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Rehearsing intolerance
Earlier this year, University of Wisconsin law professor Leonard Kaplan found himself at the center of one of those campus speech scandals that have become so regular and so stylized that they conform to a predictable script.
The script goes something like this: Professor makes a relevant comment in class on a hot-button issue such as race or sex; someone in the class takes offense and complains; administrators get hold of the issue, and so does the media; scandal ensues. The truth is often lost as concern centers less on the facts than on the feelings of those who were wounded by the professor's words; academic freedom often suffers as administrators rush to quell bad publicity and appease the aggrieved parties, often by censuring the professor. Apologies and punishment tend to be emphasized over clarification and affirmation of robust debate, and the damage is at once cumulative and incalculable.
Nobody wins in such scenarios--not professors, whose ability to handle controversial matters in class is harmed; not students, who are taught to believe they are entitled to avoid difficult ideas; not schools, which undermine academic freedom by indulging ill-advised efforts to police thought; not our society, which depends upon our colleges and universities to model and sustain free inquiry.
And yet many academics have been down this road. Renowned historian and former Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom was one of the first--in 1987, students in his U.S. history course complained to the administration and the press about his "racial insensitivity," objecting to the syllabus and to comments they alleged that he made. Most recently, there is Brandeis politics professor Donald Hindley. A popular teacher for forty-seven years, Hindley's professional record is solid. But Brandeis investigated him, sentenced him to sensitivity training, placed a monitor in his classroom, and threatened to terminate him after a small number of students complained that Hindley's classroom speech had been discriminatory (other students, and Hindley himself, strongly disagreed with the complainants' version of events). The damage such episodes do to careers--and to the learning environment--is tremendous. One need only look at what the Harvard faculty did to Lawrence Summers after he offered some politically incorrect thoughts on gender to grasp the immense punitive energy that can swell, unchecked, in academic settings when certain topics are raised.
The point here is not that anything goes in the classroom--when professors introduce irrelevant material into class, or when they inject politics in inappropriate ways, students should complain, and administrators should act. But, by the same token, administrators should be working harder to avoid rushing to judgment, to underscore the intellectual necessity of vibrant exchange, and to sidestep the anti-intellectual pitfalls inherent in the idea that hurtful speech should be punished.
The fact that administrators so regularly do not do these things--and that, as a result, cases such as those described above continue to occur on campus after campus, with chilling regularity and predictability, tells us something vital about the manner in which higher education has failed in its mission to promote, preserve, and protect that most liberal of values and that most essential component of liberal education: the free and robust exchange of ideas.
Kaplan was attacked for comments he made about the difficulties some immigrant groups encounter within America's formalist legal system. Outraged by the examples he used to make his point, students circulated a tendentious and unverifiable account of Kaplan's statements. While Wisconsin scrambled to apologize and to accommodate (scheduling discussion forums to address the issue before all the facts were in), Kaplan was pilloried by the media. Kaplan published a reasoned refutation of the accusations, denying that he had said some of the things he was accused of saying, and explaining how other comments had been taken out of context. He also apologized for any pain he caused. But by then, the damage was done.
"There is a fundamental distinction between causing offense gratuitously and invidiously, and causing offense as the by-product of the fair-minded pursuit of truth or constructive criticism," argued a group of Wisconsin faculty:
A university of the caliber of UW-Madison, with its long history and tradition of protecting academic freedom in the 'fearless sifting and winnowing of ideas' for the pursuit of truth, must take this distinction seriously, lest it surrenders its intellectual integrity. ... We fear, however, that the crucial distinction between gratuitous offense and provocative argument has been lost in the public furor over the Kaplan case. We are dismayed at the law school's public response to this dispute, as it has addressed only the school's commitment to sensitivity and diversity, while saying nothing about that institution's fiduciary obligation to train minds to grapple with various sides of controversial and difficult issues. Without serious consideration of the importance and meaning of academic freedom on campus among the members of the university community, how can freedom prevail in the face of pressures from both left and right to make universities conform to one or another model of political correctness?
Kaplan was comparatively lucky. When the uproar died down, his career and his reputation were still intact. But it could easily have been different--and for many, it has been very different indeed.
In an eloquent, searching speech republished last week in Inside Higher Ed, Kaplan outlines what is at stake in cases like his:
We are all harmed if professors avoid controversial material in deference to some accepted or imposed correctness or an apprehension that a topic may offend sensitivities. The law inevitably must resolve questions that many find offensive. If law professors avoid these questions, they no longer teach law. Most of us want security and to be left alone. Learning to question assumptions and values can be painful. But if professors avoid certain issues because they might offend someone's sensitivities, we will cease to be a university in all but name.
Kaplan's piece is well worth reading in full, both for the insights it gives into the uncomfortable paradoxes of genuine pluralism, as well as for the irony it reveals about his own experience: When law students attacked Kaplan for his comments about embattled immigrants, they were revealing their own failure to understand the lessons he was trying to teach that day about how tough it is to strike a balance between respect for cultural difference and the democratic imperative of fair and impartial law.
Posted by acta online on December 18, 2007 at December 18, 2007 03:18 PM
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