Ruminations on Academic Freedom, Professorial Rant, and the Sublime Virtue of Putting a Sock in It
by Elizabeth J. Carter
Compare and contrast the following scenes from the Chicago Tribune and CNN.com:
March 26, 2003, in the rotunda of Low Library at Columbia University: professors have gathered at an anti-war teach-in to protest U.S. military involvement in Iraq. At some point during the 6-hour event, full-time assistant professor of anthropology, Nicholas DeGenova, reportedly tells those present that the American flag symbolizes imperialism, and that he would like to see “a million more Mogadishus”—a reference to the 1993 deaths of more than a dozen U.S. soldiers during a peacekeeping mission in Somalia. Columbia’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, immediately issues a press release condemning DeGenova’s comments but also defending his right to free speech. Despite calls for DeGenova’s termination, the university retains him as a member of its full-time faculty.
September 15, 2004, at the Loop campus of DePaul University in Chicago: part-time adjunct professor Thomas Klocek is on his way to get a cup of coffee. Passing through the site of a student-activity fair, he sees a booth for an organization called Students for Justice in Palestine. He stops, reviews a piece of the group’s literature, and queries: “Don’t you know there’s a Christian perspective too?” After some discussion of his views, Klocek allegedly puts his thumb to his chin and pushes it forward—a gesture the students find offensive. They complain to Klocek’s dean, who suspends him with pay for the semester.
The above-described incidents illustrate a very real problem in academe: the disparate rights of full- and part-time faculty to speak their minds, both in class and out. Many argue (and I agree with them) that part-time faculty should enjoy the same protections against arbitrary and retaliatory dismissal as their full-time colleagues. Lost in the debate over academic freedom, though, is the simple question: Do we really need to hear all this unfettered commentary, much of it bordering on Professorial Rant? Certainly, professors, whether full- or part-time, should have the right to speak freely about politics and culture and society and just about whatever they want. But does this mean they ought to? Aren’t there times when they—when all of us—should just recognize our self-important blather for what it is, and put a sock in it? As exasperated parents of small children are often forced to say: “Enough, already!”
To be sure, professors have always indulged themselves in public pronouncements on everything from politics and literature to the demerits of the two-button suit. Recall, for example, Harvard President Larry Summers’s January, 2005 remarks on the ostensibly innate differences between men’s and women’s mathematical and scientific abilities. Certainly, a love of speaking one’s mind is intrinsic to many academics (who are, after all, smart and therefore likely to be opinionated), as is the exercise of power. The difference today, though, is that professors seem to be doing mouthing off with more and more zeal and less regard for the consequences.
By consequences, I don’t mean professional. Rather, I mean social. You know, manners. Chewing with your mouth closed and not telling your students their political opinions are ugly and taking a moment to consider that what you say and do might affect other people, to understand the need to balance the benefit of airing your thoughts, however worthwhile they might be, against your motivation for doing so and the potential harm to students. The irony about political correctness has always been its enforcement of a courtesy that is characterized by euphemism—something that, to intelligent people, is profoundly insulting. But wouldn’t political correctness be unnecessary if people were willing to filter their own speech once in a while, to understand when they’re about to cross the line separating true intellectual discourse from self-serving pontification and then, yes, put a sock in it?
Although tenured faculty enjoy a level of job security and due process that most part-time faculty can only imagine, and although this inequality is by most reasonable lights lamentable, the interesting aspect of the above stories reported in the media, particularly over the last several months, is that they involve both part- and full-time faculty. In fact, it appears—at least from the anecdotal evidence that can be gathered from the pages of our nation’s newspapers, blogs, websites, and myriad repositories of bizarre and often repulsive information—that adjuncts are speaking out almost as often and enthusiastically as their tenured colleagues. In a way, this is heartening. It confirms my suspicion that adjuncts are more courageous, more iconoclastic, and more braced by the essential urge to inform. (They have to be, given how much more easily they can be fired.) In another way, though, it’s not heartening at all, because it also suggests that an increasing number of faculty suffer from a frightening inability to ask the frank but very necessary question: Do my students need to hear what I have to say? Does the world? Does anyone?
What exactly happens to students, anyway, when they find themselves confronted by Professorial Rant about the World Trade Center attacks and the war in Iraq and girls who can’t do math? The prevailing wisdom is that the harm of irrational and offensive speech may be successfully countered by rational and temperate speech. (“To courageous, self-reliant men…no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies…the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” (Justice Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 375-378 (1927)).
In the classroom, however, where professors wield the bulk of the available power, is the “more speech” remedy really tenable? If students don’t agree with professors, they often don’t feel free to say so. Students, after all, want good grades, recommendations for graduate school and respect. So when they start to hear the shrill sounds of Professorial Rant, they stay quiet, hide in the back row or maybe just decide Instant Messaging friends is a better use of their class time. And who can blame them?
This is the very quandary, in fact, that appears to have prompted political conservatives around the country to begin pushing onto their state governments various versions of a misguided piece of legislation known as the Academic Bill of Rights. The bill, which is supposed to reverse the ostensible scourge of liberal-democratic indoctrination on the impressionable Bambis of our nation’s campuses by mandating a more “balanced” treatment of academic subjects, might just be another form of political correctness. Certainly, our universities need a balanced representation of thought. But is this the way to achieve it? Would there even be an arguable need for political correctness and an Academic Bill of Rights if professors (and students) could simply recognize when their free speech has become more ill-mannered than stimulating? Maybe what we need is what Emily Post long ago recommended: good manners, otherwise defined as sensitivity to the feelings of others.
In the final analysis, perhaps the most disturbing part of the stories of Professors De Genova and Klocek is not that DeGenova kept his job and Klocek lost his. It’s that neither professor, in his overweening zeal to express himself, bothered to consider that it might have been better just to teach his classes and leave the social commentary for a Letter to the Editor or the pub buddies. After all, a nation of students awaits an education—not in how to rant, but how to think.
Enough, already!
