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From the General Secretary: Academic Freedom Is No Picnic
By Mary A. Burgan
In the aftermath of September 11, I attempted to formulate statements that would distill the AAUP's central concerns in confronting the unimaginable violence of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings. For me, as for many fellow citizens, the effort to go back to the office on September 12 seemed a farcical enactment of the thoughtless hope that nothing had changed. One colleague countered my despair, however, with a verbal kick in the rear, saying, "Now more than ever what the AAUP stands for is important. Get back to work!"
The first statement I placed on our Web site was written in the heat of that moment and called for a renewal of our trust in reason in the presence of irrational acts. A second statement responded to some misinterpretation of the first by further explaining that faculty in the AAUP do not speak with one voice on strategy or foreign policy, but that we agree on the preservation of academic freedom even in times of crisis.
The responses from many readers- including many of our colleagues abroad-were supportive. Many other responses were, however, angry-interpreting our call to reason as a form of moral equivocation. Many cast doubt on the loyalty of the faculty in general, accusing us all of being tenured radicals endlessly reenacting the protests of the Vietnam War. Still others asserted that we should stop "whining" from our positions of privilege and understand the realities of war. No matter what their rhetoric, I took all these reactions seriously, but the trend in them that I took most seriously was the assertion that the AAUP only wants academic freedom for liberals-having denied it for conservatives by advocating campus speech codes and other suppressions. Further, liberal professors have exerted the subtle pressure of political correctness on campus—making those who disagree too uncomfortable to speak out.
Thinking back on my own career, I realize that exercising academic freedom has indeed been uncomfortable. Although I would be described as a liberal, I have felt tremendous pressure to conform to the received opinions of my own liberal colleagues on many fronts-foreign and domestic. My instinct and conviction have always been to tread a middle way, which may be less easy in academe than elsewhere: identity politics have always been in play with us English professors.
For example, I remember an African American student at a meeting accusing the faculty of wasting time in discussion rather than staging a black-power demonstration. All sweaty and shaky and untenured, I rose to remind him that thinking itself was a very important form of action. At that moment, I felt very exposed as a white, female faculty member from a southern state. I think now of how I've felt on other like occasions-during the canon wars, on various committees, and even in my women's studies classroom when I didn't keep on the expected track. In short, my exercises in freedom have never issued in triumphant moments out of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. I have no joy in contradiction, and so every time I have objected, I have had to fight both my fear of speaking up and my fear of cowardly silence. I have learned that academic freedom requires practice, and even so, neither speech nor silence will ever feel very good in opposition.
Worrying about whether the AAUP has been biased against the right of conservative faculty to speak against the grain, I went back to Policy Documents and Reports (known more familiarly as the Redbook). Under "speech codes," I found one of our most ringing declarations of the precedence of academic freedom over moral rectitude, civility, kindness, or comfort: "The underlying principle does not change because the demand is to silence a hateful speaker, or because it comes from within the academy. Free speech is not simply an aspect of the educational enterprise to be weighed against other desirable ends. It is the very precondition of the academic enterprise itself." In other words, academic freedom is as much a responsibility as a right. But academic freedom is no picnic either. We would like it to be civil, but the very incivility of passionate discourse-so long as it does not lead to physical retaliation-tells us something we need to know. And so in the current situation, it seems to me that in defending academic freedom, we must not expect a garden party. We don't need to apologize for bad manners. And we shouldn't complain
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