MichaelBerube.com
Title
Le Blog Bérubé
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Academic freedom again
This is the text of the speech I delivered on Saturday to the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors. The bracketed portions of text represent material that I did not read aloud in the interests of time, or (in a couple of instances) references to earlier discussions of such matters on this blog. Those of you who read my earlier essay on the subject will recognize a few paragraphs here and there; the opening and closing remarks are substantially the same as in the earlier essay, but the middle section of the talk is new.
In the past year I’ve come to realize that very few people know what academic freedom is, or why it matters. Perhaps that’s not surprising at a time when all too few Americans know what the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is, or why it matters. But what I’m going to argue today is not only that academic freedom is under attack, but that we are now dealing with a coordinated program of obfuscation about just what academic freedom means.
I’ll make the obvious argument first. Academic freedom is under attack for pretty much the same reasons that liberalism itself is under attack. American universities 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 campus 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.
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- Nelson, Kurt
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