Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers
By Saree Makdisi
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English literature at UCLA.
May 4, 2005
In the months ahead, the state Senate Committee on Education will
consider a bill that pretends to strike a blow for intellectual
honesty, truth and freedom, but in reality poses a profound threat to
academic freedom in the United States.
Peddled under the benign name "An Academic Bill of Rights," SB 5 is in
fact part of a wide assault on universities, professors and teaching
across the country. Similar bills are pending in more than a dozen
state legislatures and at the federal level, all calling for government
intrusion into pedagogical matters, such as text assignments and course
syllabuses, that neither legislators nor bureaucrats are competent to
address.
The language of the California bill — which was
blocked in committee last week but will be reconsidered later in the
legislative session — is extraordinarily disingenuous, even Orwellian.
Declaring that "free inquiry and free speech are indispensable" in "the
pursuit of truth," it argues that "intellectual independence means the
protection of students from the imposition of any orthodoxy of a
political, religious or ideological nature." Professors should "not
take unfair advantage of their position of power over a student by
indoctrinating him or her with the teacher's own opinions before a
student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon
the matters in question."
To protect students from what one
might (mistakenly) suppose to be an epidemic of indoctrination, the
bill mandates that students be graded on the basis of their "reasoned
answers" rather than their political beliefs. Reading lists should
"respect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human
knowledge." Speakers brought to campus should "promote intellectual
pluralism," and faculty should eschew political, religious or
"anti-religious" bias.
Notwithstanding its contorted syntax,
the bill may sound reasonable. But, in fact, it has nothing to do with
balance and everything to do with promoting a neoconservative agenda.
For one thing, the proposed "safeguards" to "protect" students from
faculty intimidation are already in place at all universities, which
have procedures to encourage students' feedback and evaluate their
grievances. Despite a lot of noise from the right about liberal bias on
campus, there are simply no meaningful data to suggest that any of
these procedures have failed.
The real purpose of the bill,
then, is not to provide students with "rights" but to institute state
monitoring of universities, to impose specific points of view on
instructors — in many cases, points of view that have been
intellectually discredited — and ultimately to silence dissenting
voices by punishing universities that protect them.
"Why
should we, as fairly moderate to conservative legislators, continue to
support universities that turn out students who rail against the very
policies their parents voted us in for?" asks the Republican sponsor of
the Ohio version of the bill.
Backers of the Florida bill
would like to empower students to sue professors with whom they
disagree on the theory of evolution.
The
campaign for academic "rights" actually originated with organizations
and individuals committed to defending Israel from criticism, and whose
interest in curtailing academic freedom dovetails with those of
conservatives.
At the federal level, for example, a
confluence of conservative and pro-Israeli forces helped push HR 3077
through the House of Representatives in 2003. That bill, which
foundered in a Senate committee (but has been resurrected in the
current Congress), called for government monitoring of international
studies programs that receive federal funding. The bill was drafted in
response to the claim that the federal government was funding programs
that criticize American foreign policy. If passed, it would have
created a board (including two members from "federal agencies that have
national security responsibilities") to ensure that academic programs
"better reflect the national needs related to homeland security." Its
supporters included the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation
League, and the American Israel Political Action Committee, the bulwark
of Israel's Washington lobby.
The bill was also backed by
pro-Israel agitators Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, who, via allies
such as neoconservative firebrand David Horowitz, are among the
proponents of the "bill of rights" legislation at the state level. All
the proposed bills before state legislatures are variants of a text
written by Horowitz and backed by Students for Academic Freedom, which
maintains a website where students can complain about their
instructors' supposed bias.
The problem with all this is that
the university is meant to be an insular environment. Those within its
walls are supposed to be protected from outside political pressures so
that learning can take place.
But the lesson of the recent
upheavals at Columbia University — where an individual professor became
the object of a concerted campaign of intimidation because of his
criticisms of Israel — is that pressure groups targeting an individual
professor for his public views are willing to inflict collateral damage
on an entire university. What the new legislation offers such groups is
the opportunity to inflict damage preemptively on our entire
educational system.
Despite its narrow defeat in the
California Senate Education Committee last week, SB 5's supporters
clearly will not disappear quietly. If this and similar bills pass, who
gets hired and what gets taught could be decided not according to
academic and intellectual criteria but by pressure groups, many of
whose members are failed academics driven by crassly political
motivations. Society would pay the price.
