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Academic Freedom in the Wired World: Political Extremism, Corporate Power, and the University

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If you are unsure exactly what "academic freedom" means, this book will probably leave you more confused than ever. Even if you are an academic freedom wonk like me, the promised "wired world" revelations really comprise only one of the ten chapters, and, as might be expected with emerging issues, their discussion remains limited, hypothetical, and speculative.

And the book is an unpleasant read.

The text displays more errors than one would expect from a university press, some typographic, others editorial (especially numerous redundancies) and suffers from a writing style that yoyos between proper legalese ("catalytic," "dispositive") and hyperbolic journalese ("surprisingly," "strikingly," "shockingly," and the all purpose "increasingly"). Professor O'Neil deploys the empty "troubling," "troubled," or "deeply troubling" at least 30 times in myriad contexts (he uses "myriad" over a dozen times). If only his editors had applied a healthy dose of Strunk's dicta #13, "Omit needless words" and #12, "Put statements in positive form" as O'Neil dilates on what is "not slow" or "not obscure," and what happens "not infrequently." In O'Neil's journalese, boring "Pennsylvania" becomes "The Keystone State" and dull "California" becomes "The Golden State," locutions more appropriate for Newsweek. How strange it is to read that "[t]he First Amendment expressly protects only freedom of speech and of the press, and the right of the people `peaceably to assemble, and petition the Government for a redress of grievances.'" Certainly Professor O'Neil is aware of the establishment clause ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;") since he refers to it elsewhere.

This book is larded with anecdotes, but anecdotes are so . . . anecdotal. Sometimes they are hearsay, other times they are incomplete or even contradictory. And why does Professor O'Neil select the tales he does and remain coy about others? Academic freedom discussions are necessarily anecdotal since they usually involve a legal or administrative response to unique circumstances, but O'Neil tells us the same anecdote two and three times as though we had not just read it in the last chapter. On page 95, he asserts that in a week after 9/11, a professor "shocked his community college class by accusing his Muslim students of `killing five thousand people . . . .'" O'Neil seems to have forgotten that back on page 81 he presented the same story (though with less drama) as "reportedly" and eventually dilutes as "unsubstantiated." On page 262, O'Neil tells the story a third time only now "[the professor] never made the inflammatory statements" at all. However, the professor was placed on leave for being "less than sensitive." Curiously, Professor O'Neil opposes David Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights for fear that its call for intellectual plurality and diversity will "inhibit the rich dialogue that must take place in the classroom," What rich dialogue is there when teachers can be suspended for being "not fully sensitive?" It is just this kind of selective blindness that has called down the public censure he finds "ominous," yet Professor O'Neil dismisses or ignores the catalytic events that brought these new challenges to academic freedom. He mentions, but never discusses, university speech codes--the lay reader would have no idea what he's referring to; he makes no mention of the Berkeley Academic Senate's revised academic freedom definition which permits professorial advocacy in the classroom regarding controverted issues (such advocacy is enthusiastically endorsed by current AAUP president Cary Nelson). O'Neil refers to the necessary "dialogue" but what students complain about is a liberal and sociological monologue. My own well-documented brush with academic freedom involved a committee's attempt to hijack an entire college curriculum by forcing, for eight years, every faculty member to take a loyalty oath and "develop a knowledge and understanding of race, class, and gender issues" in every course offered by the college (including Calculus, Kafka, and Ornamental Horticulture). O'Neil is silent on these (if I may) "deeply troubling" excesses. He speaks approvingly of Alan Kors's and Harvey Silverglate's splendid The Shadow University, then goes on to dismiss most of what it documents. The curious reader is directed to www.indoctrinateu.com and www.thefire.org and www.noindoctrination.org for copious evidence of what O'Neil doesn't want to talk about.

Even after grudgingly acknowledging the liberal predominance on college faculties (a ratio of 30-1 in some disciplines, notably those which most deal with controversial issues), O'Neil faults NoIndoctrination.org for publishing mostly complaints about liberal professors. What else? Where would students find a conservative professor about whom to complain? Luann Wright's NoIndoctrination.org, in my experience, is an invaluable academic freedom resource as well as the most scrupulously vetted of all the teacher evaluation sites. O'Neil also asserts that most postings on RateMyProfessors.com are negative when the most casual look shows smiley faces outnumbering frowny faces 10-1. So although O'Neil purports to investigate "the wired world," his knowledge of that world seems preliminary and skewed.

Eventually, O'Neil's real agenda is exposed through his own anecdotes. In four separate places, Professor O'Neil relates three different cases in which Fox News's Bill O'Reilly defended academic freedom. Each time, Professor O'Neil expresses his astonishment. O'Neil says O'Reilly defending academic freedom is "truly startling" and elsewhere "striking, given the political creed of the speaker." Why is it "striking" when a conservative defends academic freedom? O'Neil is equally amazed that other conservatives, "Rush Limbaugh, Neal Bortz [sic], Sean Hannity, Alan Combs [sic]" have been "strangely silent on national security issues and have seldom pilloried or scape-goated left-leaning scholars . . . ." Perhaps what's really strange is how little O'Neil seems to know about conservative values (and the spelling of conservatives' names, although Alan Colmes would resist being called a conservative) and how obdurate he is about his own stereotypes.

Professor O'Neil spends a fair amount of time on the case of Holocaust denier Arthur Butz who teaches electrical engineering. O'Neil explains that Butz continues to enjoy his teaching position because he is careful about keeping his personal opinions about the Holocaust out of his electrical engineering classroom. While condemning Butz's personal view, O'Neil sees his case as a moral victory for academic freedom and the necessary tolerance for even abhorrent views in the university's "quest for truth." Not really. Butz's case is not a victory for academic freedom because his opinions are not offered in academia. His case is a victory for academic responsibility which calls for electrical engineering classes to be about . . . electrical engineering, not European history. Or taken another way, it is a victory for the academic freedom of students (a concept Professor O'Neil finds . . . troubling) to receive the course described in the catalog. O'Neil even suggests that if Butz were teaching European history and expressed his denial belief, he would be removed as unfit. So his bottom line is: trust us, the system works. But it doesn't. Academic frauds like Ward Churchill prosper because of a congenial, institutionalized, dominant ideology. His academic sins were indulged, even encouraged, until his "insensitive" remarks made him radioactive. Where was the "quest for truth" in the Larry Summers case? Summers was condemned for heresy just as surely as Galileo. The taxpayer looks at the disconnect between high-minded sanctimony and actual practice and asks, "What the hell am I paying for?" And with good reason. The model for education today is not to train the intellect or educate the sensibilities but to shape social and political attitudes, an activity conducted by college professors behind the veils of academic freedom and tenure. But historically, academic freedom was yoked with academic responsibility, as the AAUP's 1915 "Declaration of Principles" makes abundantly clear:

"The teacher ought also to be especially on his guard against taking unfair advantage of the students' immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher's own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters of question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness in judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own. It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues."

Is this the experience of college students today? Hardly. Even Professor O'Neil admits that the AAUP's own committee on academic responsibility withered away and "no longer exists." If you are still curious about what "academic freedom" means today, FIRE, NoIndoctrination.org, and Indoctrinate U expose what the glossy college brochures conceal, and if the public now demands a look inside the sausage factory, academics have no one to blame but themselves.