Academic Freedom versus Free Speech (Re: What Chomsky wrote in self-defense

Nathan Newman nathan.newman at yale.edu
Wed Oct 28 20:51:34 PST 1998


-----Original Message----- From: Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>


>5. As for my past mentioned by Nathan:
>I did join others in calling for the firing of Vincent >Sarich...Well, I
became a Marxist, and I now consider my agreement >to call for his termination a big mistake...I lost a lot of sleep >over how I may have contributed to making Sarich a martyr, a >victim of poltical correctness, and ultimately a "heroic" defender >of the destruction of affirmative action...I learned my lesson in >the most terrible way and now verge towards the most absolutist >positions on free speech.

As someone who disagreed at the time with the calls for Sarich's termination, I still think you repudiate your own actions too much - especially in equating an attack on academic freedom with an attack on free speech. I was actually hoping you raised this issue to note the difference. I may have been more of a Marxist than you then and am now without question less of one (although my views may not have changed that much), but I am not sure that makes the difference in this case.

There may be tactical issues of provoking backlash and martyrdom in the disruptions of Sarich's class, but I think the right to disrupt speech is sometimes the best antidote to truly odious speech. It marks the speech as distinctively apart from speech that one disagrees with but is acceptable within democratic confines. The fact that one is willing to be arrested if need be for that disruption - and the state/university has the ability to do so - puts limits on how far such disruption goes, like any other kind of civil disobediance.

As for calling for termination, I disagreed with it but not on the same grounds as my more absolutist free speech views. Academic freedom is a benefit to the students and mucking around with it can lead to deep problems, and Sarich did not quite reach the level where that mucking around seemed justified (although taking him off required courses seemed reasonable to me).

Some more liberal friends attacked the disruption of Sarich's class but approved of the university trying to terminate him - a nice, clean "scholarly" way of disposing of the problem. Which points to why I am not absolutist on academic freedom. Somehow if Sarich has been "spotted" early and never given tenure, that would be okay by academic freedom but the result would be the same as if they had listened when you called for his termination. I fail to see a magic bright line between democracy and fascism at year seven of a career. Ideological control of faculty slots are exercised every day by fellow faculty and by university administrators (and ultimately by the Trustees and voters), so it is hardly an attack on democracy or free speech for students or others to raise counter-pressure on occasion.

Universities, especially public universities, are owned by the voters and are there to serve students. There are a limited number of academic slots and there is no reason that the selection should not reflect the values of the population to some extent. It is a testament to the health of a democracy when parents and students recognize that deviant, even extreme views are often an important part of that mix of ideas serving those students.

I generally don't fear fascist types in the university, since such hatred seems to breed quite well without any university connection. A fascist in the university probably serves liberal and left students by forcing them more carefully to craft the arguments against that kind of ideological hate. Conversely, I've always had the suspicion that leftists in the university do much more to train the rising business class in how to intelligently deflect socialist demands than they succeed in recruiting new intellectual traitors to their class.

For these reasons, I do see the anti-communist attacks against the universities in the 50s in a far different way from the proto-McCarthyism against the unions of the 40s. The first showed a majority culture sick with fear; the second was a fundamental attack on democratic rights, a betrayal of democracy that denied workers under Taft-Hartley the right to vote for union leaders purely because of their political beliefs. Taft-Hartley did not deny government subsidy to one set of views but actually obliterated that set of views as a political choice for workers in their unions - a quite different kind of repression.

Similarly, the criminalization of the profession of Holocaust denial is a dangerous oppression of free speech - far more threatening to freedom than the voices thereby suppressed. I understand the argument not to fund such a voice with ones tax dollars at a university, but to criminalize a voice of intolerant authoritarianism seems merely a hypocritical mirror of state repression.

--Nathan Newman



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