Academic Freedom versus Indoctrination?

A week or so ago (2006 July 23), the New York Times had an article (“Conspiracy Theories 101” by Stanley Fish) detailing a brouhaha surrounding Kevin Barrett. Mr. Barrett is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin who has gotten into hot water because he shared with his students his strong conviction that the World Trade Centers were destroyed not by Islamic terrorists but by the American government itself. Mr. Fish uses the occasion of Mr. Barrett’s controversy to expound the “correct” view of academic freedom, which Mr. Fish thinks both sides have gotten wrong in the Barrett debate. I think he misses the point.

Mr. Fish feels that “Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.” This seems reasonable but I think leads to a dull and dead-end academe. The obligation of an academic is to the truth, not to a policy of the University or a standard of the State or a tenet of the Faith. In essence, Mr. Fish says, “You can teach any controversial topic you like, as long as you take care to leach out of it anything that inspires passion.” Make the topic safe by making it boring — then no one will want to get worked up over it.

But there are things in the world that people should get worked up over. The civil rights movement is the example par excellence. The antiwar movement (Viet Nam era) is another. Heck, even the revolutions of the mid and late 19th century — which spread liberal democracy through West and Central Europe — stirred passion in the universities.

The academy is harmed — the cause of human freedom and intelligence is harmed — whenever we a priori restrict the lines of inquiry and instruction. Attempts to do so reveal, fundamentally, a failure to commit to the principles of the free marketplace of ideas. The proper response to ideas you cannot stand is to advocate the opposite — to proclaim (what you see to be) the correct ones. Using your authority (statutory, financial, or even moral) to cut off the inquiry or the debate is simply wrong.

There is a different issue, which Mr. Fish touches only obliquely. The students in a course must have assurances that their performance will never be tied to the alignment of their views with the professor’s. This is an exceedingly hard line to walk; but then again, education done correctly is never easy. The professor must constantly evaluate himself/herself and make sure that bias is not seeping into the coursework. The University must likewise be vigilant — and it must provide clear, effective mechanisms for students to raise concerns and have them handled. And of course, there’s a responsibility to address the actual curriculum of the course. A student should have a greater expectation of hearing the professor’s opinion on the World Trade Centers in a course called “Islam: Religion and Culture” (assuming such includes 21st century Islam and the role of fundamentalism in the religion today) than in “Advanced Techniques in Telescope Design”.

Now, in my personal opinion, there still is not enough distance from 9/11 for it to be a casual focus of discussion. Mr. Barrett probably should have kept his views to himself. (To be fair to him, the things I’ve read have been woefully unclear as to how extensively or how emphatically he raised the subject.) But that’s the sort of call any educator must make for himself/herself. The many forces arrayed against him, now calling for his head, are at best misguided and, in the long term, are chilling and dangerous.

Despite what Mr. Fish believes, the principle of academic freedom is related to the liberal democratic ideal of free expression. They spring from the same ground and they serve very similar purposes: In a free society, no authority can be ceded sole possession of “the Truth”. Everyone must be free to hold — and to expound — unpopular, controversial, or even repellent ideas. Only then can our grasp of the actual Truth be firm; only then can anyone be free.