Government Relations: The Wisdom Will Survive

By Mark F. Smith

In "To an Anxious Friend," a 1922 editorial that won the Pulitzer Prize, William Allen White, editor of the Emporia Gazette in Kansas, replied to a friend who believed "that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress." "The sad truth," White wrote, "[is] that only in time of stress is freedom of utterance in danger. No one questions it in calm days, because it is not needed."

It is truly needed now. Too many state legislatures have intruded on academic freedom in recent years, but this past fall the federal government took an ominous step.

On October 21, 2003, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 3077, the International Studies in Higher Education Act. The bill reauthorizes Title VI of the Higher Education Act, which supports international education programs. The bill also establishes the International Advisory Board to advise Congress and the Secretary of Education on the effect of Title VI programs on homeland security, international education and affairs, and foreign language training. In addition, the board will "annually review, monitor, apprise, and evaluate the activities of grant recipients" and make recommendations to Congress and the Secretary of Education.

During the legislation's progress through the House, several changes were made to address the concerns of critics in the higher education community. The most important of these was to insert language to ensure that the board cannot "mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education's specific content, curriculum, or program of instruction."

The Association welcomes this explicit recognition of the need for curricular independence in higher education, but it remains extremely concerned that the board's power to monitor programs and make recommendations to ensure that "authorized activities reflect diverse perspectives and the full range of views on world regions, foreign languages, and international affairs" gives the board direct power to influence curriculum decisions—decisions that properly are a faculty responsibility. In the words of the AAUP's 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities: "The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process."

Conservative critics of Title VI such as Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution have long believed that "Title VI-funded programs in Middle Eastern Studies (and other area studies) tend to purvey extreme and one-sided criticisms of American foreign policy." In testimony to a House subcommittee last summer, Kurtz explained that "the ruling intellectual paradigm in academic area studies (especially Middle Eastern Studies) is called 'postcolonial theory' . . . founded by Columbia University professor of comparative literature, Edward Said." Kurtz asserted that "Congress needs to create a supervisory board to manage Title VI" to counter this dangerous academic emphasis.

In the early 1980s, historian Walter Metzger, writing in Academe, set forth the AAUP's position on academic freedom limits for legislatures. Metzger granted that a state legislature can, without necessarily intruding on academic freedom, set up or abolish "departments of instruction in academic institutions under its control" because of "budgetary implications." But he insisted that a legislature "invades the very core of academic freedom . . . when it dictates the contents of any course at any level or for any purpose." Doing so "converts the university into a bureau of public administration, the subject into a vehicle for partisan politics or lay morality, and the act of teaching into a species of ventriloquism."

Congressional committee sources have suggested that without "some language" addressing ideological concerns, the reauthorization of international programs "would likely be bogged down in the politics of the issue." The fact remains that the International Advisory Board, as it is currently constituted, threatens to become an investigative rather than an advisory body. In the present climate, its mandate constitutes a clear and present danger for fundamental academic freedom.

A college or university campus is a place where controversial, and sometimes even foolish, ideas can be debated and propounded. William Allen White recognized this fact eighty years ago. He conceded that "free expression" often brings "folly with it." But White further argued that where "there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive. . . . Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world."

Mark Smith is AAUP director of government relations.

 Printer-Friendly Page