Be Afraid

Free Speech in Fearful Times: After 9/11 in Canada, the U.S., Australia, and Europe. James L. Turk and Allan Manson, eds. Toronto: Lorimer, 2007

Reviewed By Christian K. Anderson

An ongoing concern of faculty has always been their rights in the classroom and the laboratory. This concern about the sacrosanct right to academic freedom helped spur the creation of the American Association of University Professors in the United States in 1915. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) was founded for similar reasons in 1951. (Our other North American neighbor, Mexico, still does not have a national association dedicated to the protection of academic freedom.) Academic freedom concerns have been heightened since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as evidenced by the special attention given to the issue in AAUP reports, at disciplinary association conferences, in books and articles, and by the media.

An example of this heightened attention is Free Speech in Fearful Times: After 9/11 in Canada, the U.S., Australia, and Europe. The book demonstrates that reactions to 9/11 were not contained within the borders of the United States but extended around the world (though the last part of the book’s title should more rightly read “the United Kingdom”).

The book is an outgrowth of a conference sponsored by the Harry Crowe Foundation, founded in 2002 as the education and research arm of the CAUT. The foundation’s namesake was dismissed from United College (now the University of Winnipeg) in 1958 and was the subject of the CAUT’s first investigation. The book is dedicated to Crowe’s sixteen faculty colleagues who resigned in protest over his dismissal. (The parallel to the AAUP’s first investigation at the University of Utah in 1915 is uncanny. After four professors were dismissed by the president at Utah, seventeen faculty members resigned in protest before the AAUP began its inaugural investigation.) Free Speech in Fearful Times is edited by James L. Turk, executive director of the CAUT and former University of Toronto professor, and lawyer-turned-academic Allan Manson.

The style of the chapters varies. Some are personal narratives of those who have suffered injustices, such as Lee Lorch and Chandler Davis, who tell of their movement among various American colleges before settling in Canada. (Lorch and Davis took academic jobs in Canada in the 1950s after having been suspended or dismissed from U.S. institutions and being subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee.) Other chapters are historical accounts, and yet others take the form of policy and cultural critiques. The chapters work both as stand-alone pieces and as part of the book’s overall argument. Taken together, the subjective and objective accounts provided in the different chapters paint a picture of the conditions of academic freedom in four countries.

The effects of 9/11 on American society have come to feel familiar. In other countries, governments have their own versions of the American color-coded terror warnings. In Australia, alerts have been issued through mass media and outdoor advertising with the slogan, “Let’s Look Out for Australia,” while British university staff have been asked to report suspicious looking students of foreign origin, especially Muslim students and those from Islamic societies. The questions posed by the authors of this volume are whether these activities designed to heighten awareness of possible terrorist threats have had any effect on institutions of higher learning and their professors—and whether any of these effects would have come about even without the tragedy of 9/11.

The first section of the book is titled “Lessons from History” but could appropriately be subtitled “Have We Learned Anything?” Andrew Bone, a researcher at the Bertrand Russell Research Centre at McMaster University, recounts the plight of the philosopher Bertrand Russell at Trinity College in England during World War I. The environment of hysteria and government action Bone describes seems quite similar to the post-9/11 environment. Russell was dismissed from Trinity after his conviction for violations of the Defence of the Realm Act. The authors demonstrate that several tactics used in the past are in use again: false accusations, jingoistic language and propaganda, and the positing of a broad, nonspecific “us-versusthem” dichotomy, coupled with black-and-white reasoning.

The overall lesson, one author argues, is not to “be complacent,” because “the freedom to research, to think, to inquire, to debate, to discuss—these liberties are more than a collection of privileges. They are the heart and soul of academic life.”

The book demonstrates that several countries have responded to 9/11 with similar legislation: the USA Patriot Act, the Canadian Antiterrorism Act and Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the British Terrorism Act and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and the Australian Anti-terrorism Act. Each of these policies has had an effect on academic institutions and scholars. In one case, having the same name as a person on the “no-fly list” kept a Canadian mathematician from attending a conference in the United States. Other, more publicized cases involve the denial of visas to foreign scholars. The second section of the book, “International Perspectives,” offers case studies of “ideological exclusion” in Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

A key question is whether any of the cases described in this book would have taken place had 9/11 not occurred. Robert O’Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression at the University of Virginia and chair of the AAUP’s Special Committee on Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis, reminds us in chapter 9 not to assume that every current threat has come in response to 9/11. Some government efforts that could be classified as invasions of privacy or restrictions on the free exchange of ideas date from the Clinton and earlier administrations. Nonetheless, 9/11 compounded the effects of these earlier efforts, and some cases of infringement of rights have a direct link to the response to 9/11. The AAUP, with the creation of its special committee, did learn a lesson from its own history and prepared to speak out as needed instead of remaining largely silent as it did in the 1950s, when faced with the challenges of McCarthyism.

Who are the victims of policies that restrict free speech? Three main groups have been affected: librarians and patrons of libraries and bookstores (because of the prospect of having personal data gathered by governmental sources), scholars, and journal editors and authors (because of restrictions on submissions from certain countries and of collaboration by American authors with scholars from those countries). I would imagine that many readers of Academe find themselves in at least one of those categories. O’Neil asks, “Are scholars and students less free to seek information from potentially suspect sources than they were before September 11? Unquestionably, and regrettably, that is the case.”

The brief final section, “Reflections on the Past—Challenges for the Future,” examines the role of the CAUT in defending freedom and the role the “culture of fear” plays in society and academe. Manson and Turk argue that this culture of fear inhibits the free exchange of ideas both on and off campus, which in turn has negative consequences for democratic values. The antidote is to continue to demand “fairness, reason, and open debate.”

It seems almost axiomatic to say that “fearful times pose special dangers for free speech,” but Free Speech in Fearful Times demonstrates the truth behind this statement. A hope of the book’s authors is that readers will learn the lessons of the past and thus be vigilant and ready to act when necessary.

Christian K. Anderson is assistant professor of higher education at the University of South Carolina– Columbia.

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