YET ANOTHER RECRUIT TO THE CAUSE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Saturday, August 24, 2002

John K. Wilson, who never worried about academic freedom in the universities when it was conservatives who were silenced, is now very afraid because, he believes, opponents of the war on terror are singled out for oppression. Well, the more recruits for liberty the better, no matter how late they decide to join the party.

Wilson, a graduate student at Illinois State University who is writing a dissertation on academic freedom, announced in an e-mail earlier this week the formation of a new Web site, collegefreedom.org, dedicated to the subject. His capsule summaries of a wide variety of incidents in the past year or two are a useful guide to further research.

But further research is definitely recommended, because Wilson sees everything from his own narrow perspective. He published a book called The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education in 1995. I was a graduate student, at the University of Minnesota, from 1988 to 1992 and there was nothing mythical about it.

How pervasive the pressure was to conform to a leftist orthodoxy depended on what department you were in, or whose courses you took, but it was unmistakable.

Wilson maintains, for instance, that there is a ``much stronger regime of censorship against anti-war views in academia'' than against those who support the war. If matters appear otherwise, he says, it is because ``conservatives on college campuses have a much more extensive network for reporting incidents of censorship,'' and so it is likely that ``these reports represent (or even overrepresent) the cases of pro-war or conservative speech being repressed.''

Could be, though I don't know how anybody would be able to make quantitative estimates. Classroom censorship is often self-censorship, because professors at public universities have strong legal protection of their First Amendment right to express controversial views. But who wants to spend months or years in litigation defending them?

Ken Hearlson, a professor of government at Orange Coast Community College, was suspended for 11 weeks after Muslim students accused him of calling them terrorists. ``No due process, nothing,'' Hearlson says. After a lengthy investigation, virtually all the specific charges were found to be unsubstantiated.

The place to go for further research is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which has been active in many of the cases that Wilson discusses. Since its start in 1999, it has played a role in more than 600 cases, including Hearlson's. FIRE's site, thefire.org, features links to original documents in its cases -- press releases, e-mails, legal briefs -- so readers can judge the facts rather than the spin.

Curiously, Wilson mentions FIRE hardly at all, though the organization's role is often prominent in the media coverage he does refer to and academics normally cite original sources when they can. He simply lumps it in with the conservative network he refers to, though FIRE is not conservative in any plausible sense of the word.

For example, FIRE is active in the case of computer science professor Sami Al-Arian, whom the University of South Florida announced in December it was firing. The grounds on which the university claims to have acted, FIRE's legal analysts say, are so broad that they would support virtually any professor's firing for unpopular speech, and therefore the university's action is unconstitutional.

This should not be construed as support for Al-Arian's views. As Wilson notes in his chapter on Al-Arian, the professor wrote to a friend in 1995, shortly after a terrorist attack killed 19 Israeli soldiers, ``The link with the brothers in Hamas is very good and making steady progress . . . I call upon you to try to extend true support to the jihad effort so that operations such as these can continue.''

Al-Arian, Wilson says, has always defended the right of Palestinians to attack Israeli soldiers. Furthermore, firing professors because they allegedly support terrorism faces the problem of defining what terrorism is. ``One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter,'' Wilson adds.

In relation to a demonstration at the University of California at Berkeley by Students for Justice in Palestine, Wilson also says, ``The 'occupation' of a campus building by a group in a nonviolent protest is not a crime.'' Yes, it is, although universities normally back off pressing charges. On the other hand, he condemns as bigotry the decision of a campus Christian group not to allow a lesbian student to be elected to office in the group.

You might agree or disagree with Wilson's positions; it's just that you always know which way he's going to jump. That said, it's good he's finally recognized there's a problem.

For Immediate Release

August 20, 2002

Contact: John K. Wilson, 309-452-2006, collegefreedom@yahoo.com

Academic Freedom Report Lists 10 Top Threats to Intellectual Freedom

As colleges start a new academic year, a report on academic freedom in America (available at www.collegefreedom.org) identifies the leading dangers to intellectual freedom on college campuses, with the reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks leading the list of violations of academic freedom. The "2001-02 Report on Academic Freedom" is a comprehensive report on academic freedom in America during the past year, and details hundreds of incidents at colleges around the country.

The report marks the launch of a new website devoted to academic freedom, www.collegefreedom.org. The www.collegefreedom.org website provides information on the history, law, and current controversies involving academic freedom. The website includes sections on the internet, religion, legal issues, student academic freedom, faculty academic freedom, freedom of the college press, links, and an extensive bibliography about academic freedom.

John K. Wilson, www.collegefreedom.org creator and author of this "2001-02 Report on Academic Freedom," is a graduate student in the Department of Educational Administration and Foundations at Illinois State University, where he is writing a dissertation on the history of academic freedom. He serves as editor for the newsletter of Chicago Media Watch (www.chicagomediawatch.org) and is the author of three books, including The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education (Duke University Press, 1995). Wilson also wrote the "State of Academic Freedom 1995" report for Teachers for a Democratic Culture (available at www.collegefreedom.org/95tdc.htm).

For more information, contact John K. Wilson at collegefreedom@yahoo.com or 309-452-2006.

Thanks for writing the column; here's the letter I wrote in reply, followed by some other notes to you:

Linda Seebach (Opinion, August 28) criticizes me and my website, www.collegefreedom.org, as a post-Sept. 11 latecomer to the cause of academic freedom. This simply isn't true: my 1995 book, The Myth of Political Correctness, sharply criticizes those who restrict the free speech of conservatives. My argument, then as now, is that the greatest threats to academic freedom still come from those who limit the free speech of leftists. Complaining about my "narrow perspective," Seebach uses her own narrow perspective during graduate school to make sweeping claims about left-wing thought police. We should oppose all attempts to limit academic freedom, whether liberals or conservatives are the victims. But in an era of "patriotic correctness," when a professor in Florida is fired for expressing controversial ideas, and conservatives file lawsuits to stop North Carolina students from reading the Koran, Seebach should be telling her own ideological allies to defend academic freedom, not lecturing me for trying to educate the public.

John K. Wilson

1205 N. Walnut St.

Normal, Illinois 61761

309-452-2006

I don't mention FIRE much, because I prefer to rely on media reports rather than advocacy groups whenever I can (as is true of the AAUP, who I don't mention much). I do prominently link to FIRE on my website. I do consider them a conservative group for three reasons: 1) their advisory board includes some conservatives such as Herbert London, who denounced academic freedom in the 1980s; FIRE's board does include a few libertarian-left thinkers like Nat Hentoff, but no one who shares my view about the conservative threats to academic freedom; 2) FIRE's founders Charles Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate have repeatedly denounced liberals as the overwhelming threat to academic freedom (and their book is glorified in conservative circles), as have FIRE's other staff; 3) FIRE emphasizes threats to conservative speech far more than threats to liberal speech. Take a look at my report: almost every single attack on conservatives that I list gets heavy coverage from FIRE, while threats to liberals rarely get mentioned.

It's true that FIRE does very good work, and generally I support them (with a few exceptions, like the Harvard rape rules and the lesbian ban that you mention [I'd like to hear why it's okay for a student groups to ban student leaders based on sexual orientation]). However, I still think it's acceptable to call them "conservative," just as I would call the ACLU "liberal" despite its defending the rights of Nazis and having a right-wing position on campaign finance. My complaint is not with the existence of FIRE, but with the lack of a similarly well-financed liberal group that would defend academic freedom and focus on the cases they overlook.

(By the way, FIRE did defend Al-Arian strongly at first; now that the excuse for firing him has been changed to terrorism, they seem to be backing off a little. We'll see if they keep it up.)

You are correct about the difficulty of quantitative estimates, and the problem of unreported cases. But I try to uncover every possible case listed in the media, using advocacy groups and NEXIS searches, and I think it's worthwhile to have such a report. And based on my list, the firings in academia were 2-0 against "radical" views, temporary suspensions were roughly even, and intimidation by trustees and politicians is strongly against leftist views. Measuring unpublished cases of censorship is much harder to determine, but I don't think you can assume that only conservatives self-censor (in fact, your experience is graduate school is, I suspect, rather universal among any students with strong views).