Imagine a rabidly Marxist scholar of political science who tweeted
the following:
Worry not, Capitalist trolls! While
you’re accumulating profits, I’m here to remind you that you’re starving
babies.
The next time a businessman asks you
to dialogue about “business ethics,” remind him that you heard everything he
had to say when Union Carbide killed almost 4,000 people in Bhopal, India.
It’s simple. Either condemn all business, capitalism, and capitalists
or accept the fact you suck because you think it’s OK for some to have $$ while
others die of poverty.
Imagine further that the evils of business and capitalism are all
this professor tweets about and he does so multiple times a day, sometimes in
ways that are civil in tone (“Socialism is a more just social order than
capitalism.”) and sometimes in ways that
are not (“Anyone who thinks that capitalism is in anyway OK is scum.”). And he’s not joking. He believes that it is his duty to speak out,
loud and often, about the evils of capitalism and he thinks it is his duty to
denigrate those who think capitalism is OK in any way. This, of course, is his civil right.
In addition to a civil right to freedom of expression, the scholar
might claim a right to academic freedom, by which he implicitly claims to draw
on his scholarship to justify these beliefs.
Are there limits to academic freedom?
I believe the answer is yes.
Suppose that our imaginary Marxist scholar is being considered for
a professorship. The (also imaginary)
left-leaning faculty of the hiring department think his tweets are vigorous
expressions of an anti-capitalism sentiment that they, too, share (though they
are not convinced that all capitalists are evil and Ben and Jerry’s seems to be
an ethically run company – or at least it was).
But the situation is not just about colleagues of relatively equal power
and shared opinions. With so prominent a
public persona and on-the-record textual nastiness toward anyone who might
think that capitalism has some good points, it’s reasonable to ask how students
will react to a professor’s total rejection of capitalists, capitalism, and (this
point is key) conversation with capitalists about capitalism.
Here is where academic freedoms butt up against each other. The students also have academic freedom. Given the power differential between
professor and student, and given this professor’s publicly tweeted rejection
of talking to capitalists and allowing them to express their point of view (he
already heard it), students who comes from a business family would reasonably
find their speech chilled in class. Note
that the objectionable statements from the professor are not really those that
draw on his expertise, but rather those that demonize people who disagree with
him. How could and why would students
study with someone who thinks they are scum?
Last September, a University of Kansas
journalism professor was temporarily suspended after he attacked the National
Rifle Association in a tweet about the Washington Navy Yard shooting. "The
blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and
daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you."
I happen to agree with that professor’s position on the NRA, but
“May God damn you” is a nasty way of addressing people who have a different
political position. University of Kansas
journalism students who happen to be NRA members might simply toughen their
spines and avoid conversation about the NRA in class (thereby chilling their
own speech), or they might see this professor as someone who will never give
them a fair chance in class because he thinks they should be damned. They may try to avoid taking his class. Either way, the students’ academic freedom
stands in juxtaposition to the professor’s, and the inequality of power further
complicates the situation. Was a
suspension appropriate? I’m not sure.
How often does this professor insult NRA members, some of whom may be
his students? Or was it a one-off sort
of thing where the department chair might have simply reminded him to consider
how some students might feel targeted by that sort of speech. (Debate can be vigorous and still civil.)
But of course, this is not about the guy in Kansas or our
imaginary Marxist prof. It’s about Steve
Salaita, the indigenous studies scholar who apparently quit his tenured at
Virginia Tech before actually receiving the contract for an offered position at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne.
While speech should be free (no matter how distasteful I or anyone
else finds it), it is also true that people are free to dislilke you for your
unpleasant speech. And if people think that you can't do a job they would
otherwise have hired you for because of the public comments you freely make,
well then, I think that is a reasonable consequence.
Academic freedom
does not mean that speech never has any consequences.
I have read Professor Salaita's tweets on the Twitter website (and not just the
second hand reports of them, a failing of several anti-Salaita
commentators). I take the right to academic freedom and freedom of
expression extremely seriously. Most of his tweets are about the
injustices suffered by Palestinians and about his opposition to Israel's
policies. For example, on July 29, he wrote: "#
Israel's bombing of #Gaza will lead to more deaths via acute poverty, food shortages,
destabilized structures, and inceased cancer rates." I find nothing in
such statements that ought to jeopardize his chances for employment.
However, many of Salaita's tweets clearly cross the line in my mind from a
principled anti-Israel stance to an anti-Semitic stance. I think
he's free to be an anti-Semite if he wishes, but if I were a student, it would
be impossible for me to study in his class.
And if I were a university administrator, I would think very, very
carefully about whether it is appropriate to hire someone who routinely makes
anti-Semitic public statements.
For example, he writes:
I am a Zionist -- one who believes in a two state solution, but a
Zionist who believes in the right of my people to a national homeland.
Further, I am unwilling to condemn Israel's actions at this point in time
because I do not know what the alternative actions could have been and most
certainly not because I think "wholesale slaughter of children" is
OK. I believe that Israel has an obligation to fight back against missile
strikes. Have they done this at unacceptable human cost? Probably,
but the empirical evidence and judgment of history is as yet unclear.
(How many Gazans died as a result of Hamas rockets that fell into Gaza?
How many civilian deaths are attributable to unintentional accident (military
targets that were missed)? How many civilian deaths were avoidable by more
careful targeting and use of smarter weaponry? When missiles are launched
from a hospital, is it just practice to fire back at the source of the missile?
Does the existence of the "Iron Dome" mean that Israel no longer has
a right to retaliate against attack? etc.)
So I have now self-identified as one of the people that Steven Salaita
disdains. If I were an 18 year old or even a 22 year old student, how
would I feel in his class? He has stated on the public record that he thinks
I and other people who share my views are trolls. He thinks I have no
capacity to understand the layers of moral commitments that I have. He thinks
my feelings of national identity are illegitimate. Every moment I sit in
his class, I wonder if I will be "outed," if he will discover that I
am one of those Zionists that he hates. Maybe my last name is Cohen and
I'm already suspect. He doesn't just disagree with me; he hates me.
I could not learn from him under those conditions.
Because hiring new faculty at the University of Illinois requires
approval of the Chancellor, I believe that the Chancellor of the University of
Illinois is firmly within her rights to refuse to approve the decision of the
department to hire Salaita. I would never say that Professor Salaita
should be prevented from saying what he wants to say, no matter how nasty he
wants to be in the pursuit of what he believes to be a just cause.
However, there are consequences for speech, and I do not believe he has a right
to be hired by the University of Illinois.
Didn't he know that he's not supposed to resign from his current position until
he has actual contract in hand?
