I’ll begin to get the sense that the whole black lesbian feminist activist thing in academe has finally gone too far.  Let me know when that happens, and I’ll be sure to blog about it.

Posted by Michael on 06/19 at 12:12 PM
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Sunday, June 18, 2006

Father’s Day

It’s been a weekend full of camping out in the backyard and going to water parks and playing mini-golf and seeing Cars.  A very Jamie weekend, all in all.  And about Cars:  while it’s nice that Hollywood finally got around to acknowledging NASCAR culture, and finally, finally paid some respect to uncorrupted, small-town community values, I have to point out that early in the film, as Lightning McQueen is being trundled off to California, we briefly see a exit sign on the highway that reads “Wingnutville.” Yet another gratuitous liberal-elite swipe at Red America!  They just can’t help themselves, can they?  I bet there was even a subliminal crescent figure of some kind in the climactic scene, but I forget whether a section of an oval can count as a crescent.

Oh, and by the way, I told you that 285 would be good enough to win this Open.  I just didn’t imagine that there would be any Vandeveldean drama involved.

Posted by Michael on 06/18 at 07:52 PM
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Friday, June 16, 2006

ABF Friday:  Little Things

When you wake up in the morning and find that someone has left the basement refrigerator door wide open, and that there is no milk in the house, and that the dog has dug a huge hole under the front steps in search of chipmunks, even though her crazed chipmunk hunt is what gave her an eye infection in the first place, thus necessitating those four-times-a-day eyedrops . . .

that’s a good time to remember all the little things that make life worth living.  Like, for example, in the world of percussion, Joel Vincent’s poppin’ fresh work on the bass drum in Spiral Starecase’s 1969 hit, “(I Love You) More Today than Yesterday.” Otherwise unremarkable AM fare with nice full-out (though, as Janet notes, characterless) vocals on the choruses, but my goodness, that bass drum kicks it.  Or, for another example, Brian Doherty’s pair of stutter-steps on the snare in the middle of Freedy Johnston’s “Responsible.” Or the cowbell in Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.” Yes, the dang cowbell!  I’m not kidding.  I wouldn’t kid about a thing like that. Listen for the quarter note, quarter, quarter, pair of sixteenths.  You’ll thank me.

Or from another medium: Bill Murray replying, “Sure,” when, in Ed Wood, Baptist minister G. D. Spradlin asks him if he renounces Satan and all his works.  (Another movie with the best supporting cast ever!  Even better than True Romance!) Alan Rickman’s excruciating delivery of “By Grabthar’s hammer . . . what a savings” in Galaxy Quest.  (Yet another movie with the best supporting cast ever!) Kevin Kline trying to read his lines off the teleprompter in the final scene of Soap Dish (I think this film may just have the best supporting cast ever!) And, queen of them all, Lisa Kudrow explaining how she invented Post-It glue in the extended dream sequence of Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, a half-minute of thespian excellence so excellently excellent that it has been immortalized on YouTube.  Check out Kudrow’s subtle eye-flash and quarter-smile at “thermoset your resin,” as she begins to realize to her delight that she actually knows what she’s talking about—and that, consequently, she is about to blow the A Group away.

So, as I head off to repair the huge hole under the front steps, here’s this Friday’s Arbitrary but Fun exercise: what little things, in the long history of human expressive culture, make life worth living?  The catch is that they have to be little.  You can’t cheat and say, “Der Ring des Nibelungen always does it for me, personally” or “I find myself turning once again to the Chorus’s ‘Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man’ speech in Antigone” or “You know, I’ve always been fond of Joe Morello’s solo in ‘Castilian Drums.’” It has to be really, really minor, a mere grace note, like Philip Seymour Hoffman continually pushing his glasses up his nose in Owning Mahoney, which is widely recognized as the most minor film ever made.

Have a great weekend, folks.  Me, I’ve got some work to do and some milk to buy.

Posted by Michael on 06/16 at 09:56 AM
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Thursday, June 15, 2006

Singles

So it’s a very light blogging week around here, except maybe for that one 5000-word essay hogging all that space below.  It turns out that I have had precisely two unbroken days since the end of the semester in early May!  By “unbroken” I mean “not pockmarked with meetings, comprehensive exams, appointments with the vet, meetings, appointments with the orthodontist, meetings, conferences in Washington, appointments with attorneys, or meetings.” And this week Jamie has had not one but two half-days: yesterday, for the last day of school (yay!  Jamie moves on to the eighth grade!), and today at the Y, whose schedule is coordinated with other schools whose last day was today.  Well, you know I can’t very well sit around blogging while Jamie is building a giant mousetrap next to the stairs, or searching for his Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets computer game, or taking out every condiment in the refrigerator in order to make me a sandwich I most assuredly will not eat (even as I appreciate the thought!).  It’s been kind of like a weekend around here, in other words, and that means (among other things) playing a daunting memory game in which Jamie takes seventy or eighty of his wrestling men, stuffed animals, and assorted figurines out of the bins in his room, places them on the bed in groups of three or four, and asks me to introduce them all to Woody (from Toy Story).  The challenge lies in remembering all the names Jamie has given these creatures: you have to introduce the first three or four to Woody, then the next three or four together with the first three or four, then the next three or four together with the first six or eight, and so on.  And the names!  They include

Slurfy the Penguin
Steven O’Mallon
Ellie Allie Olive
Jaws of a Tiger
William Macacque
Mister Koosh-Duck
Adam Foote (a dog)
Robert Hayes
Lance Carter
Maurice Hanover (even though the figure is that of Marge Simpson)
Elvis Banks
Lauren Morrow
Obiwan Kenobi (a lemur)
Sam I Am the Duck
Lauren Morrow
Nick Hamilton
Glenn Close (a shark)
Brian Hunter (another dog)
Bob For Apples
Ramon Rinden
Tucker Martinez
Licorice the Camel
TV Woman Show
Jimbolay Habulay
Kevin Brown (a chihuahua)
Steve Irwin (a red-banded leaf monkey)
Cinnamon Allen
Alex Fernandez
Moonface
Crazy Wazy
Victor Pterodactyl
DeMarco Evans
Tom McCracken

as well as a whale named “Oakland Raiders” and two identical sharks named “Doug Balant” and “Doug Blount.”

So Nick, Jamie and I went to play some golf yesterday.  That went pretty well.  Jamie has a nice touch around the greens sometimes, and once hit a 20-footer; Nick drained two or three clutch six-footers while Jamie chattered in the background.  Today Jamie and I played mini-golf on the way to the Y, which reminded me that being part of the only twosome on a dilapidated little mini-golf course is one of the most forlorn “recreational” experiences known to humankind.  It also reminded me that there is a real golf tournament going on this weekend, and that I shot my 79 on Father’s Day last year and blew off the final round of the U.S. Open because I figured there was no way Retief Goosen was going to lose, since he’s just one of those guys like Hale Irwin or Curtis Strange or Andy North whose only majors are U.S. Opens, for reasons ill-understood by golfing science.  So I was wrong!  Goosen shot an 81 that day, and clearly needed tips from me on the whole breaking-80 thing.  This year I have a funny feeling about Ernie Els.  I also have a funny feeling that 285 will be good enough to win.  Not as bad as the 1974 Massacre at Winged Foot, mind you, but close.

I’m not golf blogging.  I’m just saying.

Anyway, enough about me and mine and the USGA.  Today I’d like to turn your attention to someone who does the exhausting single-parent drill as well as anyone, and who, in her spare time, basically invented feminist blogging back in 2000.  I’m talking, of course, about the lovely and very talented Lauren, formerly of Feministe, who has been invited to be a panelist at BlogHer.  However, it turns out that the invention of feminist blogging back in 2000 did not carry with it a million-dollar annuity, so Lauren could use your help getting there. Chris Clarke has created an Amazon account for her, and he even claims that he’s picking her up at the airport.  Then again, he also claims to have refrained from eating my halibut while I slammed tequila shots with Ward Churchill and arm-wrestled pole-dancers back in September, and that’s not true, because he definitely snuck a few forkfuls of fish while I wasn’t looking.  People have already donated enough to cover the airfare and such, but you know, there are incidentals, and Lauren definitely deserves an incidental or two.  So stop by, if you’d be so kind, and chip in for Lauren, feministe extraordinaire and inspiration to us all.

Posted by Michael on 06/15 at 01:31 PM
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Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Academic freedom again

This is the text of the speech I delivered on Saturday to the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors.  The bracketed portions of text represent material that I did not read aloud in the interests of time, or (in a couple of instances) references to earlier discussions of such matters on this blog.  Those of you who read my earlier essay on the subject will recognize a few paragraphs here and there; the opening and closing remarks are substantially the same as in the earlier essay, but the middle section of the talk is new.

_____________

In the past year I’ve come to realize that very few people know what academic freedom is, or why it matters.  Perhaps that’s not surprising at a time when all too few Americans know what the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is, or why it matters.  But what I’m going to argue today is not only that academic freedom is under attack, but that we are now dealing with a coordinated program of obfuscation about just what academic freedom means.

I’ll make the obvious argument first.  Academic freedom is under attack for pretty much the same reasons that liberalism itself is under attack.  American universities tend to be somewhat left of center of the American mainstream, particularly with regard to cultural issues that have to do with gender roles and sexuality: the combination of a largely liberal, secular professoriat and a generally under-25 student body tends to give you a campus population that, by and large, does not see gay marriage as a serious threat to the Republic.  And after 9/11—again, for obvious reasons—many forms of mainstream liberalism have been denounced as anti-American.  There is, as you know, a cottage industry of popular right-wing books in which liberalism is equated with treason (that would be Ann Coulter), with mental disorders (Michael Savage), and with fascism (Jonah Goldberg).  Coulter’s book also mounts a vigorous defense of Joe McCarthy, and Michelle Malkin has written a book defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two.  In that kind of climate, it should come as no surprise that we would be seeing attacks on one of the few remaining institutions in American life that is often—though not completely—dominated by liberals.

You’re already aware that we have in Pennsylvania a House Select Committee on Academic Freedom.  Its hearings over the past year have largely been uneventful; one of the Democrats on the committee has even described them as a “colossal waste of time.” But it’s worth noting that HR 177, which created the committee, actually stipulates

that if an individual makes an allegation against a faculty member claiming bias, the faculty member must be given at least 48 hours’ notice of the specifics of the allegation prior to the testimony being given and be given an opportunity to testify at the same hearing as the individual making the allegation. 

I think some people read that paragraph in July of last year, when it passed the Pennsylvania House, and imagined a dramatic scenario in which outraged conservative undergraduates would stand up and say “J’accuse!” at hapless liberal faculty members who’d had but 48 scant hours to get their act together and haul themselves before a board of inquiry.  Happily, things haven’t unfolded in quite that way.  There doesn’t really seem to be a flood of students complaining about their liberal professors; at Penn State, it turns out, we’ve had 13 complaints over the past five years, in a statewide system involving 8,000 professors and 80,000 students.  And those thirteen complaints don’t fit any clear pattern, either; as our local paper, the Centre Daily Times, reported on January 25 of this year, in one such complaint a Muslim student suggested that a professor was opposed to Islam; another student charged that a professor was too conservative. 

Pennsylvania is the only state to have passed one of these laws.  But thanks largely to the efforts of David Horowitz, bills like HR 177 have been introduced in about twenty states so far, and it’s clear that in many cases, the legislators sponsoring them are doing so in the name of preserving academic freedom—but without having any clear idea what academic freedom might be.  In Florida, for instance, State Rep. Dennis Baxley insisted, upon introducing a similar bill and successfully shepherding it through committe on an 8-2 party-line vote, that the legislation would help to combat “leftist totalitarianism” on the part of “dictator professors,” by allowing students to sue professors whenever they felt their beliefs were not being “respected.” At the University of Florida, the Independent Florida Alligator reported:

Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule”—for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class—would also be given the right to sue.

“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design [a creationist theory], and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue.

In January 2005, Ohio state senator Larry Mumper introduced a similar bill one of whose clauses was drawn directly from the AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure: “Faculty and instructors shall not infringe the academic freedom and quality of education of their students by persistently introducing controversial matter into the classroom or coursework that has no relation to their subject of study and that serves no legitimate pedagogical purpose.” But when Senator Mumper introduced Senate Bill 24 last year, he was asked by a Columbus Dispatch reporter what he would consider “controversial matter” that should be barred from the classroom.  “Religion and politics, those are the main things,” he replied. 

In recent months I’ve learned something of the back story on the legislative history of Pennsylvania’s HR 177, and I’ve discovered that the bill we now have is significantly different from the bill that was first proposed.  This spring, I was a guest on a conservative radio talk show hosted by Penn State students.  They wanted to know, among other things, just what was so bad about a House committee being convened with the purpose of making sure that universities are abiding by their stated grievance procedures for students who feel they have been discriminated against on political grounds.  I replied that while it’s perfectly legitimate for the state to ensure that universities have adequate grievance procedures for students, Rep. Gibson Armstrong’s proposal for such a committee said no such thing; on the contrary, the original bill called for the creation of a committee that would investigate everything from reading lists to hiring practices, and that would travel throughout the state holding fifteen to twenty hearings on liberal bias—hearings in which accused professors would have no opportunity to face their accusers (that bit about the “48 hours’ notice” was an especially late revision).  Furthermore, the original language of HR 177 sought to ensure that students would be graded on (among other things) their ability to defend their perspectives.  Now there’s a recipe for relativism—in which you have to give a student an A for his dogged insistence on citing the Book of Genesis in a class on evolutionary theory. 

Fortunately, between the first draft and the version that passed the House, the adults in Pennsylvania took over, and revised the charge of the committee so that its focus lay largely on the viability of universities’ internal grievance procedures.  But that was not what the hard-right culture warriors wanted; they wanted a much more wide-ranging and intrusive committee.  And in a weird way, the outcome of those revisions to the bill helped to confuse the public understanding of academic freedom still further—for, after all, here was a House committee investigating “academic freedom” by making sure that students had every opportunity to speak their minds.

***

THE PRINCIPLE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM stipulates that “teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties”; it insists that professors should have intellectual autonomy from legislatures, trustees, alumni, parents, and ecclesiastical authorities with regard to their teaching and research.  In this respect it is one of the legacies of the Enlightenment, which sought—successfully, in those nations most influenced by the Enlightenment—to free scientists and humanists from the dictates of church and state.  And it is precisely that autonomy from legislative and religious oversight that helped to fuel the extraordinary scientific and intellectual efflorescence in the West over the past two centuries; it has also served as one of the cornerstones of the free and open society, in contrast to societies in which certain forms of research will not be pursued if they displease the General Secretary or the Council of Clerics.  But today, the paradox of these legislative “academic bills of rights” is this: they claim to defend academic freedom precisely by promising to give the state direct oversight of course curricula, of departmental hiring practices, and of the intellectual direction of academic fields.  In other words, by violating the very principle they claim to defend.

Now, Horowitz claims that the Academic Bill of Rights does no such thing; he points out that it includes a great deal of language from the AAUP’s Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom, and he insists that it would forbid the hiring or firing of any faculty member on the basis of his or her political beliefs.  But that’s just what David Horowitz says for public consumption.  To his supporters and funders, by contrast, he says that his mission is to “get into the trenches with the radical left and battle them into submission.” That’s a real quote, from one of Horowitz’s fundraising letters, in which he claims that there are “thousands of Ward Churchills” teaching at American universities. [Veteran readers of his humble blog will surely remember my response to that particular Horowitz text in December of last year.] Well, you think, maybe Horowitz is just engaging in a little rhetorical excess here, a little hyperbole for the folks at home; really, all he wants is for university faculties to be more ideologically diverse.  You think wrong.  Here’s Horowitz in his 2000 book, The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits: “[y]ou cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political debate. You can only do it by following Lenin’s injunction: ‘In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent’s argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.’” (See Graham Larkin’s take on this passage in an April 2005 essay for Inside Higher Ed.)

There should be no question about this: David Horowitz was a member of the extremist fringe thirty years ago when he was hanging out with late-model Black Panther Party crackpots, and he’s a member of the extremist fringe now.  He’s merely exchanged fringes.  And he’s notoriously slipshod in everything he does, right down to his claim that on the eve of the 2004 election, a Penn State biology professor showed his class Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, compounded by his admission that he had no proof of this claim despite making it throughout the latter half of 2005, compounded still further that his claim that he was holding himself to “a higher standard of honesty” for dropping the original claim when he was challenged on it by Pennsylvania Democrat Lawrence Curry this past January. [About his questioning by Curry, Horowitz said to USA Today, “These underhanded, devious, malicious, dishonest tactics.  I gave 45 minutes of testimony, a half-hour of questions, and I never once mentioned the incident they’re referring to. . . .  Curry saved it to the very end of the hearings and rammed it to me.” Yes, you heard that right: it was underhanded, devious, malicious, and dishonest of Lawrence Curry to ask Horowitz about a claim he had not made at the hearing—but had made repeatedly for six months prior to the hearing.] So why are twenty states considering legislation written by this man, legislation that claims to defend academic freedom by placing professors directly under the control and oversight of the state?  Why does he have the ear of the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives?  Horowitz has managed to pull off this rhetorical and political feat by confusing the definition of academic freedom, construing it as a property of students rather than teachers.  Basically, he has managed to convince many Americans, including many American students, that “academic freedom” means, among other things, “freedom from liberal professors.”

You can find a neatly condensed form of this confusion in Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom handbook.  I have a copy of the handbook with me, and I hope all of you brought yours.  It’s a little red book of some kind, but I don’t rightly know what to call it.  Anyway, here’s Horowitz on page 19:

VI.  Frequently Asked Questions

1.  Question: Is there a conflict of interest in appealing to the legislature for help in the case of public universities, since the principles of academic freedom seek to protect the university from political interference?

Answer: There is no conflict.  The state legislatures and publicly appointed boards of trustees have a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayer-funded institutions and their tax-paying supporters.  Among them is the responsibility to insure that these institutions serve the whole community and not just a partisan political or philosophical faction.  If public universities become politically partisan they act to subvert the democratic process, which is not what their creators intended.  It is illegal under state patronage laws to use state-funded institutions for partisan purposes.  No one has the right to create a closed political fiefdom at public expense.  Such exclusionary practices are the very opposite of academic freedom.  Most importantly, there is a world of difference between asking the legislature to defend principles of academic freedom, intellectual diversity and student rights, and asking them to interfere with the universities’ proper academic functions.

I hope some of you are familiar with the game of three-card monte, because by the time you’ve gotten to that final sentence, the little red book has done a fine job of hiding the little red card: “academic freedom” has now become “academic freedom, intellectual diversity and student rights,” while professors who teach about the history of race in the United States in ways Horowitz does not like, to take but one example, have become “partisan” members of a “political fiefdom” that works to “subvert the democratic process.”

[A more elaborate version of this argument can be found in Mark Bauerlein’s testimony to the Georgia state legislature on Horowitz’s behalf, the full transcript of which is available at FrontPage.com.  Some of you may be familiar with the celebrated Chronicle of Higher Education essay in which Bauerlein argues, “we can’t open the university to conservative ideas and persons by outside command. That would poison the atmosphere and jeopardize the ideals of free inquiry.” But not all of you will be familiar with the fact that eight months before that essay was published, Bauerlein was saying something quite dramatically different:

In a democratic society, universities occupy a special place, namely, the place in which inquiry is to be unfettered by politics, money, and power. But in return comes an obligation for professors to safeguard the principles of free exchange. It’s a social contract: society grants faculty space protected from power politics and business models, and faculty members pledge to uphold the ideals that differentiate the campus from the rest of society.

Academic freedom doesn’t precede the contract, nor does it belong exclusively to the faculty. Every member in the campus community must honor academic freedom and be honored by it. It is just as easy for a professor to violate a student’s academic freedom as it is for an administrator to violate a professor’s academic freedom. For a professor to argue with a student over conservative opinion is altogether fitting and proper, so long as it is conducted with respect and decided on evidence. But for faculty to hire only Left-leaning faculty, teach only Left-leaning thinkers, and explore only Left-leaning opinions is to substitute advocacy for inquiry. For administrators to discourage conservative speakers, while paying radical Leftists five-figure fees, is to throw a mainstream aura around but one narrow range of belief.

The educational costs of such bigotry are obvious, and the ethical example it sets is deplorable. Such behaviors belong outside the campus, not inside, and there is no reason why outsiders should countenance universities that break the terms of the social contract. To be sure, academic Leftists will perceive outside pressure as an infringement of academic freedom. They think that the university is an independent enclave accountable only to itself, and that any incursions from beyond by definition threaten the integrity of higher education. But, in truth, outside pressure arises precisely in order to do the opposite. It is the faculty who have abandoned the ideal, who stifle dissent no matter how learned, who under the guise of a rearguard, adversarial, protest posture rule the campus intellectual world and apportion its many comforts and securities to a slim ideological spectrum.

This is what we must demonstrate to trustees, alumnae, politicians, and parents. Academic freedom isn’t the property of the faculty. It is the responsibility of campus dwellers, yes, but the property of all citizens.

Some people would criticize Bauerlein for lining up with Horowitz so thoroughly—for misconstruing “academic freedom” as a property of students and for telling legislators that universities “hire only Left-leaning faculty, teach only Left-leaning thinkers, and explore only Left-leaning opinions.” But not me! I support all forms of intellectual diversity, including a healthy diversity of intellectually honest and intellectually dishonest positions!]

This past year, some students at Penn State have picked up this idea as well, and have begun to defend their right to academic freedom in the face of stultifying professorial orthodoxy.  Under the banner of promoting “academic freedom,” the Young Americans for Freedom erected a cute little mockup of the Berlin Wall last November, to symbolize their oppression at the hands of their liberal professors. One student was quoted in the Penn State Daily Collegian as saying “communism was pretty much dead,” but at Penn State, “it’s still one of the most heavily taught subjects.” Another agreed that “there were many liberal courses at Penn State, especially in sociology, his minor.” Now, quite apart from the question of whether communism is heavily taught at Penn State, or whether it is synonymous with liberalism, perhaps it’s worth pointing out to conservative students (at Penn State and elsewhere) that the people of the Eastern bloc, the people on the other side of the Berlin Wall, suffered mightily and died in great numbers under Communist rule, from the forced collectivization of the farms through the show trials and purges, the jailing and exile of dissidents, the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, and the crackdown in Poland.  Surely, then, one liberal response to Penn State’s Berlin Wall is that such gestures actually trivialize the history to which they appeal.  For it is one thing to experience political oppression at the hands of Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev.  It is quite another thing to have a liberal sociology professor in a course you have chosen to take at a university you have chosen to attend.  I can’t imagine that Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa would be terribly impressed with Penn State’s Berlin Wall, or the bravery of those who built it.  Nor can I imagine that they would think much of a putatively “conservative” movement whose goal it is to place educational institutions directly under the control of the state.

And yet this kind of thinking is now taken for granted in some quarters of the right.  Last November, National Association of Scholars president Stephen Balch testified to the Pennsylvania House Committee on Academic Freedom that because of the number of faculty members at state-funded universities in Pennsylvania who identify with “a particular political group,” state legislatures should make sure that no “advocacy” exists.  I want to call attention to the evidentiary standard here: a preponderance of registered Democrats among the faculty, in and of itself, is grounds for state action. According to the National Association of Scholars transcript of Balch’s testimony, the state of Pennsylvania must pursue “intellectual diversity” in hiring—meaning, of course, a redress of the shortage of conservatives in academe.  The legislature, Balch argued,

should expect to see the problem of intellectual pluralism addressed with the same vigor that the state’s universities are already addressing what they take to be the problem of a lack of ethnic and gender diversity. . . .

The legislature must expect a full accounting of progress made toward these goals each time the state’s universities seek new statutory authority and renewed financial support.  If a good-faith effort is being made to overcome these problems, it should leave the remedial specifics to the universities’ own decision making.  If a good-faith effort isn’t made, it should urge governing boards to seek new leadership as a condition of full support.  Failing even in that, it might, as a last resort, consider a full-scale organizational overhaul, to design governance systems and institutional arrangements better able to meet the obligations that go with academic freedom.

“Full-scale organizational overhaul”: what can that mean?  I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound good.  And while I don’t want to say it sounds . . . Stalinist, exactly, I’m told that it was more elegant in the original Russian, when it had the secondary connotation of “let’s party like it’s 1929.”

More seriously, Balch is drawing on the history of affirmative action and employment discrimination law in order to argue that universities should make “good faith” efforts to hire people more to his ideological liking.  This is a common theme in right-wing attacks on universities, especially among those critics who have become alarmed that affirmative action has gone too far, insofar as fully five percent of all doctorates are now awarded to black people.  In 2002, attorney Kenneth Lee, a member of the far-right Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, made the case in so many words.  “The simple logic underlying much of contemporary civil-rights law,” said Lee, “applies equally to conservative Republicans, who appear to face clear practices of discrimination in American academia that are statistically even starker than previous blackballings by race.” Even starker than previous blackballings by race: according to Lee, conservative scholars have it worse than did African-Americans under segregation and Jim Crow.  Conservative is indeed the new black.  (This would mean, I imagine, that on some campuses there are fewer than zero conservatives.) It is a fantastic and deeply offensive claim in and of itself, but it becomes all the more offensive if you go back and look at the history of conservatives’ opposition to affirmative action programs in American higher education.

***

BUT WHERE ARE MY MANNERS? I’ve spent all this time on David Horowitz and the National Association of Scholars, and I haven’t even mentioned the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, even though its president, Anne D. Neal, has come all this way to be with us today.  Last month, ACTA published a report titled “How Many Ward Churchills?”, which consists largely of course descriptions adduced by ACTA as evidence that American universities are in fact infested by Ward Churchills.  As the report says, “it is important to explore just how widespread the Ward Churchill phenomenon” really is.  The first subheading, “Ward Churchill is Everywhere,” would seem to suggest, at least on one reading, that Ward Churchill is everywhere.

Now, I can’t say much about the courses ACTA flags, because I know no more about them than ACTA does.  All we have are the course descriptions, and it’s hard to say on the basis of those that the professors who designed the courses are really willing to blame the World Trade Center dead for the attacks of September 11. [Timothy Burke’s response to the report is characteristically painstaking and substantive, and his followup discussion is far more patient than the report or its defenders deserve.] But there is one course description I recognized when I read through the report:

Penn State University offers “American Masculinities,” which maps “how vexed ideas about maleness, manhood, and masculinity provided rough-riding presidents, High Modern novelists, Provincetown playwrights, queer regionalists, star-struck inverts, surly bohemians and others with a means to negotiate—and gender—the cultural and political turmoil that constituted modern American life.”

I happen to know who taught that course.  He is a brilliant young professor, and, thank goodness, he is nothing like Ward Churchill.  In fact, I don’t see anything objectionable about this course description, regardless of who taught the course.  On the contrary, I suggest that anyone who tries to claim that such a course has no place at an American university has no business commenting on American universities. 

By the way, since ACTA, Horowitz and company are fond of telling people that courses like this are not only evidence of the corruption of the university but also a disservice to students, perhaps it’s germane that the student evaluations of this course, and of this professor, have been off-the-charts spectacular.

[Since returning from Washington I’ve learned that ACTA blogger and University of Pennsylvania English professor Erin O’Connor is now congratulating Ms. Neal on the “civility” and on the “measured, searching, mutually respectful tone” with which she conducts correspondence with her critics, even as she continues to engage in the Horowitzian tactic of associating thousands of fine professors with Ward Churchill—including one anthropologist who committed the thoughtcrime of putting the word “race” in scare quotes.  Interestingly, a commenter by the name of Aretha Franklin, who rightly considers such attacks disrespectful of the work of good teachers, is having none of it.]

There are two more kinds of confusion behind the attacks on academic freedom, as well, and I’ll just touch on them briefly for now.

The first is that most critics of universities don’t seem to distinguish between unconscious liberal bias and conscious, articulate liberal convictions.  They take the language of “bias” from critiques of the so-called liberal media, where it is applied to outlets like the New York Times and CBS News that, in the view of movement conservatives, lend a leftish slant to the news both deliberately and unwittingly.  But the language of “bias” is not very well suited to the work of, say, a researcher who has spent decades investigating American drug policy or conflicts in the Middle East and who has come to conclusions that amount to more or less “liberal” critiques of current policies.  Such conclusions are not “bias”; rather, they are legitimate, well-founded beliefs, and of course they should be presented—ideally, along with legitimate competing beliefs—in college classrooms.  Now, notice that I said legitimate competing beliefs.  We have no obligation to debate whether the Holocaust happened.  And that’s not a hypothetical matter.  Late last fall, the philosopher with whom I co-founded the Penn State chapter of the AAUP, Claire Katz, informed me of a graduate teaching assistant in philosophy who had just had a very strange encounter with a student.  The course, which dealt with bioethics, had recently dealt with the vile history of experiments on unwitting and/or unwilling human subjects, from the Holocaust to Tuskegee, and the student wanted to know whether the “other side” would be presented as well.  I hope you’re asking yourselves, what other side?—because, of course, to all reasonable and responsible researchers in the field, there is no “other side”; there is no pro-human experimentation position that needs to be introduced into classroom discussion to counteract possible liberal “bias.” We are not in the business of inviting pro-Nazi spokesmen for Joseph Mengele to our classrooms.  More recently, I was asked by a member of the Penn State College Republicans whether I taught “both sides” in my graduate seminar on disability studies.  In response, I mentioned the debate over what’s called the ethics of selective abortion of fetuses with disabilities, and briefly sketched out four or five positions on the question.  My point, of course, was that just as it is a mistake to think that there are two sides to every question, it is also a mistake—and a pernicious one, encouraged by Horowitz, Balch, and company—to think that there are only two sides to every question.  But this is the language with which some of our students now enter the classroom; it is the language of cable news and mass-media simulacra of “debate.” There is one side, and then there is the other side.  That constitutes balance, and anything else is bias. 

A second confusion has to do with “accountability.” The argument goes like this, and I have heard it innumerable times in recent years, here at Penn State and at public universities across the country: We pay the bills for these proselytizing faculty liberals—we should have some say over what they teach and how they teach it.  Public universities should be accountable to the public. And you know, at first blush it sounds kind of reasonable.  The taxes of the people of Pennsylvania do go to support Penn State, and I take the mission of the public university very seriously.  From Virginia to Illinois to dear old State, I have spent my adult life at public universities, and I will be happy to explain my teaching and writing to any member of the public who wants to learn more about it.  But let’s look more closely at that funding, and at what forms of “accountability” are appropriate to an educational institution.  Only twenty years ago, forty-five percent of Penn State’s budget was provided by public funds; back then, in-state tuition was $2562.  Our level of state support is now down to 10 percent, and, not coincidentally, in-state tuition is $11,508.  So perhaps it’s worth pointing out that state support has declined as state demands for accountability have increased; or, to put this more dramatically, I sometimes find myself faced with people who say, in effect, “I pay ten percent of your salary, and that gives me the right to screen one hundred percent of your thoughts.”

Now, Penn State as an institution is accountable for that ten percent of its budget.  We should—and we do—make every effort to ensure that our funds are spent responsibly, and I think everyone who’s dealt with a university purchasing system will know what I’m talking about.  But that does not mean that legislators and taxpayers have the right, or the ability, to determine the direction of academic fields of research.  And I say this with all due respect to my fellow citizens: you have every right to know that your money is not being wasted.  But you do not have the right to suggest that the biology department should make room for promoters of Intelligent Design; or that the astronomy department should take stock of the fact that many people believe more in astrology than in cosmology; or that the history department should concentrate more on great leaders and less on broad social movements; or that the philosophy department should put more emphasis on deontological rather than on utilitarian conceptions of the social contract.  The people who teach these subjects in public universities actually do have expertise in their fields, an expertise they have accumulated throughout their lives.  And this is why we believe that decisions about academic affairs should be conducted by means of peer review rather than by plebescite.  It’s a difficult contradiction to grasp: on the one hand, professors at public universities should be accountable and accessible to the public; but on the other hand, they should determine the intellectual direction of their fields without regard to public opinion or political fashion.  This is precisely why academic freedom is so invaluable: it creates and sustains educational institutions that are independent of demographic variables.  Which is to say: from Maine to California, the content of a public university education should not depend on whether 60 percent of the population doubts evolution or whether 40 percent of the population of a state believes in angels—and, more to the point, the content of a university education should be independent of whatever political party is in power at any one moment in history.  Would I say this if Feingold Democrats were in power in every state house from sea to shining sea?  Absolutely.  Without a moment’s hesitation.  Legislative interference by Democrats would violate the principle of academic freedom just as surely as would interference by Republicans, though I suppose the interference would take a somewhat different form.  And don’t even get me started about those Greens.

To understand what’s at stake in this principle, we have to make an important distinction between substantive liberalism and procedural liberalism.  For one of the things at stake here is the very ideal of independent intellectual inquiry, the kind of inquiry whose outcomes cannot be known in advance and cannot be measured in terms of efficiency or productivity.  There is no mystery why some of our critics loathe liberal campuses: it is not simply that conservatives control all three branches of government and are striking out at the few areas of American cultural life they do not dominate.  That much is true, but it fails to capture the truly radical nature of these attacks on academe: for these are attacks not simply on the substance of liberalism (in the form of specific fiscal or social policies stemming from the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society) but on procedural liberalism itself, on the idea that no one political faction should control every facet of a society.  There is a sense, then, in which traditional conservatives are procedural liberals, as are liberals themselves; but members of the radical right, and the radical left, are not.  The radical right’s contempt for procedural liberalism, with its checks, balances, and guarantees that minority reports will be incorporated into the body politic, can be seen in recent defenses of the theory that the President has the power to set aside certain laws and provisions of the Constitution at will, and in the religious right’s increasingly venomous and hallucinatory attacks on a judicial branch most of whose members were in fact appointed by Republicans.  What animates the radical right, in other words, is not so much a specific liberal belief about stem-cell research here or gay civil unions there; on an abstract level, it’s not about any specific liberal issues at all.  Rather, it’s about the very existence of areas of political and intellectual independence that do not answer directly and favorably to the state.  So, for example (and this is my final example, chosen especially for you librarians out there), when in April 2005 Alabama state representative Gerald Allen proposed a bill that would have prevented Alabama’s public libraries from buying books by gay authors or involving gay characters, he wasn’t actually acting as a conservative.  Real “conservatives” don’t do that.  He was behaving like a member of the radical right.  Indeed, his original intent was to strip libraries of all such works, from Shakespeare to Alice Walker; and as he put it, “I don’t look at it as censorship.  I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children.” Thankfully, relatively few public officials see it as their job to protect the children of America from the heritage of Western culture. 

But some do, and that’s why academic freedom is so important.  It may not be written into the Bill of Rights—you know, the real one, the one in the Constitution.  It is far younger than the rights enumerated there, and more fragile.  But together with freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances, and the freedom of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, academic freedom is an aspect of procedural liberalism that is one of the cornerstones of a free society.  If you believe in the ideals of the open society and the intellectual legacies of the Enlightenment, you should believe in the ideal of professors’ intellectual independence from the state—and you should believe that it is an ideal worth defending.

Posted by Michael on 06/13 at 01:48 PM
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Monday, June 12, 2006

True things

I got in from Washington last night, and I’m happy to report that I still have the same number of children I had when I left on Friday.  Thanks to Nick for taking care of Jamie all weekend!  And also for taking care of Lucy the Dog, who needed (apart from her ordinary diurnal needs) twice-day pills and four-times-a-day eyedrops.  About the whole “keeping the house clean” thing, well, we will talk.  But not here!  Here’s not a good place.

As you may or may not know, I spent some of my time in D.C. giving a lunchtime talk at the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors.  The slot was noon to 1:15 on Saturday, so I prepared a version of this talk on academic freedom (which, as you may or may not know, I delivered at Penn State back in January).  Around 10 that morning, I went to case the joint: maybe it’s just my former-musician thing, but whenever I have a speaking gig, I like to check out the room and the acoustics beforehand.  In the course of doing so, I chatted for a few minutes with an AAUP staffer, who asked me whether I would be eating before I spoke.  No, I said, that always crosses me up.  I get up to the podium and I’m convinced that there’s a piece of chicken wedged in between my teeth, usually because there’s a piece of chicken wedged in between my teeth.  But then I realized that the talk wouldn’t start until people were mostly done with lunch.  My stars!  I’d prepared a 40-minute lecture. “Um,” I said, “about how long are these talks supposed to run?”

“Oh, about twenty minutes,” said the staffer.  “And maybe there will be some questions afterward.  But we have to stop promptly at 1:15.”

“Okay!” I said, gathering up my stuff.  “I’ll just be in my room . . . ah . . . working.”

I got it down to 25 minutes, I’m glad to say, and I’ll post the transcript tomorrow.  It’s revised from January’s talk, not only for length but also to acknowledge the fact that one of our luncheon guests was none other than the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

But I don’t have the energy to post it today, because of a Curious Coincidence that befell me last night.

After I was done putting Jamie to bed and cleaning up the house, I was exhausted.  I got ready for bed around 11, badly needing the seven and a half hours of sleep before I would have to start the morning ritual and get Jamie off to school, but I made two critical mistakes.  The first was that I checked in on this very blog, and found Saltydog, in comment 59 on this thread, saying

I think in time, we will look upon Walken’s so-called ‘performances’ as one big seamless and extended performance stretched over many decades. The same could be said for Hopper, who is kind of his spiritual twin.

Then, fifteen minutes later, I made my second mistake: I turned on the TV as I turned off the light on the nighttable, and discovered that True Romance had just started on a cable channel even more obscure than the Outdoor Living Network.

Now, True Romance happens to be one of my guilty pleasures.  Directed by Tony Scott and written by Quentin Tarantino, it’s basically (as I read it, ahem, ahem, this is a Theory by Me) a fantasy version of Tarantino’s own journey to fame and fortune, in which a geek who works in a comic-book store and watches Sonny Chiba movies gets caught up in a plot involving a call girl and a suitcase full of cocaine (Tarantino worked in a movie-rental joint, watched Sonny Chiba movies, and eventually sold the script of True Romance . . . you get the idea).  Christian Slater serves as Tarantino’s alter ego, chomping into cheeseburgers and immersing himself in Elvis and Japanese pop culture until he gets his big break in L.A.  Seriously:  when Clarence (Slater) tries to unload the coke on Hollywood producer Lee Donowitz (Saul Rubinek), he pitches it as a film, telling Donowitz via car phone that he’s giving him a shot at the release of Doctor Zhivago.  Later, as the final scene unfolds, Donowitz initially rejects the deal, believing (with reason) that $200,000 for a suitcase of uncut coke is a bargain so good that something must be wrong with it.  He pulls Clarence aside and challenges him to prove he’s on the level.  Clarence replies with a bullshit story about how a bad cop has been keeping the coke after a bust and needs to unload it, and that Clarence is getting rid of it cheap because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.  So how come the cop gave it to you, Donowitz asks, if you’re such an amateur?  “I bullshitted him,” replies Clarence, in a cheeky meta- moment that seals the deal.  The entire movie is meta- by that point, though, because Donowitz’s assistant, Elliott (Bronson Pinchot), a struggling actor, has been picked up by the feds and is wearing a wire in the hope of ratting on his boss.  “Your motivation,” he tells himself before his big scene, “is to stay out of jail.” “You’re an actor!” yell the feds as Elliott appears to crack on the pressure.  “Act, dammit!” And as the actors act, Clarence bullshits his way through the film, armed only with his wit and his inspirational meetings with Elvis (Val Kilmer) in the bathroom.

So I told myself, look.  One of your commenters has just named Hopper as Walken’s spiritual twin, and here at 11:30 you’re watching a movie that includes the positively dangeral “Sicilian scene” featuring the twins themselves.  The scene is kind of moving, in its way: once Clarence’s estranged father (Hopper) realizes that he will not survive this interview with the Mafia boss (Walken) who’s chasing the cocaine Slater inadvertently stole from his new wife (Patricia Arquette)’s former pimp (Gary Oldman), he decides to insult Walken in the most graphic possible manner, hoping that he will be killed quickly and spared hours of torture (his gambit pays off when Walken shoots him repeatedly, remarking that he hadn’t killed someone since 1984).  And so he dies rather than give the mob any information on his son, even though he hadn’t seen his son in three years before the previous morning.  You really have to see it.  And if you’ve already seen it, you have to see it again.  “I’ll just stay awake until that scene,” I said.  “Just for Walken and Hopper.  Then I’ll sleep, I promise.”

Yes, well.  Two hours later, as the movie ended and I finally closed my eyes for the night, I knew I had shot my Monday to hell.  And so I have.  But not before enjoying yet again one of the most awesome supporting casts ever assembled in one place: Walken and Hopper and Oldman and Pinchot and Rubinek, of course, but also a very entertaining Brad Pitt as a stoner and a kind of svelte James Gandolfini as a brutal thug.  Even Samuel L. Jackson appears for about ten seconds.  (I don’t know what to make of Arquette’s performance.  I wonder whether Tony Scott specifically asked her to be unconvincing, and if he did, she was most convincingly unconvincing.) I have to say I deplore the violence at the end of the film, however, and I fear that it might have a terrible effect on our children, by making them want to try to sell a suitcase full of cocaine to a Hollywood producer despite the fact that the producer’s assistant is wearing a wire for the feds and the Mafia has learned (from Brad Pitt) where the sale will be taking place, and by leading them to believe that they can escape to Mexico with $200,000 and the girl in the end even though three FBI men, four Mafia goons, and two of the producer’s bodyguards are shooting each other to death across a hotel suite.  I don’t think that’s the kind of message Hollywood should be sending our kids, which is why, when I think of wholesome family entertainment, I recommend True Lies instead.

Posted by Michael on 06/12 at 03:34 PM
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