Live from the Nuke Free Zone

Today’s linkery comes from Michael Bérubé, an instructor at Penn State University, who wrote late last month on the current state of academic freedom in the United States.

The obvious thing is this: the title of today’s presentation, “Recent Attacks on Academic Freedom: What’s Going On?” can be answered in a single sentence. Academic freedom is under attack for pretty much the same reasons that liberalism itself is under attack. American campuses tend to be somewhat left of center of the American mainstream, particularly with regard to cultural issues that have to do with gender roles and sexuality: the combination of a largely liberal, secular professoriat and a generally under-25 student body tends to give you a local population that, by and large, does not see gay marriage as a serious threat to the Republic. And after 9/11 - again, for obvious reasons - many forms of mainstream liberalism have been denounced as anti-American. There is, as you know, a cottage industry of popular right-wing books in which liberalism is equated with treason (that would be Ann Coulter), with mental disorders (Michael Savage), and with fascism (Jonah Goldberg). Coulter’s book also mounts a vigorous defense of Joe McCarthy, and Michelle Malkin has written a book defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. In that kind of climate, it should come as no surprise that we would be seeing attacks on one of the few remaining institutions in American life that is often - though not completely - dominated by liberals.

In one way, we have seen this kind of thing before. The American Association of University Professors was created, back in 1915, partly in response to the firing of professors who were deemed, at the time, to be insufficiently patriotic or dangerously pro-labor; more recently, even though the right wing claimed that political correctness was “the new McCarthyism” of the 1990s, and the left sees the current attacks as “the new new McCarthyism” of the 21st century, the truth is that abrogations of academic freedom in the McCarthy era were far more serious and far more widespread than anything we’ve seen over the past five years. So, in one way, it’s the same old same old: academic freedom has always been a tenuous thing, especially in wartime and cold wartime. Whenever liberalism is under attack, it’s a fair bet that academic freedom will be under attack too.

But in another sense this is an inadequate answer. Not all college professors are liberals, and attacks on academic freedom are dangerous partly because, in some instances, they can undermine the intellectual autonomy of conservative professors. And I don’t believe that this is the same old same old, either. What we’re seeing today is actually unprecedented, for two reasons. One is demographic: college professors have, in the aggregate, become more liberal over the past thirty-five years - though, as I’ll explain later on, most of the studies that have been done on this subject in the past three years are exercises in cooking the data. The other is strategic: for the first time in American history, there is an organized, national campaign to undermine academic freedom by appealing to the ideal of … academic freedom. And the reason it’s enjoyed such success in recent years is that so few people - faculty, students, and state legislators included - seem to have a good grasp of what academic freedom really means.

As far as blog posts go, this one is pretty lenghtly - it’s a transcript of a lecture (”complete with hyperlinks for extra bloggy pleasure”), after all. On the other hand, anyone even vaguely concerned about the state of academic liberties, no matter which side of the lectern or spectrum they’re on, should place this one on their reading list.