Last week conservative activist David Horowitz, author of the Academic Bill of Rights, e-mailed me to report, in sorrow, that Penn State University had weakened “the only academic freedom provision… worthy of the name.” What the university had done was revise an 1987 statement stipulating that “it is not the function of a faculty member… to indoctrinate his/her students with ready made conclusions on controversial subjects.” That sentence disappeared, as did a warning against “introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of [the instructor’s] study.” The National Association of Scholars Web site declares that academic freedom at Penn Sate is “ruined.” The left had won again, and the university world remains a bastion of radical political forces.
Not so, according to a new book I received in the same week. “Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era” (edited by Edward J. Carvalho and David B. Downing) boasts a roster of prominent left-wing academics including Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Ward Churchill, Henry Giroux, Norman Finkelstein and Cary Nelson. In these pages the downcast and discouraged David Horowitz who wrote to me is presented as “powerful,” a “force,” a “bully,” “notorious,” “a perfect cynic,” “dangerous,” a purveyor of “McCarthian sensibilities” and all too successful. It is because of his efforts and the efforts of other right-wing groups (listed by John K. Wilson in an essay titled “Marketing McCarthyism”) that “higher education is increasingly abandoning its role as a democratic public sphere as it aligns itself with corporate powers and military values” (Giroux). Despite the tears shed by Horowitz and his allies for the plight of conservative students, “censorship in academia by conservatives” is, according to Wilson, “more common than censorship on the left.”
Both sides can’t be right, can they? Well, actually, they can.
The left is right to point to the withdrawal of state funds from public universities as precipitating “the neoliberal rush to privatize and vocationalize all facets of higher education,” a rush that has brought us “educational cuts, tighter budgets, increasing tuition and student debt, hiring freezes, the rise of contingent faculty and the erosion of secure academic employment” (Carvalho and Downing).
But the right is right to point out that the faculty who work within these ever-more-pinched spaces are predominantly liberal and have over the years created “new inter-disciplinary fields whose inspirations were ideological and closely linked to political activism” (Horowitz, “Reforming Our Universities”). (Of course, the fact that a course of study was born out of ideological/political concerns doesn’t mean that instruction in its materials is necessarily ideological and political; any subject matter, whatever its origin, can be taught from an appropriately academic perspective.)
Each side, then, has its points and some evidence to support them, but what is most interesting is that each looks backwards to the same idealized past and laments the loss of the same values and practices. Horowitz signs on (wistfully) to John Sexton’s description of the research university as a place “of rigorous and reasoned skepticism,” where norms “are not fixed or given, but are themselves subject to re-examination and revision” in a spirit of “critical reflection.”
Susan Searls Giroux, citing Zygmunt Bauman, inveighs against the “hurry-up-and-learn” consumerist mentality of the current academic scene, where “the language of development or maturation” of knowledge is replaced by knowledge as a commodity with a “ ‘use by’ ” date, and there is no time or patience for “the slow careful accumulation of knowledge tested and retested and improved when found wanting.” You could assign Searls Giroux’s statement to Horowitz and Horowitz’s to Searls Giroux, and nothing would change in their respective arguments.
What this means is that despite the point-counterpoint accusations of betrayal, corruption and anti-intellectualism (charges hurled by each party at the other), the left and the right are after the same thing, and it turns out to be just what Immanuel Kant urged in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1784) when he answered his title question by declaring that “enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” an immaturity marked by his reliance on the pre-packaged guidance of others as opposed to the exercise “of his own rational capacities.”
Mankind, says Kant, must constantly labor to “expand its knowledge… to rid itself of errors, and generally to increase its enlightenment.” No one in the Carvalho-Downing volume or on Horowitz’s side of the street would dissent.
Indeed, what is remarkable about reading the essays by the lefties Carvalho and Downing have assembled is how conventional (for me a good word) and, yes, conservative, the authors are both in their pronouncements and their performances.
Ward Churchill, the most notorious of them all, writes a lengthy essay free of political posturing. His concern is with due process, academic integrity and the freedom the University of Colorado Regents’ statement proclaims, the freedom “to discover, publish and teach truth as the faculty member sees it, subject to no control or authority save the control and authority of the rational methods by which truth is established.”
In his essay, Norman Finkelstein does not argue or reargue his case for the exploitation of the Holocaust by Elie Weisel and others Jews; rather, he discusses the question of academic style and the place in it (if there is one) of “uncivil” language, language that refuses the politeness of academic decorums and opts instead for calling a spade a spade.
Despite his brief for incivility Finkelstein does not condone license in academic performance, and even goes as far as to maintain that professors should be constrained in, and held accountable for, their extramural utterances lest they “degrade a position on which society has conferred prestige.”
You can hardly be more conservative than that, but Cornel West goes him one better when he declares, “I really don’t have trouble with military recruitment on campus… because I believe in robust uninhibited dialogue” (a reference to New York Times v. Sullivan ). And he warms my heart (and Kant’s, too) when he declines to measure the educational experience by “results and consequences,” even the consequence of “fundamentally changing the world,” but insists instead that “it has to be, in the end, an existential question of vocation.” “What kind of love do you want to express? What kind of service do you want to render? What kind of intellectual engagement do you want to enact?” These are hardly the questions of someone anyone should fear.
To be sure, there are some things to fear, but their names are not West or Chomsky or Horowitz. The forces – call them neoliberal, call them corporate capitalism, call them political indoctrination – that have in different ways turned the university away from the emancipatory project Kant called us to (and every one of these authors celebrates) are enemy enough. We don’t have to demonize each other.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/were-all-conservatives-now/
