[CHE] A New Group Promises to Protect Campus Free Speech

AFA letter to San Diego State University regarding its violation of Professor Corlett's contractual and constitutionall rights

https://leiterreports.typepad.com/b...tio-of-professor-corletts-contractual-an.html

Leiter writes:

Excellent letter, as usual. It's impressive how quickly the AFA got this letter out, since they only learned of this incident yesterday. Having an efficient academic freedom watchdog is more important than ever in the United States, and those of us in the academy are all indebted to the work of the Academic Freedom Alliance.

Posted by Brian Leiter on March 08, 2022 at 12:16 PM in Academic Freedom | Permalink​

 

https://jonathanturley.org/2022/03/...-on-ukraine-uchicago-is-facing-that-question/

Should Universities Take a Stand on Ukraine? UChicago is Facing That Question

Jonathan Turley
March 9, 2022
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It has become increasingly common for universities to take political positions in support of everything from Black Lives Matter to D.C. Statehood. As such positions increase, there is more and more pressure for official positions to be taken on other subjects. Now, the University of Chicago is being asked to affirm its support of Ukraine after controversial statements from Professor John Mearsheimer. (For full disclosure, I am a graduate of UChicago and Mearsheimer was one of faculty when I was doing strategic studies research at the department).While I knew Mearsheimer as a new young professor, he was already a rising star in academia. He became famous for his realist approach to international studies and now holds the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Chair at the school.Mearsheimer has long been a critic of policies on Ukraine and denounced the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych as a “coup.” He also believes that the fighting in the Donbas region is a “civil war” between Ukrainians. He has given speeches on those views and wrote a widely read article in 2014 in Foreign Affairs. He has criticized the United States policies as destabilizing and endangering Ukraine, a view shared by others.



Even if one disagrees, Mearsheimer’s views are is well-researched and well-reasoned. They are precisely the type of profoundly engaging viewpoints that are the very embodiment of our academic discourse.

Nevertheless, as reported on the site College Fix, students have objected and called upon President Paul Alivasatos to publicly “identify and condemn those who are actively engaged in the spread of Putinism.”



Mearsheimer has objected to the overthrow of what he viewed as a democratically elected president in Ukraine and American policies that were pushing that country toward an inevitable conflict with Russia. He has been largely supported in his predictions of how those tensions would explode with Russia. That does not make him a Putin apologist.

However, even if Mearsheimer did espouse pro-Russian or even pro-Putin views, he has every right to do so as an individual and as an academic. The question is whether UChicago should take an official position on this debate or remain neutral as a forum for research and debate. Despite my support for Ukraine in this war, I am concerned about universities taking such official positions.

The students, Daryna Safarian, Edita Kuberka, Iryna Irkliyenko, Darya Kolesnichenko and Sergiy Kuchko, wrote that they were “pained” by Mearsheimer’s references to a “civil war” and his calling the 2014 removal of Yanukovych a “coup.” What was most notable is the assertion that his views are “not substantiated by any meaningful historical or scholarly evidence.”

One can certainly disagree with his conclusions but it is bizarre to claim that it is without meaningful scholarly or historical basis. It is a common attack on those with dissenting views to declare their views as devoid of intellectual value. We have discussed a crackdown on academics who offered opposing views on World War II, Black Lives Matter, reparations, indigenous land, diversity programs, and other subjects.

We have also seen Russian artists and athletes blackballed for failing to publicly denounce the invasion or Putin.

The students are demanding disclosures of the funding sources of Mearsheimer and a university statement to denounce “anti-Ukrainian ideology on campus.”

UChicago has long been a global leader in protecting free speech and academic freedom, even as peer schools yield to the pressure of conformity and orthodoxy. It should publicly decline such invitations to stand against what some views as “anti-Ukrainian ideology.”

The Mearsheimer controversy should not be difficult for the university. A more difficult question is how universities should address Ukraine. There is a difference between labeling viewpoints and research as unacceptable “ideology” and labeling this attack on Ukraine as a violation of international law.

The problem for the university is that it is a global institution that has a myriad contacts with both Russia and Ukraine. Some of those contacts could be assisting Russia in its attack on Ukraine, particularly in access to research and resources at UChicago. As companies from Mastercard to McDonald’s have suspended dealings with Russia, universities face the same dilemma. I believe that it is appropriate to sever some of those ties.

Universities took such a stand against South Africa during apartheid, though calls to boycott Israel has led to deep and ongoing divisions on our campuses.

There is a distinction that can be drawn between intellectual discourse and institutional support vis-a-vis Russia. Students and faculty should feel entirely protected in espousing views supportive of the Russian position. However, universities should suspend programs in Russia and limit some research collaborations that may support this invasion. That includes grants and programs funded by the Russian government or its proxies.

Where to draw that line is obviously difficult. For example, there is a call from some like Rep. Eric Swalwell to expel Russian students and academics. That, however, would reduce exposure of students and their families to opposing viewpoints and unregulated news. They are the least likely to support this war. Moreover, American academics need to support our colleagues in Russia who oppose the invasion. Putin has long had problems with students and academics who oppose his blood-soaked rule. There is a reason why Putin has shutdown media and closed social media access. He is afraid of interactions with the outside world and access to alternative viewpoints.
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more

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conclusion

As a general matter, I prefer that universities focus on maintaining a fair and open forum for the discussion and research of such contemporary controversies. The invasion forces the hand of universities since they cannot support the violation of international law and the devastation of this sovereign nation. However, we should strive to protect not just access to our universities but the freedom to express dissenting viewpoints.

This position was laid out in the famous Kalven Committee Report at the University of Chicago. I have included it below. It stated in part that the university must protect its core intellectual mission and resist pressure to take political positions on contemporary controversies:

Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues.

The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints. And this neutrality as an institution has its complement in the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest. It finds its complement, too, in the obligation of the university to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues.
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I understand the passion and sense of offense of these students. Indeed, I share their views on the invasion. They have every right to denounce Professor Mearsheimer, who I expect would be the first to defend that right. However, he also has a right to hold opposing views without being singled out by the university or officially denounced for what some view to be unacceptable “ideology.”​

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/free-inquiry-suffers-as-war-fever-grips-harvard-public-position-university-college-students-11647461748

Free Inquiry Suffers as War Fever Grips Harvard
A university’s purpose isn’t to rally support. It’s to provide a haven for debate, including dissent.
By M. Todd Henderson
March 16, 2022 6:14 pm ET

Lawrence Bacow, president of Harvard, issued a statement Feb. 28 condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine on behalf of the university. It decried the “deplorable actions of Vladmir Putin ” and asserted that Harvard has an obligation to speak out because “institutions devoted to the perpetuation of democratic ideas and to the articulation of human rights have a responsibility to condemn such wanton aggression.”

It seems hard to disagree, but I do. I’m no fan of Mr. Putin, and I certainly don’t want Russia to swallow Ukraine. I disagree because it is antithetical to the mission of a university to take a position on the war—even if everyone on campus opposes it.

To understand why, go back to 1966, when the U.S. government revised its rules about the military draft. College students had been generally exempt. But in need of more bodies, the government asked universities for the names of students in the bottom half of the class to make them eligible for conscription. At the University of Chicago, students rebelled. In May 1966, almost 500 students shut down the administrative building for several days to protest the policy. This raised the question of what position, if any, the university should take on the war in Vietnam.

To answer this question, President George Beadle appointed a committee led by law professor Harry Kalven Jr. The committee’s work, the Kalven report, is a founding document of the University of Chicago’s commitment to open inquiry. The bottom line is simple: Neither the university nor any of its parts may take any positions on matters of public concern, unless they threaten the university itself. According to the Kalven report, “the university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”

Not taking official positions is essential to a university’s mission as a place where ideas and theories are developed and tested. To succeed, the report argues, “a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.” Perhaps someone on campus has a dissenting view about the attempted takeover of Ukraine, and official positions might chill that view. That view may be wrong, but it should be proved so, not silenced.

University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer has argued for years that, by pushing the boundaries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization too far, America would be partly to blame for a Russian invasion. There is a student petition on campus to silence him, calling him a defender or an apologist for Mr. Putin’s war. But whether Mr. Mearsheimer is right or wrong, the Kalven report ensures that his university won’t silence him. His point of view will be tested in the marketplace of ideas, not censored by administrators.

Especially in an age of ideological fads and Twitter mobs, we need boundaries that protect the pursuit of truth. Bad ideas will sometimes have a home on campus. But the risks to truth from kowtowing to popular opinion are simply too great.

In his statement condemning the Russian invasion, Harvard’s president noted that the Ukrainian flag would fly over Harvard Yard and that “Harvard University stands with the people of Ukraine.” In 1943, during another war, the Supreme Court considered a West Virginia statute that required public-school students to salute the American flag during the Pledge of Allegiance. In the decision striking down the law, Justice Robert Jackson wrote that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”

The Kalven report applies this same idea. Scholars and students should be free to think and say what they believe rather than have to follow the orthodoxy of university presidents. If faculty and students want to stand with Ukraine, that is their right. Telling them that they must do so is not only contrary to the mission of universities, it is un-American.

Mr. Henderson is a law professor at the University of Chicago.
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Yale law professor tells students to "grow up." So I guess there's hope for us still

 

University of Illinois now requires diversity statements for tenure and promotion

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022...iversity-statements-for-tenure-and-promotion/

University of Illinois now requires diversity statements for tenure and promotion
April 7, 2022 • 11:45 am

I’m not sure whether this new requirement is legal, since the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the flagship campus of a state (governmental school), but that University is now, according to Inside Higher Education (IHE), beginning to require diversity statements for all faculty members who want to be considered for tenure or promotion (and who doesn’t?) The statements are optional now, but in two years will be mandatory.

This requirement, detailed in the article below seems to me inappropriate on several counts:

a. It changes the job of professors in a way to make them engage in social engineering as well as of education. While universities should certainly foster a welcome climate for minorities and not discriminate against them, and (in my view) can engage in limited forms of affirmative action, it should not enlarge the job of the faculty to comport with certain social goals that the university deems desirable.

b. It is a form of compulsory speech or viewpoint discrimination, since if you don’t adhere to a prescribed form of social engineering involving minorities, your prospects will suffer and your job will be endangered. When you take a job at a university, and presumably at the U of I, you have not signed on to doing this work.

c. There are other forms of nonacademic work that could be promoted in this way, but are not. For example, you might be forced to submit “poverty alleviation statements” showing what you’ve done to help the poor, or “outreach statements”, that demonstrate how you’ve tried to educate society about your academic work, or any number of statements documenting how you’ve tried to do nonacademic things to achieve social goals the university deems “desirable”. You could, for example, teach illiterate adults to read. But people who do this other work do it without the promise of reward, or of any expectation of reward. I give any number of free talks on evolution to nonacademic groups, high schools and so on, and often do it for free. I do that because I love it (it’s fun!(), because I do want to educate people about how great evolution is, and because I do feel an obligation of payback since the public has funded my research. But I expect no professional reward for this, nor do I feel that this should be required.

d. Although racial equality is both desirable and essential, the job of engineering that falls to the government, and even though universities are organs of the government, their job is education. If university professors were forced to engage in forms of social engineering that the government favors, the purpose of a university would not only be diluted, but corrupted. Imagine if professors had to submit statements, under a Republican administration, documenting how they had not promoted critical race theory. Academic freedom requires that professors have the freedom to work on what they want, and if they’re rewarded, it should be for fulfilling the traditional academic duties of teaching, research, and administration (committee work). They should not be rewarded for fulfilling “diversity goals”, nor penalized for not fulfilling them. Remember, just saying in your diversity statement that “I have treated all students equally and engaged in no discrimination” is deemed completely insufficient as a diversity statement. Saying that will, in fact, take you out of the running if you apply for a faculty job at the University of California.​

And, as I implied in (b) above, perhaps this kind of practice is illegal as a form of government-compelled speech. I am not sure because this kind of DEI statement is already required when applying for jobs in many places, as in the state universities of California. But even if it’s legal, it’s not appropriate for a university. This was the viewpoint of Stanley Fish’s book Save the World on Your Own Time. The Amazon blurb summarizes his thesis, with which I agree:

What should be the role of our institutions of higher education? To promote good moral character? To bring an end to racism, sexism, economic oppression, and other social ills? To foster diversity and democracy and produce responsible citizens?

In Save the World On Your Own Time, Stanley Fish argues that, however laudable these goals might be, there is but one proper role for the academe in society: to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same. When teachers offer themselves as moralists, political activists, oragents of social change rather than as credentialed experts in a particular subject and the methods used to analyze it, they abdicate their true purpose. And yet professors now routinely bring their political views into the classroom and seek to influence the political views of their students. Those who do this will often invoke academic freedom, but Fish suggests that academic freedom, correctly understood, is the freedom to do the academic job, not the freedom to do any job that the professor so chooses. Fish insists that a professor’s only obligation is “to present the material in the syllabus and introduce students to state-of-the-art methods of analysis. Not to practice politics, but to study it; not to proselytize for or against religious doctrines, but to describe them; not to affirm or condemn Intelligent Design, but to explain what it is and analyze its appeal.”​

If you are compelled to do DEI activities, this will perforce bring political views into your academic work and change the nature of your job.



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Harvard Cancels British Romanticism Scholar Due to Her Views on Gender Issues
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/04/...sm-scholar-due-to-her-views-on-gender-issues/

excerpt:

Harvard University is under fire this week after canceling a talk by philosopher Devin Buckley on British Romanticism. That is usually not a protest-inspiring subject. The Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge do not usually trigger riotous reactions. However, Harvard decided to cancel this talk not because of Dr. Buckley’s world-renowned expertise but because of her political views and associations. She is a member of the Women’s Liberation Front, a feminist organization that has opposed transgender policies as inimical to women’s rights. That was enough for Harvard, which shattered any pretense of free speech and viewpoint diversity on its campus. Wordsworth once wrote that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” In this case, powerful feelings proved the end to good poetry.

Media reports quote Buckley as saying that she was cancelled after the objections from English department coordinator Erin Saladin. Even though her speech had nothing to do with gender or feminism issues, Saladin reportedly objected to her board membership on the organization.

The National Review published an email from Saladin that raised a “difficult note” after looking up Buckley and discovering her association with what Saladin called “a trans-exclusionary radical feminist organization.” She added “I also found at least one piece of her writing online that explicitly denies the possibility of trans identity. I can’t ask for funding to invite a speaker who takes the public stance that trans people are dangerous or deceptive.” She called out other faculty by name who might not want to sign off on funding when “it could look pretty bad for them and the department.”

Dr. Buckley noted that Saladin never even bothered to quote from her writings to show the hateful content.

There has been a global campaign against feminists who challenge transgender policies as undermining or even reversing the gains of the feminist movement. They are called trans-exclusionary radical feminists or Terfs by critics. Some have even been prosecuted in other countries like Australia for hate speech due to their political beliefs.

Terfs are being attacked in the media in articles that tend to include anyone who opposes transgender laws. The labeling creates a chilling effect for those who might want to speak out against aspects of these laws or policies. For some feminists, gender self-identification creates dangerous situations for women and negates core elements of feminist values. For others, this opposition is a denial of their identification and characterizes them as dangerous or potentially criminal.

In the end, none of that matters. How Buckley views gender or how others view her views on gender should not be a barrier to her speaking on British Romanticism. (Indeed, Harvard should welcome opposing views on gender identity.) Nevertheless, she has experienced the increasingly common “shunning” and cancellation of academics who hold dissenting views on campuses.
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more at the link

 

Do We Really Need to Rethink Academic Freedom?
And how serious a problem is the “white supremacist professoriate”?


https://www.thebulwark.com/do-we-really-need-to-rethink-academic-freedom/

review of It’s Not Free Speech
Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom
by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth
Johns Hopkins, 293 pp., $29.95​

excerpt:

When the Higher Education Research Institute first surveyed professors at four-year colleges, the far right barely registered; just 0.4 percent of the respondents so identified themselves, compared to 5.7 percent who labeled themselves far left. While there were more conservative professors, 15.7 percent, they were dwarfed by self-described moderates, at 38.8 percent, and liberals, who had a plurality at 39.5 percent.

That was more than thirty years ago. In It’s Not Free Speech, Michael Bérubé, a professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, and Jennifer Ruth, a professor of film at Portland State University, are asking whether academic freedom is being used as a refuge for white supremacists. Their answer is yes, an answer so damning that, they say, it should make us “rethink academic freedom.” So, what’s changed?

Not the share of far-right professors. That’s still 0.4 percent in the most recent survey.

Other things have changed, but not to serve Bérubé and Ruth’s argument. There are now roughly as many self-described far-left professors (11.5 percent) as conservatives (11.7 percent). The ratio of liberals to conservatives has risen from a little over 2:1 to well over 4:1.

White supremacy in the academy wouldn’t seem to merit book-length alarm.

But Bérubé and Ruth are dedicated defenders of academic freedom. Both have served the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as members of Committee A, which investigates complaints against universities and crafts “policy documents and reports” on academic freedom. This is not only hard, mostly thankless, work but also an opportunity to keep an eye on American campuses. When they say that the problem of “tenured white supremacists” is weighty enough to prompt “new thinking” about academic freedom, we owe them a hearing.

***
The second rethinking is more fundamental. Drawing on critical race theory, Bérubé and Ruth argue that just as purportedly neutral laws “legitimate existing maldistributions of wealth and power,” so also does the academy’s “fetishization of a mythically neutral pursuit of truth” provide cover for the powerful. For that reason, academics should abandon the pretense of neutrality. On the understanding of academic freedom that has prevailed for over a century, the university serves democracy indirectly by supporting “the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators,” moved by “scientific conscience.” On the understanding of academic freedom that Bérubé and Ruth propose, ideas are to be judged not only on how they reflect the best available arguments and evidence but also on whether they reflect a commitment to “furthering democracy.”

In practice that means that the faculty academic freedom committees Bérubé and Ruth assign the task of “evaluating competence” should think of competence both “in standard disciplinary terms” and “in its democratic valence.” Such committees will “make judgment calls . . . that take into consideration the historical and political circumstances in which their universities find themselves.” A classicist’s conspiratorial tweet about the faking of the moon landing, on this understanding, may require less aggressive intervention than his conspiratorial tweet about #StopTheSteal.

Bérubé and Ruth acknowledge that even in the narrow work of evaluating scholars in their own fields of expertise, professors go astray and mistake challenges to the present state of their field for incompetence. What then, of the broader work of evaluating the “democratic valence” of ideas in light of the “historical and political circumstances” that the university confronts? Experts in physics may make errors in judging their fellow physicists, but at least they are well equipped to judge. It is hubris to think that faculty committees are competent to assess the historical and political circumstances, then measure the harm to democracy that might result from a colleague’s article or tweet.
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more at the link

 

On the Ilya Shapiro twitter incident

My Cancel-Culture Nightmare Is Over
After a four-month investigation, Georgetown concludes I wasn’t yet an employee when I wrote an errant tweet.

http://api.cxense.com/public/widget...JK8X4tC3Dvuiim4QCQtFD163XQ0?mod=hp_opin_pos_3