RALEIGH – I never thought I’d offer an enthusiastic second to any comment by Stanley Fish, the well-known literary theorist, formerly of Duke University, who is now teaching humanities and law at Florida International University in Miami. Fish once famously said that his deconstructionist approach “relieves me of the obligation to be right … and demands only that I be interesting,” which is telling and derisory. But in the now-celebrated case of Kevin Barrett, fantasist and conspiracy kook at the University of Wisconsin, Fish offered a good definition and defense of academic freedom.
“There should be no limits at all as to what subjects can be subjected to academic analysis,” Fish told the Christian Science Monitor. “But you should be performing as an academic and not as a partisan or preacher or moral judge.”
In defending his right to include his twisted take on 9/11 – that the U.S. government planned and executed the attacks, toppling the Twin Towers with previously installed explosive charges – in his classroom instruction in Madison, Barrett has of course trumpeted his academic freedom. So far, University of Wisconsin administrators are backing him up on the same grounds, observing that his past student evaluations have been positive (not necessarily a good sign, actually) and that Barrett promises to teach his nuttiness as one theory among many, rather than as a singular truth.
The Barrett case is all over the blogosphere (Ask.com or Google you way around it, I don’t want to try to identify a single comprehensive link). A commonality in the debate is that so many people seem either to stretch or shrink the concept of academic freedom to fit their rhetorical usage.
While in this instance the critics tend to be conservatives and the defenders liberals, controversies in academic speech and freedom come in many flavors. In my experience, some of the strongest champions of academic freedom – and even of its cousin, tenure – are themselves conservatives and libertarians, who for good reasons feel outnumbered and threatened on modern campuses run amok with diversity-speak doyennes and Marxist bitter-enders. Whether Right or Left, such champions insist that the principle be interpreted as broadly as possible – not just protecting their freedom of inquiry and express in the classroom, but more broadly their freedom from administrative oversight when they act as public intellectuals or political activists.
As the Barrett case illustrates, sometimes this expansive view of academic freedom, for which I have long been sympathetic, intrudes into the realm of indulgent poppycock. As an academic, you have the right to speak and seek the truth. But as an academic, you also have the duty to teach your students, not proselytize, and the duty to conduct your scholarship with due regard for honesty, fairness, and standards of proof. Academic freedom surely means that government officials have no authority to keep you from speaking or publishing your views on campus. And it means that university administrators should not base hiring, firing, or promotion decisions on your political, philosophical, or theological views to the extent they do not interfere with your professional responsibilities.
But academic freedom cannot be construed as a shield protecting professors and instructors from professional evaluation and personal responsibility. For me, the test comes down to relevance. Personally, I have little patience with advocates of literal creationism, for example. If I were a college administrator and a literal creationist applied for a post as a professor of biology, I would be highly skeptical of the applicant’s credentials and ability to do the job. If, on the other hand, someone whom I knew to be a creationist applied for a job teaching Shakespeare or ballet, their failure to grasp basic scientific principles and findings would not concern me.
In Barrett’s case, his absurd conspiracies make him unqualified to teach students about the nature of the current conflict between civilization and the forces of Islamic totalitarianism. To teach a theory of U.S. culpability in the 9/11 attacks alongside theories based on reality is, like teaching Holocaust denial as a legitimate theory in European History class, to strike a blow against the search for truth. It is incompetence, not simply a “difference of opinion.” Universities should hire department heads and deans who can tell the difference.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.