ABUSE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM: WHAT SHOULD BE
DONE?
Kenneth H.W.
Hilborn
Presented at the SAFS Annual General
Meeting
(May, 2004),
in a symposium
entitled: Limits to Academic Freedom.
On
March 13, 2003, the University of Western Ontario's official newspaper,
Western News, published a letter from five members of our Department of
Political Science objecting to their Department's sponsorship of a
lecture by Daniel Pipes. They pointed out that Pipes was the co-founder
of a Web site set up (as they put it) "to monitor the free speech and
activities of scholars in North American universities who disagree with
him about issues of foreign policy in the Middle East." The authors of
the letter implied that this monitoring posed a threat to academic
freedom. Pipes' Web site, they argued, had a "chilling
effect on debate about Middle Eastern issues."
These
political science professors apparently believed that part of academic
freedom is the right to make statements without having other people
draw public attention to those statements and point out what may be
wrong with them, such as errors in fact or misinterpretation of
evidence. My own view is entirely different. If academic freedom is to
be protected, it is important that ideologues be prevented as much as
possible from abusing it in order to spread distortions or outright
disinformation intended to achieve some political purpose. Any
principle that is too often abused -- even academic freedom -- is
likely to fall into disrepute. As a means of deterring abuse, it may be
a very good thing if so-called watchdog organizations keep an eye on
what professors are up to, and get students to report on what they are
being told in class, or in assigned reading, or in comments on essays.
I have a photocopy of some pages from an essay that was submitted in a
political-science course at Western back in 1988 -- a course on
international relations. Since I was teaching a related course in
History, the student brought his essay to me after it had been marked,
and asked for my opinion. The comments on it were rather interesting.
The essay included a brief reference to Stalin as (in the student's
words) "one of the worst butchers and abusers of human rights in
history." In the margin I saw this criticism: "But one could cite equal
atrocities committed by right-wing regimes, e.g. Somosa" -- despite the
misspelling, an obvious reference to Somoza, a former dictator of
Nicaragua.
If you have an ideological agenda, and therefore want to get away with
making statements of that kind to students -- statements flatly
inconsistent with historical reality -- you naturally do not want your
students to report what you say, and thus subject you to critical
scrutiny. You do not want to be monitored, though clearly you deserve
to be.
It's worth noting, perhaps, that the instructor in that
international-relations course remained at Western, and was among the
five signatories of the letter objecting to Daniel Pipes and his Web
site for their supposedly "chilling effect" on academic freedom.
In my view, participants in a university course are not members of a
secret society under an obligation to keep to themselves whatever is
said behind closed doors. Academic freedom does not mean freedom to
misrepresent, to distort or to talk nonsense to students while enjoying
security against outside criticism. Faculty members should not feel
free to give students any version of the facts that those faculty
members are unable or unwilling to defend in a debate with people
better qualified than students are to detect errors, and if necessary
to expose falsehoods. Students may not only lack the knowledge to
challenge a professor's misrepresentations, even when those
misrepresentations arouse suspicion; students may also (not
unreasonably) fear the consequences of doing so, such as retaliation in
terms of grades. The imbalance of both knowledge and power between
students and the professor, especially when the professor's political
outlook is shared by his administrative superiors, makes outside
monitoring all the more valuable as a protection for truth -- a
safeguard against abuse of academic freedom in the interests of a
political agenda. The only real "chilling effect" will be on abuse, not
on academic freedom as properly understood -- that is, on the freedom
to disseminate ideas that you ARE willing to defend publicly and to
support with evidence.
I
know of two organizations (both of them American) with Web sites that
invite reports from students on what professors are saying -- one being
the Campus Watch associated with Daniel Pipes (www.Campus-Watch.org) which focuses on the Middle East, and the
other being Accuracy in Academia (www.academia.org). The latter organization is explicitly
conservative, and is concerned with exposing attempts at left-wing
political indoctrination in general.
More
complex issues arise when we turn to the question of whether there
can be any justifiable limits of the right of an academic to make
outrageous public statements, if those statements fall short of actual
illegality (such as incitement to commit murder). In cases of this
type, it seems reasonable to draw distinctions of at least three kinds.
First:
Was the individual speaking simply as a citizen, perhaps an
official in some political organization? Or was he speaking as an
academic, invoking his status as a faculty member at University X in
order to give weight and credibility to what he said? In the latter
case, by using the prestige of the university in this way, he was
exposing not merely himself but the institution to public disapproval;
and I think it can be plausibly argued that by damaging the
university's reputation, and perhaps causing it financial loss, the
academic in question would be giving the university valid grounds for
close official scrutiny of the statements he had made. What might
happen next would depend on the two additional distinctions on my list:
One
of these is the question whether the academic was speaking on a
subject within (or at least closely related to) his area
of recognized professional expertise, or whether he was
pontificating on something entirely unconnected with his academic field
-- like a physicist holding forth on policy towards Israel. The other
distinction that I would consider relevant is whether the academic was
merely expressing opinions based on value judgments, or whether he was
making statements that purported to deal with ascertainable, verifiable
fact. It would be one thing, for example, to say on a public platform
that President Bush was the most evil leader that the world has known
since the Roman Emperor Caligula -- a value judgment, albeit an
obviously silly one -- and something else altogether to say that Jews
did not go to work at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001; and
that they stayed away because the attack on the building was a
Jewish plot organized by the Israeli secret service in order to gain
more American support against Islamic resistance to Israeli oppression.
Outrageous
statements that purport to be factual pose a relatively
simple problem, or so it seems to me. If they relate to an academic's
field of professional expertise, they raise the question of
professional competence and/or professional integrity. A university
could reasonably demand that the academic provide credible evidence to
support his statements; and if no such evidence is forthcoming,
dismissal for cause would be appropriate. Academic freedom is not a
license to tell lies with impunity.
On the other hand, if the academic does have credible evidence to
support what the public (or much of the public) perceives to be an
outrageous statement, then the university has an obligation to stand
behind him and defend his freedom to speak -- his academic freedom --
even at the risk of adverse financial consequences. That was clearly
the obligation of the University of Western Ontario when Phil Rushton
aroused a lot of public displeasure some years ago.
The situation is somewhat different if the academic was speaking on a
subject unrelated to his own professional work. The question of
professional competence, narrowly defined, would not arise; but all
academic disciplines rest supposedly on respect for truth established
through evidence. Even when you venture outside your own field,
particularly when you still invoke your academic status to make your
statements more credible, you continue to have a responsibility to the
principle of seeking truth through use of evidence. Even if your
specialization lies in (let's say) astronomy, academic freedom does not
give you the right to defy evidence and make false statements with
impunity on, for example, the events of "9/11." The astronomer might
reasonably be warned that if he persisted in bringing discredit on the
university in such a way, he could expect his career to suffer adverse
consequences because of lack of confidence in his honesty and
reliability. In the circumstances, I think, adverse consequences
-- such as a low merit rating for so-called "service to the community"
-- would not be unjust; nor would a decision to deny tenure or
promotion.
Telling lies that are demonstrably inconsistent with the evidence is
obviously different from expressing mere opinions, even what most
intelligent people would consider silly or scandalous opinions. Even if
they are related to an academic's field of professional expertise,
outrageous opinions (unlike lies) do NOT provide proper grounds
for revoking tenure; but they may well call into question an
individual's judgment and intellectual maturity -- possibly even his
mental stability. And those qualities of an individual can reasonably
be taken into account in decisions on hiring, tenure, salary and
promotion.
Admittedly this is dangerous ground, because of the difficulty of
drawing clear distinctions between opinions that are truly outrageous
and those that are merely controversial. Let me give examples of what
might properly be placed in the former category. Somebody goes about
saying that all persons who have sex outside marriage are sinners who
deserve to die of AIDS, and therefore should not be treated for it
should they develop the disease; or that Hitler was a benefactor of
mankind because of what he did to the Jews; or that the more
Americans, Canadians, British, etc. who are killed by terrorists, the
better off the world will be. I believe that it would be unrealistic to
expect that any academic could gain notoriety for preaching ideas of
that kind and not suffer adverse consequences in his career; and I
would myself find it difficult to argue that those consequences
amounted to injustice. Most expressions of opinion ARE within an
academic's professional rights; I think where I'd be inclined to draw
the line is at expressions of approval or enthusiasm for the deaths of
large numbers of people not guilty of any capital crime, and not the
enemies of one's own country or an ally in war.
For example, though denial of the Holocaust would have to be treated as
an issue of fact, approval of the Holocaust (or of other policies of
mass murder) is an opinion that places a person holding it outside the
boundaries of legitimate controversy -- and therefore outside the
shield of academic freedom.
I'd be interested to know what other ideas there may be among those
present regarding what distinctions can be made, and where lines might
be drawn between the tolerable and the intolerable. I feel sure that
somewhere a line must be drawn, since it is scarcely an acceptable
situation if a university is able to do absolutely nothing to rein in
an individual who is bringing discredit on the institution -- and
possibly financial loss -- for no reason related to a quest for
truth or to rational discussion of public issues.
The danger that this kind of problem will arise is increased by the
ethnic and cultural diversity now so much valued in the academic
community. There is less cultural consensus among academics than there
used to be, and that may prove to be a source of trouble. I have read
that in the Arab world there are people who admire Hitler for his
anti-Semitism. Indeed, I once saw a report that one publication even
referred to "Adolf Hitler, of blessed memory." In that cultural
setting, applauding the Holocaust would not be considered outrageous;
but if such an attitude reared its head on a university faculty in
North America, it would create a first-class nightmare for the
institution that had to deal with it.
Cultural diversity of the sort that now exists may also get a
university into trouble on the ground that it is giving financial
support to activities that in some way promote terrorism. On Tuesday,
May 4 [2004] the Wall Street Journal ran a story about the complaints
that some major American universities were making against a new
condition that the Ford Foundation is attaching to its grants --
stating that the Foundation would withdraw funding if a university used
money from ANY source to promote "violence, terrorism, bigotry or the
destruction of any state."
What I find disturbing about that condition is use of the term
"bigotry," which is just about as vague as the word "hate." Canada
Customs once made a ruling that an audiotape of a speech I had given
constituted a prohibited import -- "hate propaganda" -- apparently
because I had spoken of the differences among racial groups in
performance on standardized tests (a matter that I dealt with in the
course of criticizing so-called "equity" policies designed to override
test results in the interests of group equality). If the term "hate"
can be stretched that far, so could "bigotry." Just how silly people
can be in interpreting the meaning of terms is apparent from what the
provost of the University of Chicago said in criticizing the Ford
Foundation policy -- he said the policy could rule out the allocation
of funds to any U.S. taxpayer, on the ground that the U.S. government
sometimes engages in the destruction of regimes! What the Ford policy
actually referred to was the destruction of any "state" -- and
obviously one can destroy a regime without destroying the state it
governs. The only state now targeted for destruction by any significant
force is, I believe, the State of Israel.
We are left with the question, however -- what should a university
do when a significant donor offers funding amounting to millions of
dollars on condition that the university deny financial backing to
activities that support such things as terrorism (for example, the
showing of a Palestinian film glorifying suicide bombers)? Does the
principle of academic freedom require the university to turn the money
down, or does it not?
Kenneth H.W. Hilborn,
is Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario in the Department of History, also a SAFS
member.
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