Targeting academic freedom in Israel

I’ve just received word that academic freedom is under assault in Israel.

Haaretz calls the decision by the Israeli Council for Higher Education not to permit students to enroll in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Department of Politics and Government, and thus to bring about its closure, “unprecedented in its severity.”*

 A situation in which an academic department and a renowned university is forced to battle against a body meant to represent it, and meant to fend off political pressures, should disturb anyone who is concerned with higher education and academic freedom.

The closure of BGU’s Department of Politics and Government, without allowing more time to fix any remaining deficiencies, gives one the impression that the decision was based not on issues of academic quality but on political considerations.

Richard Silverstein connects that decision to the demise of Israel’s venerable Maariv daily newspaper.

Add to this that the government has just voted to recognize a settler college, Ariel, as an official government-funded university over the objections of every president of every other Israeli university and the UK government–and you have an oncoming putsch in academia that matches the one taking place in Israeli media.  Wherever the Israeli far-right sees tolerance, liberalism and freedom of thought it seeks to stamp it out ruthlessly.  It is yet another manifestation of the permanent far-right majority which is designed to turn Israel into a state that chooses nationalism and religious identity over democracy.  This is the rise of the authoritarian state and the death of the hybrid Jewish-democratic state cherished by liberal Zionists.

*The chairperson of that department, Neve Gordon, is a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study this academic year.

Freedom of speech—academic and political

Freedom of speech is central to bourgeois society. But it is often under assault, and it falls to the Left to defend it.

It is being undermined in Israel, especially now that the Boycott Bill has been passed. As Neve Gordon explains,

Ironically, the bill itself is likely to be inconsequential. It stipulates that any person who initiates, promotes or publishes material that might serve as grounds for imposing a boycott on Israel or the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem is committing an offence. If found “guilty” of such an offence, that person may be ordered to compensate parties economically affected by the boycott, including reparations of 30,000 Israeli shekels ($8,700) without an obligation on the part of the plaintiffs to prove damages.

And yet this law should still be considered as a turning point. Not because of what the bill does, but because of what it represents.

After hours of debate in the Israeli Knesset, the choice was clear. On one side was Israel’s settlement project and rights-abusive policies, and on the other side was freedom of speech, a basic pillar of democracy. The fact that the majority of Israel’s legislators decided to support the bill plainly demonstrates that they are willing to demolish Israeli democracy for the sake of holding onto the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Daniel Little reviews the classic defenses and definitions of academic freedom of speech (by Richard Hofstadter, Walter Metzger, the American Association of University Professors, and Ronald Dworkin) and then provides a link to Jennifer Washburn’s discussion of academic freedom in the corporate university.

In recent years, editors of science journals, members of Congress, federal agencies, education experts, public interest groups, and professional societies—including the Institute of Medicine—have called on US universities to regulate financial conflicts of interest on campus more vigorously. By and large, however, the academic community has resisted regulation of commercialism on campus as well as periodic attempts by the federal government (in 1989, 1995, and 2001) to attach stricter conflict-of-interest rules to the receipt of federal research grants. A growing chorus of critics now considers these university-enforced conflict-of-interest rules far too variable and weak.

In part, this avoidance of the adverse effects of commercialism stems from not wanting to bite any hand that feeds (even though today private industry accounts for a mere 6 percent of academic research funding nationally; 60 percent of academic research is funded by the federal government). Commercialism can be tricky for the faculty to tackle, in part because it often pits faculty members against one another.

However, in my view, another major obstacle stems from the faculty’s current tendency to view academic freedom more as an “individual right” than as a collective, professional right rooted in the university’s core commitment to knowledge for the public good. Consider, for example, the conflict-of-interest problem on campus. Today, one frequently hears entrepreneurial faculty members argue that any effort to restrict financial conflicts of interest (by academic administrators, journal editors, or the federal government) constitutes a violation of individual professors’ academic freedom rights, because such regulation could impede the financing of a professor’s research. . .

The time to act is now. If the university looks and behaves more and more like a for-profit commercial entity—and its commitment to producing and transmitting reliable public knowledge grows increasingly suspect in the public’s eye—then the societal justification for academic freedom will simply fall away, as will the public’s willingness to finance universities. Much as they did when the AAUP was founded, the faculty must take the lead in addressing these threats to the national interest.

The issues Washburn raises go directly to the heart of mainstream academic economists’ role in creating the conditions of the 2008 crisis and Second Great Depression. Yes, they benefit from the principles of academic freedom to utilize and disseminate the results of their neoclassical approach. But their unwillingness to consider the ethics of their work—from conflicts of interest and the lack of disclosure rules through the celebration of academic commercialism to the slavish adherence to one economic theory and the lack of theoretical pluralism—undermines the very freedom of speech on which the university is based.

Don’t cry for us, Argentine

We’ve come to this: watching the Argentine chancellor of the University of California playing a faux proletarian and crying on the reality show “Undercover Boss.”

Toby Miller, one of his employees, uses the pitiful display as a teachable moment:

Our CEO cried about personal loss. He cried about student debt. He almost cried about putting in false teeth and wearing a Groucho moustache as part of his thrilling disguise. He looked very miserable as he tried to function as an athletic coach, a library assistant, a science adjunct you name it. But then he removed the disguise. He came out, out of the closet of the faux proletariat. And his young mentors in these various failed real jobs were rewarded.

Student loans? Forgiven. Poor athletic facilities? Sorted. Untenured new faculty? Supported. It was magic, provided by unnamed benefactors (perhaps this was a quid pro quo from CBS?). What an absurd moment. . .

It cloaked the horrors of a system that puts children of the working class into generational debt and wastes millions of dollars on anti-educational sports programs.

The cloak is one-off charity, made available to those lucky enough to be subject to childish deceit by a media corporation and a public servant.

What is going on here, at a time when our campus has to cut $US37 million from this year’s budget a figure that could double by the end of the northern summer but is ploughing on with investing $US10m in a medical school? . . .

The University of California can be privatised, turned into an engine of inequality. Goodbye to the most storied public-education system in the world.

While we’re on the subject of public universities, I was pleased to see that the University of Michigan Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Phil Hanlon has issued a statement in support of Juan Cole along with a strong defense of academic freedom, just as the University of Wisconsin publicly supported William Cronon back in April.

On one hand, we need to take notice of the fact that both embattled faculty members, targets of right-wing political attacks, teach at public universities. It’s no coincidence that, at least in the United States, public intellectuals like Cole and Cronon work in public, not private, universities.

On the other hand, while support for academic freedom is important (otherwise, why do universities exist at all?), it’s not enough. It’s equally important to defend what remains of the other dimensions of public universities: a high-quality, affordable education for all working-class students who want it.

Right now, across the United States, that kind of higher education is being undermined, including at the universities of California, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Don’t just cry for us, university officials. Do your job and defend U.S. public higher education.

Update

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education [behind pay barrier], the University of Massachusetts Amherst is also in crisis, since the current chancellor’s strategy to establish the university as an elite institution consisted of the following:

a failed effort to open a medical school, an ambitious and costly plan to play big-time football, and significant improvements in facilities at an honors college that he hopes will appeal to nonresidents of the state.

Take the money and run

The Harvard Boys took it from Saif Qaddafi, and they were only too willing to do his bidding.

The most ambitious courtier was the Monitor Group, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, consultancy that assists countries with economic reform. Co-founder ­Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, began traveling to Tripoli to meet with Saif, bringing with him energy consultant and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Daniel Yergin. In June 2004, Porter, Yergin, Fahmy-Hudome, and C&O head Sandra Charles attended an economic forum Saif was overseeing at Tripoli’s Corinthia Hotel. Saif, the Americans found, was a refreshing change from Muammar, who, dressed in one of his quasi-military getups, was known to provoke visitors by decrying the hypocrisies of the West. In a natty suit, with shaved head and eyeglasses gleaming, Saif directed the proceedings with the efficiency of an executive. “It was the seminal meeting of launching the new Libya. This was the team that was going to help him do it,” says Fahmy-Hudome.

That night, Saif sent cars to collect the team and bring them to his beach house for a seafood dinner. Having changed out of his suit, he received them in a flowing white thaub and traditional taqiyah cap. They toasted to the future of Libya.

Two years after that toast, in 2006, Porter presented the Qaddafis with a plan for the rehabilitation of the country that called for a “unique model of ‘popular capitalism’ ” starting with the energy sector, which would revive the economy and, eventually, Libyan society. Muammar could do all this, they promised, by 2019, the 50th anniversary of his coup.

For a yearly fee that reached $3 million, Monitor also mounted an international public-relations campaign to “enhance international understanding and appreciation of Libya and the contribution it has made and may continue to make to its region and to the world,” according to a memo. This entailed bringing to Libya a who’s-who gallery of public intellectuals, including Harvard’s Robert Putnam and Joseph Nye and former LSE director Anthony Giddens. Some, like Barber, were paid consulting fees. Others wrote glowing stories about the new Libya in the press, and Monitor offered, for an additional $2.4 million, to ghostwrite a book under Muammar’s name.

Universities have been taking it from rich conservatives for a long time, and the economic crisis has created even more openings.

The movement to buy conservative beachheads within academia and vilify leftist professors is clearly not new. What’s new today is that universities are incredibly vulnerable to conservative encroachment and attack. A debilitating economic crisis has dried up state revenue amidst a long-term move to casualize academic labor so that part-time adjuncts scurry from school to school with no hope of tenure, while tuition continues to rise while household incomes plummet. Those professors lucky enough to land full-time jobs are not very often eligible for tenure. Students shut out of enrollment-capped community colleges are forced to try their luck at for-profit “colleges” like the University of Phoenix, where record numbers of students accumulate record debt with few job prospects.

“The neoliberal attack on the university is now backed by so much money and so many resources that it’s almost overwhelming,” says [Henry] Giroux. “You couple that with deficits, and it’s a perfect storm.”

Clearly, both liberal and conservative professors are willing to take the money and run, peddling their influence both on and off campus. And, in this “perfect storm,” it’s probably only going to get worse in the years to come.

Update

Texas A&M University faculty members, alarmed by the apparent influence of the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation on their university, have urged the system’s regents to distance themselves from the foundation’s educational reform proposals that are moving the university toward a “for-profit mentality.”

Restricting academic freedom

Stanely Fish wants to restrict the meaning of academic freedom—and then sweep everything else under the rug.

I actually have no problem with Fish’s restricted definition of academic freedom.

The pursuit of truth is what is done in classrooms and laboratories and that is why those activities should be protected from outside interference. Truth cannot be pursued if constraints in the form of political or ideological preferences block the search for it. Other activities not in the pursuit-of-truth business merit no such protection because there is no specifically academic value to their being allowed to occur without constraint.

So, yes, academic freedom can and should cover what goes on in the classroom and in research activities. And it covers a wide range of issues, from the “sexual exhibition staged for a valid educational purpose” at Northwestern University to the “controversy at Florida State University over a gift given to the economics department in 2008 by a foundation funded by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers.”

But then Fish wants to sweep everything else under the rug, such as CUNY’s decision to award an honorary degree to Tony Kushner, students’ ability to invite speakers to campus, and the teaching of courses. I agree: those aren’t academic freedom issues. But they are university governance issues.

The problem with Fish’s analysis is he takes the governance of the new corporate university as given. Faculty members teach and do research, and they’re covered by academic freedom. Students buy an education and are they to be alternately taught and entertained. And academic administrators run the place, without interference from students or faculty.

What Fish fails to understand is that the idea of the university is governed by a number of principles, including but not restricted to academic freedom. Shared governance is also an important principle, since it protects and enriches the idea of the university as a space of critical thought. Critical thinking is not only what happens in the classroom and in research but is also reflected in honorary degrees, invited speakers, and what courses are taught.

Sweeping those issues under the rug in an attempt to restrict the meaning of academic freedom just serves to reinforce the new corporate university and to undermine the idea of the university.

In defense of democracy

As the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa are now demonstrating, creating democratic institutions involves a lot of hard work. So, as it turns out is defending democracy, especially when those in power are willing to sell it or legislate it away.

It’s certainly going to take a lot of hard work to defend academic freedom, since Florida State University, Clemson University in South Carolina, and West Virginia University [ht: ng] have decided to sell it to the Koch Brothers.

A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university.

A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University’s economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting “political economy and free enterprise.”

Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they’ve funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.

Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it’s not happy with the faculty’s choice or if the hires don’t meet “objectives” set by Koch during annual evaluations.

And it’s going to take at least as much work in Israel, since the Knesset has approved or is considering a spate of laws that curtail democratic rights. As Neve Gordon explains,

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel recently warned that the laws promoted by the Knesset are dangerous and will have severe ramifications for basic human rights and civil liberties. The association, which is known for its evenhanded approach, went on to claim that the new laws “contribute to undemocratic and racist public stands, which have been increasingly salient in Israeli society in the past few years”. . .

There is a clear logic underlying this spate of new laws; namely, the Israeli government’s decision to criminalise alternate political ideologies, such as the idea that Israel should be a democracy for all its citizens.

Both sets of measures—to undermine academic freedom in public universities in the United States and democratic rights in Israel—stand in sharp contrast to the rejection of tyranny and the demand for democratic institutions elsewhere in the world.

The other irony is that, once again, it falls to the Left to defend the basic ideas and institutions of democracy that mainstream academics and politicians celebrate but are so willing to sell or legislate away.

In defense of academic freedom

Academic freedom is currently under attack in Wisconsin and Michigan because of right-wing requests to examine faculty email messages.

Daniel Little sounds the alarm against this “alarming intrusion into the zone of academic and personal freedom of the faculty member,” which threatens to create a chilling effect on the faculty member’s ability to freely communicate his or her ideas with colleagues without fear of retaliation or punishment, or premature disclosure of ideas not yet fully developed.” He then attempts to draw a line between email messages that should be open to the public—having to do with “business records”—and those that do not—those which are “intellectual, critical and creative documents.” He defines business records as having “to do with concrete decisions involving such issues as purchasing, contracting, personnel decisions, hiring, and other material administrative actions,” while the other documents “express the faculty member’s ideas, thoughts, judgments, and hypotheses about subjects of interest.”

Little argues for a zone of individual privacy in relation to individual employment. An alternative way of making a case for the protection of email communications other than those pertaining to business records is to argue that the community has a stake in the freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression of university employees—both faculty and staff—and that requesting email messages other than business records would undermine those freedoms and thus impoverish the community. That’s a defense of academic freedom not in terms of individual privacy and employment but in terms of the nature of the university in relation to the larger community.

It’s precisely because the administrators of the new corporate university have failed to make that case for academic freedom that scholars’ email records are now being threatened by freedom of information requests.

Academic freedom: uneven developments

Right now, academic freedom is being contested in the United States, especially in public universities. In some cases, it’s winning; in others, it’s losing.

It won recently at the University of Wisconsin and at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

In a ruling that breaks from other recent federal court decisions chipping away at the speech rights of public colleges’ faculty members, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held on Wednesday that the University of North Carolina at Wilmington could not deny a promotion to a faculty member, the prominent conservative commentator Michael S. Adams, based on writings that university administrators had deemed job-related.

But it’s losing at Wayne State University, where lawyers have ordered parts of the Labor Studies Center website shut down over concerns from the Mackinac Center For Public Policy think tank that they violate rules against political advocacy with state resources.

The site changes were a direct result of Mackinac’s inquiries into the department, including the FOIA requests for faculty and staff emails discussing the labor fight in Wisconsin and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, MIRS News reports. On Makinac’s investigative journalism website Michigan Capitol Confidential, Ken Braun explained why he FOIA’d the labor faculty at Wayne State (as well as Michigan State and the University of Michigan), pointing to portions of the Wayne State site he said were clearly advocating political outcomes rather than education.

In related developments, Juan Cole reminds us of some of the history (3 professors of economics who were fired at the University of Michigan in 1954), while the National Labor Relations Board is planning to file a complaint accusing Thomson Reuters of illegally reprimanding a reporter over a public Twitter posting she had sent criticizing management.

We tend to take academic freedom and free speech for granted. And yet, every once in a while, such as with the battle over public institutions right now, we are reminded that we take it for granted at our peril.

In defense of academic freedom

The University of Wisconsin has decided to comply with the request from the Republican Party of Wisconsin seeking access to history professor William Cronon’s emails—but only after winnowing the database.

And only after issuing a statement in defense of academic freedom:

Scholars and scientists pursue knowledge by way of open intellectual exchange. Without a zone of privacy within which to conduct and protect their work, scholars would not be able to produce new knowledge or make life-enhancing discoveries. Lively, even heated and acrimonious debates over policy, campus and otherwise, as well as more narrowly defined disciplinary matters are essential elements of an intellectual environment and such debates are the very definition of the Wisconsin Idea. . .

To our faculty, I say: Continue to ask difficult questions, explore unpopular lines of thought and exercise your academic freedom, regardless of your point of view. As always, we will take our cue from the bronze plaque on the walls of Bascom Hall. It calls for the “continual and fearless sifting and winnowing” of ideas. It is our tradition, our defining value, and the way to a better society.

Would but that the administrations of all colleges and universities held themselves to such a standard.

Debating affirmative action in South Africa

The University of Cape Town is debating whether or not an “elitist version of race-based affirmative action” in admissions is useful in overcoming the legacy of apartheid and creating a new, more just South Africa.

The debate, itself, as discussed in the New York Times, is certainly not unusual. What is unusual—and commendable—is that the contributions to the debate are posted on the University of Cape Town web site. It’s a kind of vibrant, open, public discussion that universities elsewhere in the world would do well to emulate.