The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Journal of Free Speech Law: "Academic Freedom & the Politics of the University," by Joan Wallach Scott
A new article from the Daedalus (Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) Future of Free Speech Symposium.
The article is here; the Introduction:
The United States is in a difficult moment: what basic faith there was in the institutions of democracy has been eroded, constitutional protections have been undermined by the Supreme Court's radical right-wing majority, and reason is no barrier against the libidinal release enabled by former president Donald Trump. In the wild proliferation of paranoia, accusation, retribution, and hate speech that flourishes on the internet and translates into dangerous, sometimes lethal activism in "real life," education in general and the university in particular have been singled out for attack.
The attack on education is itself not new—right-wing think tanks and politicians have been at it for decades. But this moment seems somehow more dangerous, as Republican lawmakers and militant activists use their power to send censors directly into classrooms and libraries, promising conservative parents they will regain control of their children against the specter of "woke" indoctrination.
In one of those inversions of meaning so adroitly practiced by the right, censorship is being enacted in the name of free speech and/or academic freedom. The terms themselves seem to have lost their purchase: once weapons of the weak, they now have been seized as legal instruments by the powerful, who censor what they take to be unacceptable criticism—of state policy, of inequality, of injustice—in the name of freedom.
And, perhaps most hypocritical of all, the censors claim they are ridding the university of "politics." Heightened politicization, in the name of the purging of "politics," is the stunning result. The two are not the same. Politics (as I want to use the term) refers to contests about meaning and power in which outcomes are not predetermined; those who politicize—or, better, rely on partisanship—know in advance the outcomes they want to impose, the enemies they want to defeat. In theory, politics is at the heart of the free inquiry associated with democratic education, partisanship is its antithesis. In fact, the relationship between the two is never as simple as that opposition suggests.
The line between politics and partisanship has been difficult to maintain, if not impossible, as demonstrated by more than a century of cases investigated by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Critical scholarship that challenged the interests of businessmen and/or politicians, however rigorous and disciplined, inevitably met the (partisan) charge that it was unacceptably "political"; its proponents were often fired as a result. In the course of its long history, the AAUP has sought to strengthen the boundary between politics and partisanship with conceptual and practical tools: disciplinary certification of the "competence" of scholars; insistence on the objectivity or neutrality of "scientific" work; tenure; faculty governance; "responsibility"; and the designation of "extramural speech" as warranting the protection of academic freedom.
There is now a rich body of material (statements of principles, guides to good practice, reports) that serves to codify the meaning of that freedom, periodically updated in the Association's Red Book. It provides important ammunition for the struggle to protect democratic education from its censors, even as the need to constantly refine and update the protocols suggests the ongoing (seemingly eternal) nature of the struggle.
Despite changing historical contexts, the line between politics and partisanship has never been secured. That is because it constitutes a tension inherent in knowledge production that cannot be resolved either by legislation, administrative fiat, or academic punditry. Academic freedom mediates the tension, but does not resolve it because when knowledge production is critical of prevailing norms (whether in the sciences, social sciences, or humanities), it incurs the wrath of partisans of those norms, who seek to defend their integrity and their truth. The tension between politics and partisanship is the state (or the fate) of democratic higher education in America, a state of uncertainty (political theorist Claude Lefort associates uncertainty with democracy), that requires the kind of ongoing critical engagement—interpretative nuance, attention to complexity, philosophical reflection, openness to change—that ought to be the aim of any university education.
