PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY, AND OTHER BOURGEOIS IMPEDIMENTA.

Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth ask New Republic readers, "Should academic freedom really protect those who make false and morally repellent claims? It’s time for a rethink."  Their essay is going to get into difficult terrain, as what they characterize as "false and morally repellent" might still be contested questions.  That's a familiar place for Cold Spring Shops readers.

Academic freedom does not mean academic license. Rather, it means academicians enjoy a great deal of latitude to investigate questions that interest them, subject to the constraints of the discourse practice in their discipline. At the risk of oversimplifying to finish this post in finite time, scholarly inquiry involves variations on the theme "Proposition P is valid under conditions C."

The problem Professors Bérubé and Ruth focus on is precisely the quest for the P and the C, although the line of inquiry bothers them. "Does academic freedom protect professors espousing white supremacist ideas?"  They understand an ancient American Association of University Professors statement as saying as much.

The American concept of academic freedom is distinctive insofar as it covers not only research and teaching but also “extramural utterances”—statements beyond research and teaching, including Twitter and podcasts. The idea is that no professor gives up their First Amendment rights as a citizen when they take an academic position.

That's true, although the spirit of the doctrine is protecting the right to investigate, and follow the evidence no matter where it leads. You don't use your status as a scholar in one field to claim authority in some other field, or to make unscientific claims.

AAUP has consistently held that faculty should not be fired for extramural speech unless that speech calls into question a professor’s fitness to serve. Ordinarily, that speech has to bear directly on the faculty member’s field of study. The idea is that a historian who is a Holocaust denier is obviously unfit, whereas an electrical engineer who is a Holocaust denier is just a crank. This position makes perfect sense, though few people realize that it entails the unsettling corollary that professors enjoy greater protection for extramural speech when they have no idea what they’re talking about than for speech within the areas of their research and teaching.

That's only a problem if the people who are spouting off about their ideological hobbyhorses are calling attention to their academic credentials as they do so.  That's academic malpractice, and it might be bad manners.

One might use the term "freedom of speech" loosely as in the liberty to pop off about anything, any time, anywhere. That's not the same thing as the liberty to address a governing body in order to influence a particular policy.

We have good manners to serve as a constraint on free speech in the first sense, or perhaps enlightened self-restraint. It's probably not smart to go into a Harley bar and pour beer over the riders and say good things about rice-burners. We have rules of order to serve as a constraint on free speech in the second sense. No matter how good it might feel to yell "Believe all victims" when the legislature is debating tax policy or the siting of an airport, that really isn't convincing anyone not already convinced, or is it germane to the question before the house.

It's precisely the use of expertise in a field that bothers the writers.

When [Portland State's Bruce] Gilley compares BLM “criminals” to the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, his First Amendment rights protect him. But that’s not the same thing as saying that his claims have the protection of academic freedom. He is not, after all, platforming as an ordinary citizen; he’s doing it, as he says in a tweet on June 16, 2020, “based on my knowledge of Mao’s politics.” This is critical. For here he is saying that his extramural commentary is manifestly an extension of what he considers his area of expertise—the history and politics of various regimes. He’s not staking his rights to this speech on the First Amendment, but on his claim to expertise as a scholar of political science.

Perhaps so, but that only strikes me as a big deal if Professor Gilley had gone on Tucker Carlson's show or the like, and even then, other comparative politics scholars could offer a compare-and-contrast on whether the summer of looted cities was the kind of revolutionary violence a Barrington Moore might seek to understand, and how that differs from state-sponsored public demonstrations a Communist dictator might organize.  The authors come close to that position.

But some ideas don’t deserve a hearing, and one of the primary roles of the university is to distinguish between those that do—and should continue to be explored and built upon—and those that should not be seriously entertained by any legitimate institution of higher education. Conflating free speech with academic freedom obscures this basic truth.

I suspect that the social causes of urban unrest fall into the universe of topics that "should continue to be explored," and that comparing and contrasting state-sanctioned unrest with emergent, if politically grounded unrest ought not be beyond serious entertainment.

On one side of the campus culture wars, we have people arguing from extremely tight priors and ruling some conditions C as out of bounds, perhaps with the best of intentions, but none-the-less, violating the rules of construction.  It does no more good to blame all sorts of ills on some -ism or -phobia than it did to lay them off on Original Sin.  Teach the controversies and consider other sets of C.

On the other side, we have people bringing in provocateurs simply to set the True Believers off.  That might demonstrate how tight the True Believers' priors are; it doesn't do much to open students' minds to the possibility that there are other C leading to the validity of P.

The authors' priors might be too tight to permit them to grant that possibility.  Their argument rests strongly on a premise of enduring, institutional white supremacy in the country and in the academy.  That's unfortunate, as the standard practices of scholarly inquiry are excellent tools at winkling those priors out.  Or perhaps we're seeing the consequences of high intellectual denials of coherent beliefs.

Universities are thus critical institutions in democratic countries because the work they perform—discriminating between opinion or propaganda on the one hand and reasoned argument on the other—inhibits the development of alternate realities rooted in power and special interests. Why, then, has it been so easy and tempting for everyone to treat academic freedom as a synonym for free speech? For two reasons, we suspect. One, “expertise,” some conception of which is integral to academic freedom, is in bad odor these days, for some good and some bad reasons. Two, the idea of “competence” pales next to the triumphant rhetoric of free speech—the idea that everyone has a right to speak their mind. According to [Yale Law's Robert] Post, while “it is not intelligible to believe that all ideas are equal,” Americans gravitate to free speech over the cognitive ideal embedded in academic freedom because “Americans are committed to the equality of persons,” and “the deep egalitarian dimension of the First Amendment resonates far more with this ethical value than with any cognitive ideal.”

Yes, if your experts suck, they ought be figures of fun.  And when competence is another social construction, and the intellectual stars have had sixty years or so to contend that constructions are arbitrary, does it come as any surprise that competence gets deconstructed?  "In practice, though, scholarly inquiry builds on previous inquiry, and there is at any time a box to be respected rather than mindlessly thought outside of.  Implicitly, there ought be limitations on what an academician is as a public intellectual."  That is, academic freedom comes with obligations.