|
« AAUP Homepage
|
Legal Watch: Ideology in the Academy
By Rachel B. Levinson
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, some professors were rebuked for making statements seen as critical of the United States or its antiterrorism effort. In response, the AAUP’s Special Committee on Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis warned in a November 2003 report that “in these critical times, the need is for more freedom, not less.” Yet, six years after September 11, a growing focus on politics and ideology in the academy is increasingly constricting academic freedom.
Foreign scholars, for example, have been prevented from entering this country to address academics and other citizens. In a highly politicized case, the U.S. government acknowledged (before subsequently denying) that it prevented Swiss Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan from assuming a faculty position at the University of Notre Dame because of his ideology. In most other cases, the government has declined to explain the reasons for withholding visas, but an apparent similarity among the excluded scholars is their political viewpoint or involvement.
Bolivian scholar Waskar Ari waited for nearly two years for a decision on the University of Nebraska’s visa application while the faculty position offered to him languished. He studies political activism among Bolivia’s indigenous Aymara people, an ethnicity he shares with Bolivia’s president, who has opposed certain American interests in his country. John Milios, a Greek Marxist economist who was denied entry at the U.S. border last summer despite having a valid visa, was interrogated about his politics before being turned away. And Riyadh Lafta, an Iraqi professor of medicine, was denied a visa to lecture at the University of Washington this past spring about the public health effects of the Iraqi war. His research contradicts U.S. government data about death tolls from the war.
In addition, despite a longstanding Supreme Court opinion cautioning that loyalty oaths threaten to “cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom,” some states have started enforcing loyalty oaths or similar pledges for public employees. An egregious example is a form that prospective employees at Ohio’s public universities must now complete. Introduced by the Ohio Patriot Act, the form requires “correct” answers to six questions about support for terrorism; leaving a question blank ensures rejection. And in Nevada last year, an award-winning theater director was relieved of his teaching duties after he refused to sign a pledge of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and government and the state of Nevada; the oath, which dates to Nevada’s establishment as a a state, appears to have been revived for postsecondary teachers only in the past several years.
Some commentators have focused on whether an ideological imbalance exists in academe. Of perhaps keener concern is that decisions based on ideology ill serve faculty, students, and institutions. As declared in the joint 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, “The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.” When educational decisions are placed in the hands of political bodies, colleges and universities become far more vulnerable to shifts in popular belief.
Moreover, viewpoint is simply not a useful proxy for a professor’s skill as a teacher or a scholar. The AAUP’s founding 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure holds that the primary goal of an educational institution should be to attract faculty “of the highest ability, of sound learning, and of strong and independent character.” These goals are not furthered by a focus on faculty members’ ideological leanings.
Rachel Levinson is acting AAUP staff counsel.
|