Should academic freedom have limits?

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?

Something analogous happened in Kansas, according to the Wall Street Journal (August 13, 2014; http://online.wsj.com/articles/tweets-on-israel-cost-professor-1407974658):

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?

And finally, I recommend this elegant blogpost by R. William Ayres on civility in academia.