Unfettered Expression: Freedom in American Intellectual Life

Peggie J. Hollingsworth, ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000, 192 pp.

Reviewed by Erwin Chemerinsky

The reality is that universities and other institutions often feel the desire to stop and to punish speech that they and others dislike. Sometimes the censorship efforts are defended in the noblest of terms, such as to preserve American democracy during the McCarthy era or to advance equality in enacting hate-speech codes in the 1990s. Universities, of course, are not unique in this impulse to censor. But the dedication to freedom of expression is perhaps the greatest in colleges and universities where there is a professed commitment to academic freedom.

Unfettered Expression: Freedom in American Intellectual Life, edited by Peggie Hollingsworth, is a fascinating collection of essays on various aspects of academic freedom. The book consists of a series of lectures delivered on the topic at the University of Michigan over a ten-year period. The origin of the lecture series, described by Hollingsworth in the first chapter, is one of the most interesting and compelling aspects of the book. During the McCarthy era, three University of Michigan professors were suspended and two of them were ultimately fired for invoking their constitutional rights and refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The book begins movingly with a photograph and biography of each: H. Chandler Davis, Clement L. Markert, and Mark Nickerson. Strikingly, and this is not explicitly mentioned elsewhere in the book, their biographies show that each went on to great success at other universities in their respective fields of mathematics, biology, and pharmacology.

In 1990 the faculty senate at the University of Michigan resolved to create a lecture series named after these three men. The book consists of the nine lectures delivered between 1991 and 1999 as the University of Michigan Senate’s Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom. The nine lecturers include First Amendment scholars Robert O’Neil and Lee Bollinger; history professors Walter Metzger, Roger Wilkins, and David Hollinger; a federal judge, Avern Cohn; and a former managing editor of the New York Times, Eugene Roberts. One of the most powerful essays is by Catharine Stimpson, university professor and dean of the graduate school at New York University, who recounts her own tenure fight in which opposition to her was based on her political views and her sexuality.

The book has all of the virtues and all of the flaws to be expected of a collection of essays. It is easy and enjoyable reading. Not surprisingly, it focuses on the issues that were most relevant at the time of the lectures. Several of the essays, especially the initial ones, discuss the fight over hate-speech codes on college campuses that was very much on everyone’s mind in the early 1990s. Unsurprisingly, some of the essays also discuss the role of the AAUP in protecting speech on campuses. Throughout the book there is discussion and reflection over the events of the McCarthy era, which spawned the lecture series.

The book’s weaknesses also stem from the fact that it is a collection of essays written over a decade by nine different people. As a result, basic foundational issues, like the definition of academic freedom, never get addressed. Nor is there consideration of the relationship between the First Amendment and principles of academic freedom. Are they the same, with the former protecting the latter in state institutions, or are they different? What are the relevant differences, if any, between the speech rights of teachers and the speech rights of students? What role should the courts play in adjudicating these disputes? How much deference should the judiciary give to colleges and universities? Is academic freedom different in varying kinds of institutions, such as in church-related schools?

None of these questions, of course, has straightforward answers, but all are important in assessing the issues posed by the book. Unfortunately, there is little consideration of these basic questions in the essays.

Underlying the book’s essays is the issue of tolerance. Must universities tolerate speech that they dislike? Must they even tolerate speech that advocates intolerance? In his essay, Bollinger writes: "The critical problem with the recommendation of self-doubt, or of any acceptance of multiple truths and of pluralism, is that it must end somehow. Yet exactly where the perspective or disposition of self-doubt and pluralism appropriately ends and what we might call reasonable commitment to belief begins is not easy to identify." It is exactly this point that defines what universities may regulate. The book does not address this issue nearly thoroughly enough.

Still, the book is an interesting discussion of various aspects of academic freedom and its relationship to freedom of speech on campuses. A half century after the McCarthy era, it is important that those experiences be recounted for a new generation that has no personal memories of what transpired. It is too easy to take academic freedom for granted and too easy to forget the powerful urge that institutions have to silence speakers whose message they dislike. The University of Michigan lecture series and this collection of essays is valuable because it encourages the reader to confront these issues and to think again about the fragile nature of academic freedom and intellectual discourse.

Erwin Chemerinsky is Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science at the University of Southern California.

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