...I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.
How odd that a man whose own behavior that day at the Placement Office more closely resembled that of Birmingham's Bull Connor—replete with police dogs, hidden photographers, and clubwielding police—should invoke the name of Martin Luther King, who would have been there on the steps with the students.
The idea that one who commits civil disobedience must "willingly" accept punishment is an oft-repeated but fallacious notion. Silber repeatedly confuses "community" and "society" with government. He talks of "refusing to accept the penalties that go with violating the law" as showing "contempt for organized society." No, it is showing contempt for organized government, and that is justified when the government is behaving as badly as this one is. He talks of "the community...arresting and punishing them." It is not the community that arrests and punishes, but the legal authorities. The reason for showing contempt for government, for defying the law, is precisely because government and law show contempt for the lives and liberties of the community.
Silber talks of the "social contract" that we are supposed to have made with our government. Of course the government would like us to believe that such a contract exists, one binding us to obedience of the law and allowing the government to do as it pleases. It is as if Silber has not read, or has forgotten David Hume, back in the eighteenth century, who brought Locke back to earth and history by pointing out: "Almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in history, have been founded originally, either on usurpation or conquest, or both, without any pretense of a fair consent or voluntary subjection of the people." Silber talks as if we have some sort of obligation, based on a voluntary agreement, to obey the leaders who have taken us again and again into war, who have allowed a few to monopolize the enormous wealth of this country. Hume, a conservative but honest man, told it like it is: "Is there anything discoverable in all these events but force and violence? Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of?"
What Silber calls "civilization," what he thinks we have a "social contract" to obey, is the state and its agents. What he calls "barbarism" is the courage of those who resist the state. "It is important that civilization not acquiesce to barbarism...civilization doesn't abdicate before the threat of barbarism; rather it calls the police." When antiwar protestors represent "barbarism" and the Tactical Police represent "civilization," then we certainly need what Confucius suggested, a "rectification of names."
Here is Silber again (at the same press conference reported in the official Currents, from which the other quotations in this article are taken):
We had recourse to the police power of the state. Every civilized country in the world has found it necessary to rely on police power to protect itself against the use of force and violence by individual members of that community. When one calls upon the properly designated institution to exercise that force, it can certainly be an expression of civilization.
In Silber's inaugural address, on "The Pollution of Time," he deplored ignorance of history. But does he not know from history that the "civilized" countries have used massive violence against one another (Guernica, Dachau, Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Budapest, My Lai) and the most brutal force against movements of protest and resistance inside their borders? Does he not know from history that the "properly designated" institutions have engaged in a thousand times more force and violence than any individuals or any social movement of opposition?
If the word "civilization" can be given some positive moral content, it should mean the attempts of man to create a society in which the violence of war, and persecution by class or race or sex, are resisted and restrained, so that they can be ultimately eliminated. By such a definition, students blocking the recruiting of soldiers to kill Vietnamese peasants truly represent civilization; those who attack them, and those who order the attack, represent barbarism.
Does John Silber—bright, well-read, articulate, energetic—not understand these points about history, about nation-states, about the law, about morality, about war, about social protest? We are always surprised when educated people don't understand simple, clear concepts, but that is because the brightest people strain their perceptions through a mesh of interest, position, role. It didn't matter that McGeorge Bundy was "brilliant" from elementary school throughout graduate school and beyond; his vision was distorted by his position in the Establishment, his closeness to power, and he ended up supporting the most stupid, as well as the most immoral of policies in Vietnam.
Silber came to Boston University with strong ideas about academic "excellence," and enormous drive, determined to make the University "first-rate." But education is not a technological problem; it is more a matter of human relationships and moral concern. Academic excellence, in a context of amorality, does not have much meaning. Mussolini made the trains run on time; but the importance of that petered out on the sands of Ethiopia. Boston University cannot be a place of moral excellence, if it is run by a dictatorship, however efficient that dictatorship is.
What would a truly free campus be like? It would give absolute freedom to the exchange of ideas, of all kinds. It would insist on its own freedom from the power of government, of donors and trustees. It would not bow to law and authority; not to the authority of the President of the United States or to the authority of the President of the University. Its academic decisions would be made by faculty and students; staff and maintenance workers would share in decisions about the allocation of the university's money. The president and deans would carry out the decisions, as administrators constantly accountable to faculty, students and staff. The university's courses would be open to anyone, whether they could pay or not.
A truly free university would not celebrate obedience, for obedience is what has enabled governments to send young men by the millions to die in war. It would celebrate resistance and disobedience, because the world, so full of authoritarianism, so full of policemen, so racked with injustice and violence, needs rebels badly. It would admire not that technical intellectual efficiency which ignores the fate of human beings far away or near, but that combination of sense and sensibility one finds in good people everywhere, educated or not. It would understand that the most important thing about a university is not its programs or curricula or any of the accoutrements of the upward-striving educator, but its soul.
9
How Free Is Higher Education?
I was invited in 1991 to write this essay as part of a symposium on the university for the Gannett Center Journal, which came out of Columbia University. There had been going on for some time a hot national debate on "multi-culturalism," on freedom of speech in the university, on "political correctness." As a result of the movements of the Sixties, changes had taken place in American education, and some of these changes were causing a kind of hysteria among conservatives. I thought I would add my bit to the debate, based on my own experience in higher education.
Education has always inspired fear among those who want to keep the existing distributions of power and wealth as they are.
In my thirty years of teaching—in a small southern college, in a large northeastern university—I have often observed that fear. And I think I understand what it is based on. The educational environment is unique in our society: It is the only situation where an adult, looked up to as a mentor, is alone with a group of young people for a protracted and officially sanctioned period of time and can assign whatever reading he or she chooses, and discuss with these young people any subject under the sun. The subject may be defined by the curriculum, by the catalog course description, but this is a minor impediment to a bold and imaginative teacher, especially in literature, philosophy and the social sciences, where there are unlimited possibilities for free discussion of social and political
issues.
That would seem to be an educational ideal, an arena for free discussion, assuming a diversity of viewpoints from a variety of teachers, of the most important issues of our time. Yet it is precisely that situation, in the classrooms of higher education, which frightens the guardians of the status quo.
They declare their admiration for such freedom in principle, and suggest that radicals are insufficiently grateful for its existence. But when teachers actually use this freedom, introducing new subjects, new readings, outrageous ideas, challenging authority, criticizing "Western civilization," amending the "canon" of great books as listed by certain educational authorities of the past, then the self-appointed guardians of "high culture" become enraged.
Early in my teaching career I decided that I would make the most of the special freedom that is possible in a classroom. I would introduce what I felt to be the most important, and therefore the most controversial, questions in my class.
When I was assigned, as a young professor at Spelman College, a college for black women in Atlanta, a course in "Constitutional Law," I changed the course title to "Civil Liberties" and departed from the canonized recital of Supreme Court cases. I did not ignore the most important of these cases, but I also talked with the students about social movements for justice and asked what role these movements played in changing the environment within which Supreme Court decisions were made.
When I taught American history, I ignored the canon of the traditional textbook, in which the heroic figures were mostly presidents, generals and industrialists. In those texts, wars were treated as problems in military strategy and not in morality; Christopher Columbus and Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt were treated as heroes in the march of democracy, with not a word from the objects of their violence.
I suggested that we approach Columbus and Jackson from the perspective of their victims, that we look at the magnificent feat of the transcontinental railroad from the viewpoint of the Irish and Chinese laborers who, in building it, died by the thousands.
Was I committing that terrible sin which is arousing the anger of today's fundamentalists: "politicizing the curriculum"? Is there any rendition of constitutional law, any recounting of American history that can escape being political—that is, expressing a political point of view? To treat Theodore Roosevelt as a hero (which is usually not done overtly, but in an expression of quiet admiration)—is that less "political" than pointing to his role as an early imperialist, a forerunner of a long string of crude U.S. interventions in the Caribbean?
I have no doubt that I was taking a political stand when, in the early 1960s, I expressed respect for my students who missed classes to demonstrate in downtown Atlanta against racial segregation. In doing that, was I being more political than the fundamentalist Allan Bloom, at Cornell, who pointed with pride to the fact that the students in his seminar on Plato and Aristotle stuck to their studies and refused to participate in the social conflict outside the seminar room?
In my teaching I never concealed my political views: my detestation of war and militarism, my anger at radial inequality, my belief in a democratic socialism, in a rational and just distribution of world's wealth. To pretend to an "objectivity" that was neither possible nor desirable seemed to me dishonest.
I made it clear to my students at the start of each course that they would be getting my point of view on the subjects under discussion, that I would try to be fair to other points of view, that I would scrupulously uphold their right to disagree with me.
My students had a long experience of political indoctrination before they arrived in my class—in the family, in high school, in movies and television. They would hear viewpoints other than mine in other courses, and for the rest of their lives. I insisted on my right to enter my opinions in the marketplace of ideas, so long dominated by orthodoxy.
Surely the expression of "political views" (what is just, or unjust? what can citizens do?) is inevitable in education. It may be done overtly, honestly, or it may be there subtly. But it is always there, however the textbook, by its very bulk and dullness, pretends to neutrality, however noncommittal is the teacher.
It is inevitably there because all education involves selection—of events, of voices, of books—and any insistence on one list of great books or great figures or great events is a partial (in both senses of that term) rendering of our cultural heritage.
Therefore it seems to me that the existence of free expression in higher education must mean the opportunity for many points of view, many political biases, to be presented to students. This requires a true pluralism of readings, ideas, viewpoints—a genuinely free marketplace of thought and culture. Let both Shakespeare and Wole Soyinka, Bach and Leonard Bernstein, Dickens and W.E.B. Du Bois, John Stuart Mill and Zora Neale Hurston, Rembrandt and Picasso, Plato and Lao-tzu, Locke and Marx, Aeschylus and August Wilson, Jane Austen and Gabriel Garcia Marquez be available to students.
Such a free marketplace of ideas does not depend essentially on "the curriculum." How many words have been wasted moving those empty shells around the debating table! What is crucial is the content of those shells, which depends on who the teachers are and who the students are. A thoughtful teacher can take a course labeled "Western Civilization" and enlarge its content with an exciting global perspective. Another teacher can be given a course grandly called "World Civilization" and give the student an eclectic, limp recounting of dull events and meaningless dates.
That pluralism in thought that is required for truly free expression in higher education has never been realized. Its crucial elements—an ideologically diverse faculty, a heterogeneous student body (in class, race, sex—words that bring moans from the keepers of the "higher culture")— have always been under attack from outside and from inside the colleges and universities.
McCarthyism, in which the corporate nature of academic institutions revealed itself in the surrender of university administrators to government inquisitors (see Ellen Schrecker's book No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism in the Universities for the details), was only the most flagrant of the attacks on freedom of expression. More subtle, more persistent, has been the control of faculty appointments, contract renewals and tenure (inevitably with political considerations) by colleagues, but especially by administrators, who are the universities' links with the dominant forces of American society—the government, the corporations, the military.
Boston University, where I taught for many years, is not too far from typical, with its panoply of military and government connections— ROTC chapters for every military service, former government officials given special faculty posts, the board of trustees dominated by corporate executives, a president eager to curry favor with powerful politicos. Almost all colleges and universities are organized as administrative hierarchies in which a president and trustees, usually well connected to wealthy and important people in the outside world, make the critical decisions as to who may enjoy the freedom of the classroom to speak to the young people of the new generation.
Higher education, while enjoying some special privileges, is still part of the American system, which is an ingenious, sophisticated system of control. It is not totalitarian; what permits it to be called a democracy is that it allows apertures of liberty on the supposition that this will not endanger the basic contours of wealth and power in the society. It trusts that the very flexibility of a partially free system will assure its survival, even contribute to its strength.
Our government is so confident of its power that it can risk allowing some political choice to the people, who can vote for Democrats or Republicans but find huge obstacles of money and bureaucracy if they want an alternative. Our corporations are so wealthy that they can afford some distribution of wealth to a supportive middle class, but not to the 30 or 40 million people who live in the cellars of society.
The system can allow special space for free expression in its cultural institutions: the theater, the arts, the media. But the size of that space is controll
ed by money and power; the profit motive limits what is put on stage or screen; government officials dominate the informational role of the news media.
Yes, there is, indeed, a special freedom of expression in the academy. How can I at Boston University, or Noam Chomsky at MIT, or David Montgomery at Yale, deny that we have had more freedom in the university than we would have in business or other professions? But those who tolerate us know that our numbers are few, that our students, however excited by new ideas, go out into a world of economic pressures and exhortations to caution. And they know too that they can point to us as an example of the academy's openness to all ideas.
True, there is a tradition of academic freedom, but it is based on a peculiar unspoken contract. The student, in return for the economic security of a career and several years with some degree of free intellectual play, is expected upon graduation to become an obedient citizen, participating happily in the nation's limited pluralism (be a Republican or a Democrat, but please, nothing else).
The boundaries for free expression in the university, though broader than in the larger society, are still watched carefully. When that freedom is used, even by a small minority, to support social change considered dangerous by the guardians of the status quo, the alarm goes out: "The Communists are infiltrating our institutions"; "Marxists have taken over the curriculum"; "feminists and black militants are destroying classical education."