Shawn Graham
@kfitz well said!
Independence and Neutrality
Back in December, my university's top administrators announced an official position of "thoughtful restraint," attempting to stake out a commitment to institutional neutrality on contentious political issues by not making statements or taking sides. "As an educational institution, our goal is to serve as a forum for debates, not proponents within them," the website describing this non-position says, "with the highest value being the pursuit of truth."
Even as I understood the administration’s desire to avoid making a misstep on an issue that had already resulted in the downfall of several prominent university presidents, this statement bothered me. Is "the pursuit of truth" best served by turning the institution into "a forum for debates" — mere platform without judgment? And are all debates the same? I wondered whether there were issues — however “contentious” — on which the pursuit of truth would require the university to take a stand, to maintain its commitment to the fact that there are areas of settled knowledge in which the call to “debate” is always issued in bad faith. And though I didn’t quite have the words to say so at the time, I wondered whether the institution might find itself hoist on its own neutral petard, whether the university's self-protective position could wind up being the very thing that could do it in.
I've been reading Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth's It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom this weekend, though, and just ran across a passage, summarizing the impact of Felix Frankfurter's opinion in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), which tied the necessary freedoms of the university to its responsibility to remain neutral on the issues of the day. Bérubé and Ruth read this opinion through Adam Sitze's essay, "Academic Unfreedom, Unacademic Freedom," in which Sitze shows that Frankfurter's opinion derives in part from a misreading of an argument about the open universities in South Africa issued just before. The South African argument tied academic freedom to the universities’ independence from the state -- and in the South African context, independence was grounded in resistance to the apartheid regime.
Here’s Bérubé and Ruth’s concluding move in that discussion:
“Independence” and “neutrality” are not the same thing. In the South African context, neutrality would have meant acceding to academic apartheid. Once the backstory is supplied (and history returned to theory, as in the work of Charles Mills), the lesson then is that the university must remain independent from the government but cannot remain neutral. Faculty must make judgment calls on the university's behalf that take into consideration the historical and political circumstances in which their universities find themselves. (211)
Two months later, it is clear to me that “thoughtful restraint” will not only not protect the university from those who wish to do it harm, but will erode the very independence that the institution needs in order to survive right now: the ability to bring the faculty’s best judgment to bear in declaring that there are truths that cannot be ordered away. Our institutions cannot live out their most basic reason for being without a willingness to point out and reject outright lies, and without the ability to say that there are issues — like the basic humanity of each and every person on campus, and that they deserve respect, safety, and opportunity — that should never be up for debate.
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