From the General Secretary: Academic Freedom and Human Rights
By Roger W. Bowen
I am old-fashioned. Since my college days, I have relied on William Strunk and E. B. White's The Elements of Style as the authority in addressing stylistic questions. That book dictates: "In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last." Thus Strunk and White command "red, white, and blue." Up-to-date academics (and the New York Times), on the other hand, would use a comma only after red, as if to say that white and blue are specially conjoined, apart from red; they sometimes tell you, "It's all relative."
Something similar to this battle has been fought long and hard by scholars in the area of human rights. The cultural relativists hesitate to criticize governments that condone or commit human rights abuses, while universalists (critics maintain "absolutist" is the better term) like myself invoke a human rights standard and give no ground.
The basis for my "Strunk and White" standard for academic freedom is Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
The Universal Declaration has defined humankind's noblest aspirations during the post-World War II period; it comes close to representing universal agreement on fundamental human rights. It is a moral statement and in that respect resembles the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which has become the standard for the American academy.
Relativists might argue that Article 19 and the 1940 Statement are arbitrary enactments, and therefore not binding. Of course, those who take such a position might also be, in their respective spheres, violators of human rights or academic freedom, in the name of "order" in the first instance and "administrative efficiency" in the second. We must not trust them, nor accept such facile contentions.
It is one thing to strive to be "value free" in the scholarship we produce, but quite another to be valueless in the face of attacks on universal standards. There is nothing wrong with taking an absolutist or universalist stand when a basic freedom is under assault. But to resort to a relativist position to appease violators is simply wrong.
We should not fear that by espousing universalism we somehow leave ourselves open to the accusation of ethnocentrism if we promote Article 19, or the charge of ignorance about administrative efficiency if we confront threats to academic freedom. To aver a relativistic position on either front is tantamount to being, as philosopher Richard Rorty phrases it, "so open-minded that our brains [have] fall[en] out."
We can, then, be unapologetically close minded on the issue of human rights, chief of which for us is academic freedom. We can adopt what Rorty calls a stand of "anti-anti-enthnocentrism" without diminishing our respect for different cultures. Nor need we concern ourselves with charges of enthnocentrism when we denounce academic freedom violations in other nations (or in our own). We can affirm the human dignity of all people by decrying the violation of any individual's rights, anywhere, anytime. Our ideals and values, as professed in the Universal Declaration or the 1940 Statement, are not bound by culture or institutions.
If what I say is true, what action should we take? First, we should declare our allegiance to Article 19 (the 1940 Statement already has our allegiance). Second, we should welcome and support the efforts of kindred institutions, such as Human Rights Watch and Scholars at Risk, that monitor and report violations of academic freedom around the world. Third, during our travels abroad, each of us should record and share those academic freedom violations we learn about. And, finally, we should urge government decision makers to link trade and investment abroad to improvements in human rights, and advise university administrators to press foreign counterparts to respect academic freedom.
My own battle to enforce the rule of the serial comma, I recognize, may never be won. Human convention is, after all, human, and some conventions turn out to be short lived. But whatever your views on the serial comma, I hope you will agree that some conventions are more vital than others in forging a just order, and that the Universal Declaration and the 1940 Statement are the most important of all.
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