Note: This paper was presented at the Second Annual Conference on Intellectual Freedom, April 1996, Montana State University-Northern
Not since this spring's graduates were freshmen--or, at most, sophomores--has it been news that intellectual freedom in the US finds itself under concerted attack once again. The present assault derives from what has plausibly been denoted a new orthodoxy, one generally referred to with somewhat bitter irony as "PC" (1). While the actions, policies, rules and pressures comprised by this attack are found in virtually all quarters of American intellectual life, I shall be primarily concerned with those evident in higher education, those which aim at altering, diminishing, or even abolishing that special form of intellectual liberty called academic freedom. I understand academic freedom about as it is defined in the AAUP's classic "Academic Freedom and Tenure: 1940 Statement of Principles and Interpretive Comments:' along with the "1970 Interpretive Comments" (2). This document has been endorsed by more than ninety scholarly and professional organizations, including (at least most of) those to which those of us in faculty service owe allegiance. In sum, I take academic freedom to be the liberty of one competent in some recognized intellectual discipline to pursue and profess the truth within that discipline's proper domain as he, or she, sees it. I take it, complementarily, to be the freedom of students to learn with the aid of such a person, as opposed to suffering indoctrination.
The more recognizable forms of the attacks on academic freedom I have in mind are prohibitive in emphasis; they strive to forbid thought, speech and other expression of certain kinds. The notorious "hate speech" ordinances adopted by many institutions come readily to mind as examples of measures of this kind. Similarly, there are some forms of anti-sexual harassment or gender bias regulations, particularly those which are based upon the "hostile environment" theory. There are other actions or policies, usually relying upon some civil rights rationale, or intended to promote "diversity," "harmony" or "multi-culturalism."
On the other hand, there are those attacks which seek to enjoin thought, speech and expression--the promotion of certain kinds of thought and speech. Ideology driven teaching, that which would properly be called indoctrination, or proselytism, suggests itself most readily as an example. The sensitivity training sessions required of some faculty and students, too, often belong in this category. But, in fact, the most familiar and wide-spread instance is the so-called gender neutral language demand we see virtually everywhere in the academic and scholarly world. Campus publication standards frequently incorporate it in some form, as do the directives of textbook publishers and professional journals. On many campuses a failure to conform to this nearly ubiquitous requirement will surely be reflected in a faculty member's student evaluations and may well bring reproval in some concrete form. Yet the need for, and desirability of, gender neutral language is certainly the sort of thing about which reasonable persons can disagree, which is to say, can disagree with good reason and mutual respect.
For the sake of economy, I will refer to all these actions, policies, and pressures of other sorts as "political correctness purifications"--PCPs, for short (3). 1 acknowledge that there are those who sincerely hold that the PCPs are benign, at worst, and genuinely beneficial, and even necessary, at best. There are those, too, who deny that PCP's exist as they are usually described. My purpose is not to argue these points, but to reflect upon the meaning of the PCPs. I shall take it for granted, then, as a hypothesis for this paper, that they exist and that they are deleterious, one of several important forces eroding the substance of American higher education today (4).
We have frequently heard it said that the PCPs are anomalous or paradoxical in two ways: (a) as attacks upon academic freedom, they are unusual in coming from within the academy, rather than from without; (b) they are illiberal. The first of these claims is simply mistaken, a reflection of ignorance of higher education's long and troubled history. It is worth considering briefly, however. While I think the second is on the whole mistaken, too, it is a much more complex claim than the first, and reflection upon it pays some important dividends. I shall be primarily concerned with this second claim in this brief paper.
Most violations of academic freedom have been committed by administrative officers, faculty members, or students, not by external authorities or members of the general public. We tend to think otherwise, remembering, perhaps, the events of the 1950s, growing out of the anti-communism witch hunts exemplified by those conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy. This was the age of loyalty oaths, legislative hearings and faculty purges (5). Somewhere in the back of a desk drawer I believe that I still have the loyalty oath I was asked to sign upon my appointment to the faculty of the University of Montana in 1969. I merely stashed it there, sans signature, and nothing was ever said about it (6). We native Montanans may remember the persistent public complaints about Roland Renne, former President of MSU, thought by many good Montana citizens to be a communist, or at least a fellow-traveler (7). And there was Leslie Fiedler at UM, whom I heard many times described as a "card carrying communist," and an embarrassment to the state who should be required to leave forthwith (8). Some of us remember, too, former Governor Babcock's declaration that there was not room enough in Montana for himself and Morton Borden, then a UM professor of history (9). But successful attacks upon academic freedom of this kind have actually been comparatively rare.
Academic freedom has been a highly regarded ideal in American higher education at large only in this century. Prior to that time, higher education was fundamentally a religious enterprise, one in which doctrinal purity was demanded of both faculty and students (10). It was not until the rise of the sciences and the secularization of the curriculum in the Nineteenth Century that academic freedom became a viable concept. Only with the founding of the AAUP in 1914 did academic freedom begin to move toward the general acknowledgment it now enjoys in the US. That organization's establishment was prompted in part by a particularly notorious case, that of John M. Mecklin, professor of philosophy at Lafayette College. Mecklin, an outspoken liberal, was rather too enamored of relativism for Lafayette's Calvinist President, who fired him (11).
Even after respect for the AAUP principles became generally accepted policy within the American higher education establishment, violations of academic freedom came most often at the hands of administrators, rather than external forces. Walter P. Metzgar, analyzing the 124 cases of allegations of violation of academic freedom investigated by the AAUP and reported in its Bulletin through 1953, noted such things as an investigative committee's report in 1935 that the administrative practices at the University of Pittsburgh had "brought into the lives of the men and women of the faculty, and into the lives of those dependent upon them, acute anxiety, worry, and fear" (12). He concluded that "...these cases do give color to the belief that administrative, not professorial, incompetence is the great unsolved problem of academic life" (13).
The claim that attacks on academic freedom typically originate outside the campus walls also ignores the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s connected with the Civil Rights Movement and opposition to the Vietnam war. Yet these events troubled many scholars deeply, and quite rightly so. For example, they led James Q. Wilson, then a professor of sociology at Harvard, to write that, of the institutions with which he had been associated in his lifetime, including the Catholic Church and the US Navy, Harvard was among the least tolerant (14).
We should perhaps remind ourselves that but a few generations have passed since chapel requirements were customary on US campuses. We should recognize that academic freedom is a relatively young idea, one compatible with, and growing out of, a certain conception of the nature and function of higher education. It is incompatible with many others, including those which have prevailed through most of higher education's history, both here and in Europe. It is not inconceivable that higher education could return to some version of its earlier form; perhaps we now see it in the process of doing so.
I turn next to the question of illiberality. In a perceptive and well-argued essay Morris Dickstein writes:
Hilton Kramer calls PC "liberal McCarthyism," but it conflicts dramatically with any known form of liberalism--by forwarding speech codes on some campuses, for example, and hygienic limitations on speech elsewhere. Ironically, this has allowed some conservatives to emerge as champions of free speech, while others have allied themselves with radical feminists to support local ordinances against pornography. In PC, both ends of the spectrum meet, united against liberal tolerance." (15)I want to comment on two aspects of what Dickstein asserts here, concentrating on his claim that the PCPs are at utter odds with liberalism in any form.
Certainly the PCPs would appear to be illiberal by conflicting with the aims and legitimate methods of classical liberal education. It is this perception which explains, for example, the title of Dinesh D'Souza's well-known book, Illiberal Education, one of the first major discussions of the PC movement (16). A liberal education is one such as befits a free person, as opposed to a slave. If is an ancient idea; the term appears, for example, in the Platonic epistles. A slave, according to Aristotle, is a human instrument, a tool of master or mistress. A free person, on the other hand, is autonomous--self-governing--his actions restricted only by the confines of his own nature as a human being, and his peculiar gifts, aims, circumstances and commitments. Liberal education was intended to develop the free person's characteristically human capacities (17). Thus, the concept of liberal education is grounded in, and depends necessarily upon, a philosophical anthropology, a theory of human nature.
The philosophical anthropology which prevailed in the West from the Enlightenment until recently took reason to be the essential, defining characteristic of human beings (18). Our current understanding of liberal education--and academic freedom--owes much to that proposition. It is not logically necessary that a conception of education deriving from some other theory of human nature be illiberal; but, it is necessary that controversies over the liberality of educational programs and policies must ultimately reach to the question of what it means to be a human being.
Were Dickstein to confine himself to modem liberalism we should be quite able to agree that the PCPs contravene its principles and its spirit. I take J.S. Mill to be not only the strongest and clearest representative of modem liberalism, but, more than any other single figure, its founder, as well. On Liberty I take to be modem liberalism's principal text for the issues before us. On these points there is general accord among scholars, I believe. James Q. Wilson, for example, refers to Mill as "the modern father of liberalism" (19).
One does find passages in On Liberty which would appear to be congenial to the thought lying behind the PCPs. For example, Mill is now often quoted as saying:
Where there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of superiority. The morality between Spartans and Helots, between planters and negroes, between princes and subjects, between nobles and roturiers, between men and women, has been for the most part the creation of these class interests and feelings: and the sentiments thus generated, react in turn upon the moral feelings of the members of the ascendant class, in the relations among themselves. (20)However, Mill's program for nullifying such class interests differs markedly from that which manifests itself in the form of the PCPs. There can be no doubt, I believe, that Mill would react to these with abject horror and condemn them severely (21).
The nearest thing to the PC movement Mill considers explicitly is in the form of the writings of an advocate of what was then called "temperance."
The Secretary [of the Temperance Alliance] says, "I claim, as a citizen, a right to legislate whenever my social rights are invaded by the social act of another." And now for the definition of these "social rights." "If anything invades my social rights, certainly the traffic in strong drink does. It destroys my primary right of security, by constantly creating and stimulating social disorder. It invades my right of equality, by deriving a profit from the creation of a misery I am taxed to support. It impedes my fight to free moral and intellectual development, by surrounding my path with dangers, and by weakening and demoralizing society, from which I have a fight to claim mutual aid and intercourse." A theory of "social rights," the like of which probably never before found its way into distinct language: being nothing short of this--that it is the absolute social right of every individual, that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought; that whosoever fails thereof in the smallest particular, violates my social right, and entitles me to demand from the legislature the removal of the grievance. So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them: for the moment an opinion which I consider noxious passes any one's lips, it invades all the "social rights" attributed to me by the Alliance. The doctrine ascribes to all mankind a vested interest in each other's moral, intellectual, and even physical perfection. (22)
Mill's arguments against noxious notions like the Alliance Secretary's "social rights" rest most directly upon what he refers to as "one very simple principle": scholars now usually call it the harm principle. Mill first states it as follows:
[T]he sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. In the part [of his conduct] which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. (23)The principle turns out not to be simple at all, requiring considerable qualification and at least one further ma or attempt at restatement--at the head of the concluding chapter of the book it becomes two "maxims."
Mill holds the principle to apply to adult, normal persons who are fortunate enough to belong to societies which have reached some ill-specified stage of maturity. Thus, children may be constrained where adults cannot be, as can citizens of "those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage (24). Societies are to be taken as arrived at the appropriate level of development when they may be seen to profit fully from thought and discussion.
Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. (25)He later adds important qualifications (implicitly and explicitly) to the effect that the threatened harms which justify limitation of liberty must not be merely "constructive" and must be demonstrable. A threatened harm is merely constructive if it is possible, but improbable of actual occurrence, or it is such as to be inferred or derived by its victim, or is otherwise not concrete and immediate. For example, Mill tells us that the government may not prohibit the sale of poisons on grounds that they might occasionally be used for murder, nor could a normal, sane adult be restrained from crossing an unsafe bridge when he knew what he was doing. One may readily infer what he would say about today's seat belt and helmet laws (26). A harm is demonstrable if it would be possible to prove that it derived from the alleged cause, the action which would be interdicted under the harm principle: it follows that the harms at issue must be of the sort appropriately cognizable in law. Proof would be by the usual standards of science and English law.
It is important to observe that Mill argues for the importance of liberty solely on the grounds of what he calls "utility," which for our purposes may simply mean its valuable effects. He explicitly declines to appeal at all to any doctrine of natural rights (27). His fundamental claim is that respect for liberty through the observance of the harm principle will promote the development of knowledge, and therefore the betterment of humanity. That betterment he does not conceive as being achieved, however, in Baconian fashion, through the conquest of nature for the sake of human convenience; rather, the development will be found in human nature itself. It is, in short, education of the species to which liberty leads. "Man is a progressive being," Mill tells us repeatedly, and he goes so far as to say that the spirit of liberty and the spirit of progress are one and the same (28). He might in complete consistency have added the spirit of education to this set of equivalencies.
The harm principle, properly understood, protects "opinion" and speech with special force. Actions are more problematic. An opinion, as Mill uses this term, is always true or false; hence, Mill's freedom of opinion is clearly the essential part of intellectual freedom, and the speech with which he is most concerned is that whose normal form is the declarative sentence. With regard to speech, then, Mill means his arguments to encompass a narrower domain than the First Amendment has been read as covering.
There are numerous difficulties with the harm principle; it has some well-known weaknesses (29). Setting these aside for the moment, it yet would be misleading simply to say that the PCPs violate the principle, one and all. Some particular examples certainly do; but it must be noted that the justification sometimes offered for the PCPs is, in part, that they prevent certain alleged harms (30). Where such measures are most likely to fail the test of the harm principle is in its qualifications, rather than in the principle simpliciter. The harms they are meant to protect against are merely constructive, or are not demonstrable. For example, language which is not gender neutral, so-called "sexist" language, is held to cause harm in the form of perpetuation of the subjugation of women. Here it should be noted that not only is the alleged harm constructive, in Mill's sense, and not demonstrable, but the alleged victim is actually a class of persons, rather than a concrete being of the sort who could appear as plaintiff before the bar, as Mill knew it. This illustrates an important point. For the most part, the PCPs are alleged to serve the purpose of promoting good, rather than merely preventing harm, where the goods at which they aim are such things as "diversity," "harmony," "inclusiveness," "multiculturalism," etc., all properties of societies as integral entities, not of their members (31). Mill's theory, on the other hand, is concerned with individuals as individuals (32). His primary object in On Liberty is to establish the limits of governmental power over individual citizens, a manifestation of his fundamental conviction that government and all its apparatus is always a creation of individual persons acting to maintain and enhance their well-being (33). Thus, when Mill speaks of "diversity" in On Liberty, as he sometimes does, he does not mean the term in its currently fashionable sense as denoting variety in race, gender or culture, but as referring to variety in individual modes of life (34).
The advocates of the PCPs do not seem to concern themselves much with the harm principle. In part this may be because they take it to be ill-suited to the needs of the present day, a product of the ethnically and culturally homogeneous and technologically simple society in which Mill lived. They might also reasonably hold that Mill's argument rests upon some naive assumptions; for example, Mill certainly takes a rather strong form-content distinction in speech for granted. But the principal reason they feel themselves free to ignore Mill, I believe, is that they do not share the vision of society, or the theory of human nature which we find in On Liberty. Thus, they might say that if the actions and policies they recommend for American higher education violate the tenets of Mill's great book that only shows the extent to which Mill was in error or has become outmoded.
Even if the PCPs were in certain, irrefutable contravention of Mill's principles, it would not follow that they were, as Dickstein claims, contrary to "any known form of liberalism." Liberalism, as a strain of political philosophy, has a long and venerable history, of which Millian liberalism is but one phase, the penultimate one. Scholars customarily refer to the liberalism which prevails in the present day as "interest group" liberalism. It might also be called "post-modem" liberalism, given that Mill's variety is often called "modem" liberalism. The leading exponent of contemporary liberal theory is probably John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice has been one of the most important and influential works in political and moral philosophy since the Second World War (35). Interest group liberalism, which began to take shape in the US in the 1930s, has been the subject of serious, highly-reputable, critical philosophical scholarship for more than twenty-five years (36).
It is tempting to say that the PCPs are, in fact, the product of interest group liberalism, but it is not possible to do so with any great degree of confidence, because as doctrine, this species of liberalism is particularly ill-defined. Certainly, the PCPs, one and all, seek to advance the interests of a few specially designated groups, and the vision of society as a kind of mosaic that the PCPs present resembles that within interest group liberalism. Moreover, it is characteristic of contemporary liberalism that it emphasizes equality over liberty, while previous incarnations of liberalism did the opposite (37). Interest group liberalism also denies that rationality is the distinctive human capacity (38). It is quite telling, too, that the PCP phenomenon has now led to numerous calls for a radical re-thinking of liberalism per se. Jonathan Alter, for example, a prominent defender of what he calls the liberal "creed," says, "We need to totally redefine what it means to be progressive, liberal, or of the 'left'" (39).
I think that an excellent recommendation, one particularly apposite for those of us in the academic world, where the liberal creed, with some justification, has long dominated (40). I would add that a general beginning for that task might be made by hearkening to the wise counsel of that noted English philosopher of the generation succeeding Mill's, a man who expressed his insights primarily in the form of verse set to music. I refer, of course, to Sir William S. Gilbert, collaborator of Sir Arthur Sullivan. In their Iolanthe there is a particularly delightful song, "When All Night Long a Chap Remains," whose refrain takes note of the remarkable fact
that Nature does contriveFor far too many of us in the present day academic world "liberal" and "conservative," and their cognate terms, denote fundamental categories of thought, rudimentary ideas from which flow inferences of broad scope and compelling force. Thus, we find a review of a book by a colleague of mine which praises the book for its advocacy of some liberal notions, but damns it for its similar treatment of some themes the reviewer finds to be "dangerously conservative" (41). Such is what altogether too often now passes for serious thought among us; it does not even acknowledge that contemporary conservatism is largely a discarded species of liberalism warmed over, a fact which explains Dickstein's "irony" that some conservatives have been "allowed" (out of their cages, we presume) "to emerge as champions of free speech."
that every boy and every girl
that's born into the world alive
is either a little liberal,
or else a conservative.
My reflections on the status of intellectual freedom in American higher education today finally compel me to a melancholy admission. To an important extent, I think, we have gotten just what we have earned. Perhaps the PCPs, more than anything else, are a reflection of the philosophical superficiality of our scholarship and the poverty of its imagination. But then, this may only be the result of that reflection for one scholar, one importantly trained as he was by scholars who were refugees from tyrannies, and who has himself taken Mill to heart, along with another great philosophical work of which Mill would have heartily approved, and which, in some respects represents an extension of Mill's own thought, Ortega Y Gassett's The Revolt of the Masses. In the present day, laments Mill, "the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind (42). Such must inevitably be the result of unbridled egalitarian enthusiasm.