Z Magazine: Neoconservatism and the Academic Bill of Rights
By: David Gabbard
Before resigning her post as president of the University of Colorado, Elizabeth Hoffman expressed fears of a “new Mc-Carthyism that endangers academic freedom.” These fears stem from pressures mounted by Colorado Governor Bill Owens and others for Hoffman to fire Professor Ward Churchill for having drawn an analogy between those persons working at the World Trade Center whose jobs contributed to the reproduction of impoverishing and oppressive conditions throughout the world to Adolph Eichman’s complicity in the genocide of Nazi Germany.
For her part, Hoffman deserves praise for not bowing to those pressures, particularly given the timing of the attacks on Churchill. Though Churchill’s “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” originally appeared on September 11, 2001, the attacks against him did not begin until early 2005, a time when many state legislatures (California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, Washington, Florida, Maryland, Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, Oklahoma, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and as many as seven others) began considering passage of “Academic Bill of Rights” legislation modeled on a proposal developed by David Horowitz’s reactionary group Students for Academic Freedom. The assault on Churchill was timed to soften up those states’ legislatures to receive those bills. (At the time of this writing, Georgia has already passed its version of the bill and it virtually mirrors the one developed by Horowitz).Though framed in terms of a student’s right to hear a variety of opinions while not being punished for adhering to their own views, these legislative proposals amount to a thinly veiled affirmative action program for neo-conservative ideologues whose work, until now, has been confined to corporate-funded foundations and think tanks where they are paid to generate ideas and reports in keeping with the views of those who sign their paychecks. Playing on our sensitivities to promote diversity, the neo-conservative movement shamelessly exploits students, with the help of David Horowitz and others, to get their foot in the door of universities, which they consider to be the bastion of “anti-business ideology.” Now that they’ve got public schools chasing test scores and have intimidated the mainstream media into submission, they’ve set their sights on the academy.
If universities can be accused of holding a liberal bias, that’s because enlightenment liberalism, from which the modern university was born, was committed to the pursuit of truth, regardless of how uncomfortable the pursuit of that truth made those in power. This explains why neo-conservatives want to extend their growing hegemony over institutions of higher learning–to eliminate the discomfort we (well, some of us) bring to the powerful.
In academia, we have always tried to protect that pursuit of truth through various peer review processes. Though they do not work perfectly, peer academic review processes for publications and grants have worked reasonably well to ensure that the theories or arguments submitted adhered to professional standards. This has always been especially important within the natural and physical sciences where it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for academics to blatantly falsify (i.e., lie about) their findings. (Yes, there are cases [e.g., eugenics] when those processes did not work very well.) In the social sciences things may be a bit more complicated, but–particularly in the mainstream humanities, social sciences, and professional schools–the right wing would be hard pressed to claim that their professional journals reflect leftist ideology.
While the Academic Bill of Rights defines the mission of the university as “the pursuit of truth, the discovery of new knowledge through scholarship and research, the study and reasoned criticism of intellectual and cultural traditions, the teaching and general development of students to help them become creative individuals and productive citizens of a pluralistic democracy, and the transmission of knowledge and learning to a society at large,” we need to recognize that the neo-conservatives behind this deception don’t play by these rules. If their regard for academic standards even comes close to being as low as their regard for journalistic standards (e.g., Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, O’Reilly, Hannity, Liddy, and most recently Gannon/ Guckert), we should not allow our tendency to value difference get the best of us.
Again, their training within the vast network of foundations, think tanks, and institutes has not prepared them for a world traditionally bound to the objective pursuit of truth. The Bradley Foundation was paying Charles Murray $100,000 a year while he was writing The Bell Curve, which basically argued that the ongoing poverty among African Americans and Latinos can be attributed to their genetically determined intellectual deficits. This argument had a policy implication. Since their poverty was argued to be biologically determined, we should stop spending money on social programs aimed at eliminating poverty among minorities, includ- ing affirmative action.
On this last count, we must recognize the irony that those groups who oppose affirmative action programs for women and minorities now want one for themselves.
The first principle of the ABR declares, “All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.”
How would Fox News respond should the public demand the same standard be applied to journalism by the Federal Communications Commission?
Of course, all of this begs a more fundamental question. If conservative/neo-conservative “scholars” share the same commitment to the pursuit of truth as other university faculty, why would they need an affirmative action program to begin with? The answer is obvious. They don’t share that commitment. Just ask members of today’s scientific community who must now compete with corporate-funded research in shaping state and federal policies on issues as great as global warming. Furthermore, how seriously can we take the ABR’s belief that “academic freedom and intellectual diversity are values indispensable to the American university,” when they demonstrate so little commitment to those same values in neo-conservative media outlets such as Fox News and the Washington Times?
We also find ourselves perched on the edge of a descent back to the Middle Ages and the struggle between faith and reason. While reason may appear to be losing the political battles in the world beyond academe, placing democracy at risk, we can’t afford to lose this battle. While Ward Churchill’s spontaneous thoughts after the tragic events of 9/11 may have left himself (and us) vulnerable to these attacks, we should not be so na
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