on the freedom to inquire
As I teach at a university that tends to attract the attention of the news media – and that has made the sort of institutional missteps in the face of the conflagration in Israel-Palestine that perhaps warrants such attention – I have been asked with some regularity over the past two months how things are going on our campus. I have generally replied, to put it plainly: not well.
Students with familial or other direct connections to the region have found themselves at the center of a firestorm of emotion, one that has swept up many others, too. Some students have simply not wanted to come to class. Others, still suffering from the aftereffects of a pandemic that disrupted their education at a crucial time, have found themselves unable to focus, whether or not they have a connection to the dreadful events unfolding within visceral – and frequently, in our technological and media environment, visual – awareness. Many at the university have found it difficult to find any way to say what we feel needs to be said, for fear of being misunderstood – and indeed, for fear of being targeted by outsiders, such as the organizers of so-called doxxing trucks that have patrolled the streets near campus.
As I will argue below, one reason that genuine conversation on campus has been stifled is that the distinction between political persuasion, with the brief time-scales on which it operates, and intellectual inquiry, with its characteristically slow and stuttering progress, has not been observed or maintained. But let me say something briefly about my own view of the conflict before turning to my main topic.
The attacks by Hamas terrorists on October 7th were heinous. The indiscriminate and brutal murder, torture, and rape of hundreds of civilians in the span of a few hours is such an enormity that it is nearly inconceivable, one that is compounded by the horror of hostage-taking whose soul-killing effects continue to unfold on thousands of others. Comparisons to the Shoah are apt because of the sheer indiscriminateness of this anti-Jewish violence, an evil calculated to damage the soul of anyone who learns about them, most importantly those who fear the same happening to them.
The nature and scale of these attacks have become clearer in the weeks since October 7th, and the pain they inflicted has been concentrated into a fury that has fueled atrocity after atrocity in the Israeli military operation in Gaza. Hamas knew perfectly well what the people of the Palestinian territories would suffer in response from the Israeli military, but the laws of war are meant to bind the hands of states who seek revenge on the innocent. Thousands of innocent people have died in Gaza, often through indiscriminate bombing — whole families destroyed, so many small children. A few days after Christmas, many Christians, including Palestinian Christians, will celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents, honoring the children slain by Herod in his fury after the birth of Christ. Today, Herod’s mask is worn by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Leaving history and policy aside, when I consider these events, I am left simply with something undeniable and unequivocal: moral protest. Innocent people, innocent children, are dying daily. What can we say but stop? What is it to have a conscience if not to say stop?
Despite this simple conviction, I have not participated in any of the protests or rallies on campus. As a teacher, expressing my views in a public forum always carries a risk of unduly chilling the classroom environment. (I feel hesitant even writing about these matters here.) Moreover, my speech would be purely civic and not academic, because I do not have any relevant expertise. Just as news journalists may have to refrain from certain kinds of political expression to maintain their professional standing, academics and teachers in general may have to do so, as well.
A major difficulty on our campus is that there has been precious little intellectual conversation about the underlying issues, apart from a few moderated forums with experts, where views of all sorts tend to be more nuanced than anyone who is passionately involved cares to hear. Still, when there are issues of pressing public concern, one function of a major research university is to help disseminate the expertise of its faculty. While we were leaders on the novel coronavirus pandemic, we have been largely ineffectual on Israel-Palestine.
There are many reasons for this failure. One is that administrators, on our campus as on most others, rushed to issue statements, even before it was clear what had happened, in the name of reassuring members of our community. This response was entirely predictable and also foolish. The Kalven Report, issued at the University of Chicago in 1967, wisely recommended that campus administrators fall silent on social and political issues, unless they bore directly on the nature or function of the university itself, so that the university could remain “the home and sponsor of critics”. But this lofty aspiration is at odds with the trend of universities, especially élite institutions, toward taking on an attitude of pastoral stewardship toward students, an attitude that the student movement of the 1960s attacked as unwarranted paternalism.
Another reason is that many academics, particularly in the humanities, take their work to be essentially political, in the sense that their scholarship is premised on specific social and political convictions and is designed to advance a specific social and political agenda.[1] I am not so naive as to think that scholarly endeavor could be wholly independent of politics. The topics we devote ourselves to studying are, of course, influenced by what we ourselves hold to be valuable. Especially where significant funding is needed to promote such inquiry, the allocation of scarce resources becomes a political question itself. Moreover, even attention is a scarce resource, so all scholarly activity has an incipiently political dimension. When we write about a topic, and especially when we teach it, we issue a social demand to others to consider it with due care. The demand may go unheeded, of course, but the core activities of academic life cannot simply be walled up from our shared life and its complexities.
Nevertheless, I am troubled by the idea that we cannot at least aspire to separate the promotion of specific political aims from our academic work itself. If the discovery of shared truth – and not the expression of individual sentiment – is our goal, then such truth may and likely will be found in unexpected places. To follow where the arguments lead may well involve changing our minds (as a downstream consequence of the inquiry) about what we consider valuable in human life and what political aims we take to be worthwhile. The search for truth demands listening carefully to the voices of those who might be politically opposed to us, but are part of the shared endeavor of academic inquiry.
More generally, the university as an institution is devoted to free inquiry, and every academic, whether in the natural and social sciences or in the humanities, should recognize that such inquiry is developed over and directed toward the long term, well beyond the ever-shortening horizons of politics. But this clash of time-scales, between the long horizons of truth-seeking and the urgency of political life, reflects a serious tension between two ways of thinking about academic freedom or freedom of inquiry.
American constitutional jurisprudence has tended to construe academic freedom as a sub-department of freedom of speech, an idea that took hold through Supreme Court decisions in cases like the Red Scare-era Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967). On this model, university members have a democratic right to research, teach, and study without external political interference.
By contrast, organizations such as the American Association of University Professors, formed in response to politically-motivated dismissals of academics in the early 20th century, have instead emphasized the professional dimension of academic freedom. The classic statement of this view came in the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.[2] Just as doctors and lawyers take the lead in regulating their own professions, setting standards and holding one another to account on the basis of their professional judgment, so too academics ought to be responsible for evaluating their colleagues, rather than, say, boards of trustees.
These two ways of thinking about academic freedom differ in many respects, e.g., in locating the rights at the institutional or the individual level and in the identity of the potentially hostile ‘other’ against which academic freedom is a bulwark – external political forces or internal meddlers.
I want to identify a different contrast in these views that we can, perhaps a little poetically, conceive in spatial terms. The view that academic freedom is a democratic right locates academic freedom in the public sphere. The view that academic freedom is instead a professional prerogative places it within the cloister of the university.
I am a firm partisan of the second view, that academic freedom is a professional prerogative, for the simple reason that it is unclear how academic freedom could be grounded in the egalitarian respect for political expression that freedom of speech and other First Amendment rights codify. No academic would tolerate giving an equal hearing to views they find nonsensical or poorly argued, whether from their colleagues or from students, but that is precisely what democratic governments must do. It is also peculiar to single out universities or university members as deserving of special protection of political rights, no matter how crucial universities are to a flourishing society. Finally, academic communities are typically global, but political rights are not (until a world state is formed, anyway!).
An unwelcome consequence of the framing of academic freedom as part of a democratic right of expression is that the important distinction between academic speech and extramural or civic speech tends to be effaced. It is true that we do not lose our political rights when we step onto campus, and it may be crucial for universities to commit themselves not to punishing students or faculty for otherwise-authorized political expression and desirable that they permit some forms of political expression on campus. But the demonstrations and rallies on our campus have encouraged an atmosphere where genuine inquiry – and even simply the dissemination of knowledge – has in fact been inhibited. Media coverage of these protests and scrutiny from outside organizations have magnified this problem.
What we need, more than ever, is the protective cloister of the university, whose first responsibility is not to an imagined public but to its members in their corporate intellectual activities of scholarship, teaching, and learning, activities which ought to be insulated from political exigency. Unfortunately, the leaders of our universities, even private ones, are less convinced than ever of the value of such essentially inward-facing activities.
The defense of these prerogatives will have to come from academics, not in our standing as citizens or as political actors, but as members of a guild whose value to society – through both scholarship and teaching – justifies our independence. We must, at the same time, resist the urge to reduce the value of what we do to that social value. Ultimately, a university, even a fully secular one, is rather like a monastery, a place set apart from the urgency of social and political life and devoted to pursuits whose value is only realized – and can only really be seen – in the long term, perhaps even sub specie aeternitatis.
[1] Tyler Austin Harper’s essay in The Atlantic this week explores some of the pressures, especially bureaucratic imperative, that have accelerated this tendency in recent years as well as the resulting costs.
[2] As the Statement of Principles recommends, I will note that I am not speaking in this essay on behalf of my institution.
Thanks for writing this, Dhananjay. It seems to me that one reason the two ideas of academic freedom (civic and professional) are so often conflated (or just jumbled?) is that both are taken to be individual rights: think of the way "faculty" is so often used as a synonym for "individual member of the faculty" rather than as a collective noun. And so your suggestion that we think in terms of spaces is both a way to restore our sense of "the faculty " as a collectivity *and* to explain why the two spaces, civic and academic, are constituted by different kinds of freedom. Very helpful, that!