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Joan Wallach Scott on Threats to Academic Freedom
Historian Joan Wallach Scott has served on the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure since 1993. She was committee chair from 1999 until this past June, when she became a consultant to the committee. To mark her transition from chair to consultant, Academe asked her to participate in an interview about her experience with the committee and her work in behalf of academic freedom. Scott is Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth-Century City (1974), Women, Work, and Family (with Louise Tilly, 1978), Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), and Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005). Her current work focuses on the controversy over Islamic head scarves in French public schools. David Hollinger, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, succeeded Scott as Committee A chair.
Academe: What trends have you seen in the cases that have come before Committee A during your tenure?
Scott: I don’t think there has been much change over the years I’ve been on the committee. The cases we deal with stem from the exercise of arbitrary power by arrogant or frightened administrators who, in the face of real or imagined exigencies, refuse to follow procedures that guarantee due process and academic freedom to faculty.
Academe: How has serving on Committee A affected your views of the academic profession?
Scott: Above all, my experience on Committee A has confirmed my belief in the importance of faculty governance. Where institutions of faculty governance are weak, administrative violations of faculty rights are more likely to occur than where such institutions are strong. It is disturbing to watch the erosion of these institutions either because of administrative action (dismantling them or finding ways around them in the form of special committees and task forces) or faculty indifference. Reports about widespread lack of participation by younger faculty are especially worrisome. We need these institutions more than ever to challenge corporate styles of management and to resist pressure from forces outside the academy. There is another reason for the weakening of these institutions of governance and that has to do with the decline in the numbers of tenured and tenure-track faculty and the enormous increase in the numbers of contingent faculty. This restructuring not only weakens faculty governance—contingent faculty don’t have the clout, the time, or, sometimes, the right to participate—but it threatens academic freedom as well by reducing the ranks of tenured faculty. How to preserve tenure where it still exists and reverse the pressure to eliminate it is one of the big challenges we now face.
Academe: The Association published a lengthy report in 2003 about the effects of the attacks of September 11, 2001, on academic freedom. How would you assess developments on campuses since publication of the report?
Scott: In the report, we commented on the fact that things were better than we had expected them to be. Although there had been some incidents that caused concern (the firing of Sami Al-Arian at the University of South Florida was the gravest of these), there were also good examples of administrators acting to uphold the principles of academic freedom. In the last two years, however, things have changed for the worse, largely because of increased intervention on campuses by outside agitators, most of them acting on behalf of organized lobbies intent on securing support for the policies of the current Israeli regime. The stated goal of these groups is to remove any pro-Palestinian presence from campuses and to silence all criticism of Israel ’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. These groups equate any criticism of Israel ’s politics with anti-Semitism and with opposition to the existence of the state of Israel —claims that are as irresponsible as they are dishonest, but which seem to command a great deal of uncritical media attention. The result of their actions has been to make invisible the existence of opposition to the Sharon government among Israelis and among American Jews, myself included. They have also created a climate of fear and intimidation on campuses, making the free and open exchange of opposing ideas—the hallmark of the liberal university—difficult if not impossible. Critics of Israel have had their academic credentials challenged, their lives threatened, and their courses invaded. The threat to academic freedom is enormous, as it was during the McCarthy era. And many university administrations are in disarray. Fearful of the impact of bad publicity on donors, alumni, and prospective students, they hesitate to take strong stands against the invaders and instead try to accommodate them. There is no organized counterweight to this powerful lobby, only local resistances, and that bodes ill for the future.
Academe: Recent critics of the academic profession have accused professors of bias and lack of balance in teaching and research, often singling out professors of Middle East studies for especially harsh judgments. What do you make of these kinds of criticisms?
Scott: I don’t think the accusations of bias and lack of balance are credible. I’ve already discussed my reactions to the attack on professors of Middle East studies in my response to your last question. The call for “balance” has also come from neoconservatives, led by David Horowitz and his campaigners for the “Academic Bill of Rights.” There is, of course, a connection between the pro-Sharon lobby and many of these campaigners on substantive grounds and in their self- representation as victims of discrimination, when in fact they represent a majority viewpoint in American society. On Committee A, we were particularly disturbed because Horowitz cites our principles in support of his bill. But there’s a world of difference between our notion of academic freedom and his. (There’s a very good analysis of these differences on the AAUP Web site.) Horowitz’s goal is to secure the same conservative hegemony in the classroom that already exists in the White House, the Congress, and corporate boardrooms. He wants to end the critical function of the university, to take away the role of the professor as gadfly and require instead a studied neutrality in regard to “substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.” This means that creationism and the denial of the Holocaust must get equal time in science and history courses. And it means that the judgments of quality and the ethical commitments that are part of academic discourse must be put aside. But conflicts of values and ethics, as well as of interpretation, are part of the process of knowledge production; they inform it, drive it, trouble it. The commitments of scholars to ideas of justice, for example, are at the heart of many an important investigation in political theory, philosophy, and history; they cannot be suppressed as irrelevant “opinion.” And because such commitments cannot be separated from scholarship and teaching, there are mechanisms internal to academic life that monitor abuses, distinguishing between serious, responsible work and polemic, between teaching that aims to unsettle received opinion and teaching that is indoctrination. They are not perfect by any means, but they will not work better if government oversight is substituted for community self-surveillance. This is how John Dewey and Arthur Lovejoy, founders in 1915 of the AAUP, understood the need for academic freedom. The protections of academic freedom and tenure for faculty are necessary precisely to prevent the invasion of the academy by outside forces—trustees, legislators, judges, lobbyists, and agitators like Horowitz. Horowitz’s call for “balance” and for the “rights” of students to be spared having to listen to lectures that challenge their politics is an attack on academic freedom as the AAUP defines it, and on the integrity of the liberal university as well. It is also a wild misrepresentation of what’s going on in the academy. In-stitutions of higher education are already diverse and pluralist, although not necessarily in each department or each classroom. There are, to be sure, programs that stand for things Horowitz despises, programs that interrogate the relationship between knowledge and discrimination—women’s studies, African American studies, queer studies, postcolonial studies, and the like. But no university offers only courses of this kind. They are “balanced” by equally “one-sided” approaches in other departments: rational choice has become dominant in many political science departments, and Marxists have been driven from economics departments that are now devoted to game theory. From a larger perspective, there is no lack of balance in the academy as a whole. Many schools have decided to specialize in one ap- proach or methodology as a way to distinguish themselves in the academic marketplace: the business school at the University of Chicago is conservative, the law schools at Duke and Yale are liberal. At the undergraduate level, some schools offer traditionalist approaches to education— Saint John’s or Grove City; others are more liberal—Brown or Wesleyan; still others more experimental—Reed, Hampshire, or Sarah Lawrence. If one looks closely at the reality on the ground—the variety of institutions, programs, and courses—it becomes clear that the neoconservative depiction of colleges and universities as strongholds of “tenured radicals” is an ideological appeal to anti-intellectual fantasies that, as historian Richard Hofstadter long ago pointed out, are readily mo-bilized for dangerous political ends.
Academe: How has your perspective as a feminist and a historian influenced your sense of yourself as an activist academic?
Scott: In both capacities (as feminist and historian), my interest is in the operations of power—how it is constructed, what its effects are, how it changes. It follows that activism in the academy is both informed by that work and informs it. It seems to me that scholars and teachers have a responsibility not only to produce and transmit knowledge, but also to protect the institutions within which the free and open production of knowledge takes place. My academic activism is devoted to that end.
Academe: You are a longtime active member of the AAUP. Why have you felt it important to participate in the Association?
Scott: There are many reasons, the first of which I mentioned in my answer to your last question. The AAUP is dedicated to maintaining colleges and universities as places where knowledge can be freely pursued, where the kind of creative thinking that changes ideas and lives can take place. The second reason is that the AAUP has a long and impressive track record as the association that makes protection of academic freedom a priority, that has assembled experienced staff members and faculty to address the often complicated issues that come up in the lives of academics. The collection of statements in Policy Documents and Reports (more commonly known as the Redbook) has served as a kind of constitution for higher education, setting the standards and the limits for many different forms of academic practice. Finally, if I have long believed in the need for an organization like the AAUP, today more than ever it seems to me vital to support its work. The university is under siege in many ways: corporatization, politicization, the new rules and regulations of the “security state.” There has to be collective resistance to these pressures, and the AAUP provides that. That’s why, although my term as chair of Committee A is over, I’ll be continuing to work with and for the AAUP.
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