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Look to your left, look to your right
In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel astutely observes that in American politics, the positions and tactics of far left and far right are increasingly becoming indistinguishable. Citing the dovetailing attitudes of left and right toward trade restriction, immigration, technology, and the market, Postrel observes that "what all these left-right alliances have in common is a sense of anguish over the open-ended future ... a future too diverse and fluid for critics to comprehend." Her point? The left/right distinction that we so often use to classify and compartmentalize debate is not necessarily the most accurate or informative rubric for understanding either our debates or the nature of the conflict they exemplify. Postrel devotes her book to delineating an alternative distinction that she claims can frequently tell us much more about the philosophical and psychological motivations underlying some of the most contentiously argued issues of our day; we would do better, she suggests, to think in terms of dynamism and stasism than we would to think in terms of left and right. Dynamists are people who are open to change, who welcome movement as both inevitable and good, and who look with consequent optimism toward the future. Stasists, by contrast, fear and resist change; they are likely to exhibit nostalgia for a romanticized, stable past, and they are equally likely to regard the future as that which must be predicted, planned, managed, and controlled. For Postrel, innovation is the provenance of dynamism; the real conservatism, by contrast, is that evinced by stasism--which emanates from the left as well as the right.
Postrel's observations explain a lot about contemporary attitudes toward free speech, especially when that speech is situated in academe. For the past two months and more, the media has regaled us with the details of two scandals centered on two instances of unpopular academic speech: Harvard president Lawrence Summers' question about whether the comparative dearth of women in engineering and the hard sciences may have a biological component, and University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill's comments about the "little Eichmanns" who died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In each instance, we have watched an extended, partisan attack on both the utterances and the individuals who made them. There are those on the right who want to see Churchill fired, and who have succeeded in getting him investigated for academic dishonesty; there are those on the left who want to see Summers ousted, who have pilloried him in the media, and and who have succeeded in staging a vote of no confidence in him at Harvard. As Donald Downs notes in a recent editorial, "Suddenly, academic freedom is besieged from both the left and the right."
Two academics, two unpopular statements, two organized attacks that assume the validity of a tactical, politically motivated censorship: We have right now in academe what we might call a "Postrel moment," an instance when we can observe the denizens of left and right agitating for the same essential thing, the right to monitor and punish others' speech in order to enforce conformity to their own views. Summers' enemies might be horrified to realize they have much in common with Churchill's enemies; Churchill's would hardly see themselves as versions of the shrill ideologues who have attacked Summers. But the family resemblance is there, and the nature of that resemblance is their shared stasism--their fear of difference, of challenge, of dissent, and of where those things might lead if they were given free reign.
It might seem unreasonable to compare Summers--whose remarks were qualified and temperate and hardly incendiary--and Churchill, whose comments were designedly extreme and wilfully provocative. Summers' statements were posed earnestly, in the spirit of a quest for answers to legitimate questions, while Churchill's were an obvious instance of rhetorical agitprop, a patently ideological effort to paint America, and Americans, in the worst possible light. And yet it is important to compare--though not to equate--them, if only because it allows us to see how similarly their critics have responded to them. Summers' opponents want to punish him for asking a question because they fear how that question might be answered; Churchill's critics want to silence him because they don't trust the marketplace of ideas to firmly and decisively expose his rhetoric for the glaring example of bad intellectual faith that it is. In each case, distrust of debate and where it might lead took the form of a desire to punish those who expressed certain threatening thoughts. That desire to punish was in turn the expression of a desire to prevent future articulations of similar thoughts. If it is not possible to erase the comments that Summers and Churchill made, it is certainly possible to respond to their comments in such a way that others will think twice before they make the professionally dangerous mistake of speaking their minds.
Over the last two months, the left and the right have collaborated--however unwittingly--in a campaign to chill the climate of academic debate. As such, they have exposed a lack of faith in both intellectual endeavor and reasoned disagreement that transcends political affiliations and that bespeaks an entirely different order of problem, one that has more to do with the creeping stasism of the academy than with political disagreements within it. The very project of the university--to pursue knowledge, wherever it might lead, and to foster an environment in which ideas are rigorously tested--becomes an impossible joke if the culture of academe is hostile to the inevitably unpredictable and unsettling process of inquiry.
The fight to defend free speech and academic freedom must be conducted in an impartial, nonpartisan way if it is to be an intellectually honest fight. Anything less is hypocrisy. Anything less exposes the university as the scene not of learning, but of lying.
Posted by acta online on April 03, 2005 at April 3, 2005 06:11 AM