If a discussion of freedom of speech and academic freedom is to be clarifying rather than polemical, it is important to begin with definitions. Let’s start with academic freedom, a phrase that invites confusion because so many who invoke it rush right by the limiting and controlling adjective “academic” and attach themselves too quickly and too piously to the word “freedom.” I would prefer something like “the latitude necessary for the performance of the academic task” (to be sure, no one is going to repeat that mouthful) because it answers a question many never ask: Freedom to do what? The answer is simple once you think about it: Academic freedom is the freedom to engage in academic inquiry, a form of inquiry that does not have its path delineated at the outset. An academic inquirer wants to figure out the truth about a disputed or obscure matter in the humanities, the social sciences, the physical sciences, or the mathematical/computer sciences. Given that the sought-for truth is not known, no route to it should be canonized in advance and no possible route to it should be ruled out in advance. Follow the evidence—itself often disputed—and see where it leads or whether it leads anywhere. Putting it that way alerts us to the oddness of academic freedom and explains why we don’t hear anything about dentist freedom or dermatologist freedom or car-salesman freedom. Workers in those (and many other) practices understand themselves to be adhering to pre-formulated protocols, rules, and routines on the way to achieving a specified end—the fixing of a tooth, the sale of a car—agreed on by both the deliverer of the service and those who receive it. Their labors are not completely scripted, but they are largely scripted, whereas academic labor is largely unscripted. You don’t know where it’s going to go, and you don’t know whether the problem that impels it will ever be solved.
In a way, then, the freedom academics enjoy is not their own; it belongs to the practice of which they are members. As an academic you can’t exceed what the course of inquiry gives you; you can’t make leaps just because you want to. Your freedom—if that is the word, and it really shouldn’t be—is severely limited. It is, in fact, a constraint. If you call yourself an academic, you have to allow conclusions to be forced on you rather than chosen by your preferences. You might want things to come out a certain way because of your politics or your career ambitions, but you must put those aside; you are not free to factor them in. And if the instructor’s personal views and political hopes are irrelevant to academic inquiry and must be kept out of it, that irrelevance is doubled and tripled when it comes to the views of outsiders—governors, legislators, clergymen, donors, corporations, parents. These outsider views can of course be published in op-eds or proclaimed on the floor of Congress or enacted into laws, but when such efforts successfully encroach on academic agency, they are illegitimate and should always be resisted.
Some encroachments come from outside. “Parental rights,” a topic much in the news these days, deserves an essay of its own, but let me say briefly that in the context of higher education there are no such things as parental rights, just as there are no parental rights when your child is having a tooth pulled. You can of course remove your child from the dentist’s chair or the classroom and go elsewhere for service—that’s where your rights begin and end. But once you have chosen a provider, you can’t step in and substitute your skills, insofar as you have any, for the skills of the professional.
Encroachments on academic agency by non-academic speech can also come from the inside, by students. It might seem that students have an investment in the process of education—they, after all, are its object—that would legitimize their active participation in classroom planning, the selection of materials, and the choice of pedagogical methods. But this would also amount to taking the drill from the dentist’s hand and giving it to the patient. Students are not the educators; they are, at least it is hoped, the educated. Instructors may, if they choose, invite students to suggest topics or take charge of part of the curriculum or assess the progress of the class so far, but that is a teacherly strategy and should not be mistaken for granting the students independence and agency. In the end, what students say or don’t say is a matter to be decided entirely by the instructor. Students, like outsiders who would hijack the enterprise if given a chance, have no right to have their speech taken seriously by those in charge of the enterprise.
You may have noticed that the effect of my strictures is to eliminate freedom of speech as a feature of the academic landscape. Instructors don’t have it because they are authorized to speak only about the assigned materials and are enjoined (by the nature of the discipline) from viewing those materials through an ideological lens. Students don’t have it because they can only speak in response to the instructor’s promptings (which should be rigorously academic) and don’t have a license to say whatever comes into their heads. Parents, donors, business leaders, politicians, and clergymen don’t have it because what goes on in the classroom and the laboratory is, quite literally, none of their business. And administrators don’t have it because they can only pronounce legitimately on issues directly related to the flourishing of the institutions they lead; they should not present themselves as repositories of a general wisdom capable of commenting on everything under the sun. Since that would seem to cover the territory—no one seriously suggests that staff and maintenance workers and campus police have academic freedom rights—it seems correct, although perhaps counterintuitive, to say that freedom of speech is not an academic value. The reason is implicit in the distinction offered earlier between freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. Freedom of speech is a democratic value that mandates universal participation in the making of laws; it is an offshoot of the broader value of the formal equality of citizens; when matters of public concern are being debated, each of us has an equal right to be heard. Indeed, the more voices the better. By and large, there are no threshold requirements for entry into the democratic conversation. It is quite different in the academy, where you have a voice only if you have been vetted by hiring committees, promotion committees, the editors of learned journals, and the like. Much of the academy’s machinery is devoted to determining who will not get a chance to speak. The ratio of those who gain the podium in relation to those who seek it is small. And this is as it should be. If determining the truth is the goal of the activity, you want those who participate in it—both on the teaching and research end—to be credentialed and tested; you want participants who know what they’re talking about, not participants who just want to talk. That, of course, is not democracy in action; it’s more like Darwinism in action, where the winnowing out of aspirants leaves many by the wayside and confers legitimacy, and a voice, only on a few.
So this is the argument:
1. Academic freedom is the freedom necessary for the doing of the academic job.
2. The academic job is the pursuit of truth in the various disciplines.
3. That pursuit—free inquiry—requires that there be no impediments to its unpredictable course.
4. Scholars and teachers are free to go with the flow of inquiry and resist the pressures exerted by external constituencies and by their own preferences.
5. Scholars and teachers are not free in any other sense; they are bound by the protocols of their disciplines, and what they say must be in the service of disciplinary inquiry and of nothing else.
6. Administrators are likewise bound by the responsibilities attendant on their offices.
7. None of the participants in the process of inquiry has free speech rights; the only right they have is the right to do their job and do it freely, without interference from alien precincts.
8. Any other freedom they claim is in excess of both their obligations and their competencies.
9. Freedom of speech is not an academic value.
Had they internalized these straightforward precepts, the presidents of Harvard, Pennsylvania, M.I.T., and Columbia would not have been stymied when asked by legislators whether student protests possibly tinged with anti-Semitism should be allowed on their campuses. Indeed, they wouldn’t even have been called to testify because they would have already asked themselves a simple question: “Is there a right to engage in political protest on campus?” The answer is no. Political protest is a right guaranteed by the free assembly clause of the First Amendment to citizens who oppose their government’s actions. It is no part of a college or university’s responsibility to encourage or sponsor such protests because it is no part of a college or university’s responsibility to react to the actions of a government at all unless they directly affect academic operations. Consequently, there is no obligation to house a form of activity that is foreign to the university’s mission. Moreover, despite the heated rhetoric at the congressional hearings, anti-Semitism is beside the point. Any activity whose content is political, no matter what the content happens to be, does not merit the protection of academic freedom because it is not academic. Administrators may decide to allow it in demarcated spaces if they so choose, but they are not required by the Constitution or anything else to do so, and prudence suggests that they shouldn’t.
Notice how easily a supposedly difficult issue is disposed of once the appropriate definitions and distinctions are in place. Other difficult issues self-clarify just as easily. Right now there’s a big argument about whether “critical race theory” should be taught in schools. Again a definition is useful. John O. Calmore writes that “Critical Race Theory begins with a recognition that ‘race’ is not a fixed term” and is instead “a fluctuating, decentered complex of social meanings that are formed and transformed under the constant pressures of political struggle.”
“Critical Race Theorists,” according to Richard Delgado, “articulate concerns that may have been ignored or marginalized by the dominant discourse; problematize concepts that seem otherwise immune from scrutiny; and suggest resolutions that are frequently at odds with the prevailing demands of convention or fashion.” Together these two brief statements suggest a research program or several research programs. What are the different definitions of race that have been deployed? In what ways have racial categories—including “Irish,” “Italian,” and “Jewish”— been filled throughout our country’s history? How have events and patterns been misdescribed or ignored entirely because of racial perspectives? (The destruction in 1921 of a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa and the subsequent “forgetting,” even erasure, of the incident for decades is an obvious example.) How do you explain the growth and popularity of the restaurant Sambo’s, which had a thousand locations, in the Sixties and Seventies, and the subsequent demise of the chain beginning in 1981? (I am old enough to have eaten at Sambo’s restaurants.)
If this sounds like ordinary historical inquiry, that’s because it is. It’s just that the object of inquiry, race, is politically charged when other paths of inquiry—let’s say the history of railroads or the history of cutlery—are not or are less so. “Object of inquiry” is the key phrase. Insofar as critical race theory is an academic project, its mode is description and analysis, not partisan exhortation. The inquiry begins by noting that there is something in the world that many people consider significant, in the case of C.R.T. a set of accounts, arguments, and proposals that require a rethinking of the cultural/political narratives within which we organize our lives and make sense of things. The next question is, then, is this phenomenon worthy of study? The answer is “Of course.” Ergo, courses in critical race theory. It is important to understand that such courses, when they are properly academic, do not advocate the ideas and arguments of C.R.T. polemicists; they explain what they are, and explain too the opposing ideas and counterarguments. “Critical” does not mean accusatory; it means “looking beneath the surface” or “uncovering what others have missed.” Are there some instructors who cross the line and pressure students to believe in C.R.T. (to the point sometimes of insinuating that they are racists) as opposed to just learning what it is? To be sure. But at the moment when study turns into proselytization, the instructor is no longer an academic and has become a political actor and as such deserves none of the protection academic freedom provides. Yet the fact that certain subject matter may be improperly taught—or not really taught at all but aggressively urged—is not an argument for removing it from the classroom. Remove those who abuse the subject by surrendering to it uncritically; don’t remove the materials. The bottom-line distinction is between teaching as a form of advocacy and teaching about the subject at hand. You can teach about anything, but nothing should be taught as a credo.
The same analysis will do for gender studies or transgender studies or populism or social justice studies or Holocaust denial or intelligent design or Christian nationalism. You don’t teach any of these because it is, in your view, true and incontrovertible, and you don’t refrain from teaching one of them because you happen to think it’s false. (What would it mean to say in a class that Christian nationalism is false? What role would you be playing and with what credentials?) You teach it because it is of sufficient interest and density to reward academic examination. So study anything so long as you can make a case for its responsiveness to analytic interrogation. It has long been a feature of the academy to fix on something apparently inconsequential—game shows, movie posters, comic books, rubber bands—and make a persuasive case for taking it seriously. That’s how the scope of academic analysis is enlarged—by turning its lens on hitherto unworthy subjects and transforming them into something worthy, into objects of study. That’s what academics do, study things, and they also study the studiers who have come before them. They are actively, and freely, engaged in a conversation with a history they at once continue and alter, taking their place in the army of researchers who are drawn to the task of explaining what items in the world are and how they work. That task is large and difficult and requires analytic and research skills conferred on us by professional training. They should not allow those without that training to determine how and when and to what it can be applied; they should not dishonor that training by making it more than it is and pretending that it qualifies them to fix every ill the world’s landscape presents. To borrow and alter the words of Polonius: To thine own professional self be true, and it must follow as the night the day that thou canst be false to thy colleagues, students, or the public. More simply put:
1. Do your job.
2. Don’t try to do someone else’s job.
3. Don’t let anyone else do your job.
