In their handling of controversy surrounding Chemerinsky and Summers, UC’s leaders showed themselves unable or unwilling to defend academic freedom
By Peter Scheer
The best that can be said about the University of California’s leaders is that they are neutral in their spinelessness: in the face of political pressure, they are quick to surrender the university’s academic freedom–its lifeblood—whether that pressure comes from the ideological right or the left.
From the right, UC-Irvine was criticized for its hiring of law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a liberal, as the dean of its new law school. Chancellor Michael Drake, rather than resisting pressure from conservative quarters to politicize a key academic appointment, fired Chemerinsky last week. (Later, apparently realizing that his action would do grave harm to the fledgling law school, Drake went hat-in-hand to Chemerinsky and publicly re-hired him.)
From the left, the UC Regents found themselves under assault for their invitation to Lawrence Summers, prominent economist, former president of Harvard University and US Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, to speak at a regents’ function in Sacramento this week. Some 290 UC faculty members, clearly in need of remedial training in First Amendment principles, signed a petition condemning Summers as a “symbol” of “gender and racial prejudice” and insisting that his speaking engagement be cancelled. The regents, to their great discredit, gave in, withdrawing Summer’s invitation.
These incidents reveal a UC leadership that has clearly lost sight of its mission. Building new campuses, enhancing the diversity of faculty and students, strengthening university finances, and the like: these are all means to an end. That end is not conflict-avoidance or consensus. It is academic excellence in service of —excuse the corniness—the pursuit of truth.
Fundamental to the pursuit of truth is academic freedom—the freedom to consider, and give voice to, all manner of ideas, especially those that are unpopular or outside the mainstream or even subversive. This freedom is fundamental not because all ideas are equally valid—they’re not—but because the validity of an idea can only be determined through free and open debate.
Under the First Amendment, the appropriate response to speech with which one disagrees is more speech, not less. Suppression of speech is always antithetical to First Amendment values. It assumes, erroneously, that the censor is invariably right. Also, it doesn’t work: censorship concedes the moral high ground to the censored, which only increases the power and following of a banished idea.
These principles are so axiomatic that it’s hard to believe that the anti-Summers protest attracted more than a handful of faculty extremists. It is frightening, frankly, to think that several hundred faculty apparently believe that, because they don’t like what Summers has said, or is alleged to have said, that it’s OK to censor him—to deprive him of the opportunity to speak to the regents, and to deprive the regents of the opportunity to hear him—no small loss given Summers’ expertise and unique perspective on issues like university finances, faculty tenure, and long-range planning.
What is it about Summers that so offends the UC faculty petitioners? As president of Harvard, he offended minority faculty by reportedly criticizing the scholarship of African-American professor Cornell West (who later left to teach at Princeton.) And he offended women faculty by suggesting that innate differences between the sexes may be one explanation for why women are underrepresented in careers in mathematics, engineering and the sciences. Although he later apologized for this remark, it ignited a firestorm of faculty discontent that ultimately forced Summers to resign.
But these transgressions, which are highlighted in the petition to the UC regents, hardly seem egregious enough to account for the intensity of the resentment against Summers, at least among college faculty. (He was actually popular at Harvard among students and alumni.) That resentment may have more to do with Summers’ unwillingness to defer to the Harvard faculty, which saw him—no doubt correctly– as a threat to their considerable power and privileges. Viewed in that light, the UC protest is less about gender and race, and more about a special interest group—UC faculty–jockeying to protect its status.
Still, special interests alone can’t do great harm to a great university. They can make demands, but their impact is negligible if the persons entrusted with safeguarding the university’s commitment to academic freedom—the chancellors and the UC Regents—just say no. In the on-again, off-again appointment of Chemerinsky as law school dean, and the canceling of Summers’ speaking engagement, UC’s leaders’ reflex reaction was, instead, to avoid conflict at all costs.
While that impulse is understandable, some things are worth fighting for, principles of academic freedom among them. They must be actively defended, even at the cost of dissension and conflict. That, like it or not, is the UC leaders’ job. Consider them on probation.