Red Scare: free speech is costing a career

[emma_goldman]

http://www.yalehera ld.com/article- p.php?Article= 4796

When free speech costs a career

How profs' political advocacy outside academia can threaten
their success within it.

BY ALEX HEMMER

On Feb. 17, 2003, Juan Cole posted a snarky, strident, and
altogether typical comment to his blog:

If Bush had been smart, his first move after Afghanistan
would have been to throw his muscle around and settle the
Palestine issue by forcing an Israeli withdrawal from the
occupied territories. Apparently he has fallen for a line
from the neocons in his administration that they can deliver
the Jewish vote to him in 2004 if only he kisses Sharon's ass.

A tenured professor in Middle East studies at the University
of Michigan, Cole has published books, articles, and reviews
about the history of the region. But he is also part of a
growing cohort of academics for whom the urge to say
something in a more immediate, more public, more
consequential way has proven hard to resist. Professors have
always been a part of public debate; ever since the New
Deal, the academy has served as policymaker and social
critic, as an integral part of the discussion over right and
wrong.

The recent explosion of professors using their academic
bully pulpits to expound on everything from federal
sentencing law to the need for a Palestinian state raises
questions of responsibility and consequence. Every year,
more professors join the blogosphere, expanding into a
medium that lets them write anything about anything and
makes them advocates as well as teachers.

As the freedom to speak out has grown, however, so have the
questions about what a professor should be saying to the
world. More and more academics seem to feel they are walking
a fine line between speaking out and shutting up; free and
outspoken speech can, perhaps, have its consequences.

They say those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. But,
increasingly, it seems that professors are choosing to live
in glass houses-the better to speak to a wider audience, to
effect more change, to have a greater impact on the world.
Should they be worrying about the glass breaking under their
feet?

Six years ago, a scientist named Mazin Qumsiyeh was hired by
the Yale School of Medicine as director of cytogenetic
services, a post that placed him in a position of
responsibility over many of the school's genetic labs. Dr.
Qumsiyeh had been born a Lutheran in Palestine and, when he
wasn't at the lab in New Haven, was working as the national
treasurer of Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return
Coalition, and as an advocate for a single-state solution to
the conflict in the Middle East.

In the summer of 2003, Qumsiyeh found himself at the center
of a firestorm of controversy for sending an e-mail to a
Yale anti-war group listing the membership roster of the
Yale Friends for Israel and labeling it a "pro-war cabal."
YFI members protested and Qumsiyeh issued an apology, but
the issue lingered; many students were concerned that a Yale
professor would express such an extreme opinion in such a
public way.

But free speech is protected in the academy, and while ITS
investigated how Qumsiyeh obtained the e-mail addresses in
the first place, there were no further inquiries. No one
disputed his right to speak out against a war he believed
was crippling his country.

Looking back on the incident, Qumsiyeh still sees it as
entitled free speech: "In a democratic and free society it
is actually the duty of all people regardless of their
profession to participate in public discourse and this is
especially true for intellectuals and academics," he said.
"Academicians can and do balance career, civic
responsibility and family life."

But when his contract came up for review in 2004, it was not
renewed. The provost's office would not disclose why; hiring
and renewal decisions are as confidential as they can be
controversial.

Controversy seemed to surround Qumsiyeh from the start of
his career at Yale. He had advocated locally and nationally
for Palestinian rights under his title as a Yale professor.
Five years later, he was looking for a new job. All this
raises the question: When professors turn the ivory tower
into a soapbox, what rules of conduct should they follow?

At first blush, the answer seems simple: in any way they
want to, as long as they don't bring politics into the
classroom. Stanley Fish, GRD '62, a longtime academic and
the former dean of the University of Illinois at Chicago, is
also an active contributor to the New York Times, writing
op-ed pieces about higher education and free speech and,
recently, delving into blogging. He's a proponent of what
some would call the modern public intellectual -- a
professor who is also public citizen, who engages the world
outside the ivory tower as vigorously as the world inside.
"Faculty members can say whatever they want outside the
precincts of their academic responsibilities, " Fish said.
"They can't get up in class and harangue about the Iraq War,
but they can write letters to the New York Times or write
op-eds and so forth."

Paul Freedman, chair of the Yale history department, even
argued that a Yale professor who contributes to the public
debate should be seen as a benefit to a university.
"Research universities in general, and Yale in particular,
like their professors to be in the public eye," he said.
"They like to have professors consulted, rather than only
people who are narrowly policy-oriented. "

Both Yale College Dean Peter Salovey, GRD '86, and Graduate
School Dean Jon Butler (who, incidentally, chaired the
committee this summer that would reject Juan Cole's
candidacy for a teaching position at Yale) agreed, and
reaffirmed Yale's commitment to academic free speech. "The
University, like the public, has an obligation to honor the
spirit of the First Amendment," said Butler.

But despite its officially unshackled policy regarding
protected free speech, both deans agree that there is a gray
area between academic writing and political activism. "As a
researcher, I generally feel an obligation to limit my
public comments to ones that I can support with my own
research or the research of others in my field whose
findings I trust," Salovey said. "I try not to offer
opinions about matters beyond my areas of expertise, even if
'entitled' to those opinions."

But truly extreme opinions, even if protected, can
inherently be dangerous for a professor to espouse. "Making
statements about general public matters in which you have no
particular expertise, if they exhibited racism or bigotry,
would inevitably call your scholarship into question,"
Butler said. "We think we live in an ivory tower, but our
tower's not so tall, and it's not so ivory-clad."

Jerry Gordon, a local political activist and commentator,
published an article for FrontPage Magazine, a pro-Israel
newsletter, on the Qumsiyeh affair. He put it more bluntly:
"To engage in the kind of activities that [Qumsiyeh] was
doing, both on campus and off, was kind of a dangerous thing
for someone in his position to do."

Qumsiyeh's "position" was an untenured associate professor
facing a contract renewal. Enter David Graeber, a
phenomenally successful anthropologist and anarchist whose
books are taught worldwide. In October, he was invited to
give this year's Malinowski lecture, an honor given only to
the world's most promising young anthropologists. His
contract went up for renewal last year.

And in May 2007, he will leave the University as the result
of an unusual plea bargain: an extra year on the faculty
payroll in return for an agreement to leave without a fight.
Graeber, whose contract was not renewed by the anthropology
department, had alleged that their decision was motivated by
political animosity, a claim he could not confirm because
tenure decisions occur behind closed doors. He had been a
controversial figure, but now finds sleeping on couches in
his friends' New Haven apartments after giving up his lease.
When tenure decisions are made in total secrecy, professors
are left with little guidance about where their boundaries lie.

At Yale, tenure is both simple and arcane: You get tenure if
you are a star in your field, an academic powerhouse, a
professor with a contribution to make. No exceptions. There
is no fast-track to tenure at Yale, no way to know exactly
what's expected of you, except for an obvious triad of
priorities: research, teaching, and service to the University.

A would-be public intellectual can face a delicate balancing
act: Extreme examples of political activism, like
Qumsiyeh's, can lead to consequences, be they direct and
career-altering or more subtle and insidious. Yet to toe the
party line can seem a stifling fate to a passionate new hire
who's excited to write, to speak, and to serve society
inside the ivory tower and out.

When Graeber returned from a one-year sabbatical in 2002 --
having joined forces in the interim with anti-war and
anti-globalization groups such as the Direct Action Network
and Ya Basta-he said he found his welcome back much colder
than his farewell. "I thought a 'hello' would have been
reasonable," he said. "All of the sudden, no one was talking
to me." He continued to be a prolific writer and researcher,
but his future no longer looked so rosy.

Graeber maintained that his outspoken political activism had
caused his already-distant colleagues to see him as
dangerous. Was it the way Graeber had presented himself to
the world in his time away from the University, protesting
in front of the World Economic Forum and speaking to the New
York Times as a representative of anarchist fronts?

"I'm not allowed to know," he said sardonically. It seemed
to him that a year away had changed his status in the
department in ways he hadn't predicted. One tenured
professor went so far as to call the parents of one of his
students to warn them that their daughter could be falling
under the sway of an anarchist; some, apparently, felt that
Graeber's political activities, which he had conducted only
in New York, should be public knowledge.

Anthropology chair William Kelly refused to comment on the
department's decision not to renew Graeber's contract, nor
on its implications for untenured professors who wish also
to be activists. Graeber additionally pointed to department
relations as a reason behind his departure; many in the
department labeled Graeber an eccentric, which may have
pointed to signs of major disagreements to come.

"If the judgment is that the presence of this person in the
organization makes the smooth functioning of the
organization extremely difficult, then that's a reason not
to give a person tenure," said Fish, who presided over
hundreds of hiring decisions at the University of Illinois.

Yet the silence that surrounds these decisions makes it
impossible to know whether to ascribe Graeber's departure to
activism, collegiality, or something else entirely; Graeber
was informed via letter that there had been complaints about
his work ethic as a teacher, an allegation many of his
students vigorously deny.

"I didn't experience those things," said Phoebe Rounds, SM
'07, one of his students. "I thought his class ["Myth and
Ritual"] was one of the most engaging lecture classes I'd
taken at Yale."

Despite Yale's hope that its professors will engage the
outside world, Graeber worries that its policies discourage
intellectual adventurousness. "The structure is such that it
rewards mediocrity," he said. "That's the problem -- the
lack of transparency, the lack of communication, but
especially that system that never rewards people for
standing out."

Last year, Yale decided to woo Professor Juan Cole away from
Michigan. Then it changed its mind.

The decision raised several eyebrows and many questions.
Cole, the president of the Middle East Studies Association,
speaks Arabic and Persian, is considered a powerful scholar,
and had been approved for the position by votes in the
history and sociology departments. The provost's office
refused to comment on the reasons for his rejection; Dr.
Cole refused to comment on this story. But many eyes turned
toward Cole's blog as a factor in the decision, one that may
have raised his profile and polarized opinion on his
candidacy. On his site, "Informed Comment," Cole has
provided commentary on the news coming out of the Middle
East since 2001. Discussing politics is almost guaranteed to
cause controversy, but when professors can speak to their
passion while educating an ever-growing blogosphere, how can
they resist?

Ann Althouse, a law professor at the University of
Wisconsin, blogs about legal issues and personal ones -- a
recent post discussed her unexpected affection for the
racially-segregated "Survivor" -- and sees an essential
tension in the role of an academic blogger. "There are a lot
of risks," she said. "There's a certain style in blogging
that involves polemic and sharp-laced, pithy opinions that
don't necessarily impress people who don't agree with you."
She added: "Yet if you try to write in a scholarly style,
you're not going to be effective in affecting the debate.
It's a trade-off, and a risk, and you shouldn't go into it
naively."

At the same time, Althouse said, there's an immense
attraction in the free-form nature of the blog. Blog writing
can be a way for professors to discuss topics that fascinate
them without necessarily possessing a base of expertise in a
given field. "I think what's exciting is to have a mix of
topics and to be willing to say things you don't know a lot
about," Althouse said.

Moreover, she said, there's an appeal in the way that blogs
can raise an academic's profile. "I always read the New York
Times, and when they wrote about legal topics before
blogging, they'd go to the usual people at the top schools,"
Althouse said. "But by blogging, you end up being one of the
people that they call. There's something to that -- some
ability to become more prominent."

Cole's blog seems to reflect a similar desire to expand
beyond his traditional academic outlets, commenting on a
more specific topic with an even more extensive willingness
to engage in strident discourse. Yet both Althouse and Cole
have a single great advantage over many of their
compatriots: lifetime tenure. If untenured David Graeber had
kept an anarchist blog, would he have been more or less
likely to have seen his contract renewed last year?

There's a prevailing opinion that in the ideal world, at
least, faculty should be accorded the right of free,
consequence- free speech in practice as well as in principle.
"Faculty should be evaluated on their scholarship alone,"
Butler said. "We shouldn't be judging faculty on what seem
to be, or what we deem to be, or even what they say their
views are about contemporary politics."

But in reality, a professor's politics can stick with us no
matter how hard we try to focus on their classroom lecture.
And the same can be true when faculty come up for tenure,
admits Deputy Provost Charles Long. "Blogs can't help but
raise your profile and create controversy, " said Long. And
while he wouldn't comment on whether Cole's blog affected
his candidacy, he acknowledged that the question had been
raised. "I know there was a good deal of talk about the
degree to which what Juan Cole said in his blog should be
considered part of his application material," he admitted.

And even Butler -- who chaired the committee that rejected
Juan Cole's candidacy -- admits that there can be unintended
consequences when one speaks as an advocate. "It's not
possible to isolate, in the real world, that kind of
speaking out on public issues from one's scholarship, " he
said. "It doesn't mean that that should be done."

The issues surrounding advocacy can really be boiled down to
a matter as old as time: that of free speech. As long as
people have been able to speak, they've been saying things
other people don't want to hear. Speech has consequences;
your right to speak is protected, but you're not protected
from what people think of you. Weber was writing about
blogger snark all the way back in 1918: "They are not
plowshares to loosen the soil of contemplative thought; they
are swords against enemies: such words are weapons."

If words are indeed weapons, then one must hope that the
questions that surround advocacy get answered to the
betterment of the academy, one way or another. Certainly
free speech can have -- has had -- its consequences, but
none of these three, when questioned, would have chosen any
other path. "I do not regret what I did at all," Graeber
said. "Everything I was involved in was incredibly
important. And given the choice between this kind of role in
the world and risking contract renewal, that's a risk you take."

There's a remarkable contrast between Graeber, sleeping on
couches in his friends' apartments on the nights he spends
in the city, and Jon Butler, whose comfortable, wood-paneled
office in the Hall of Graduate Studies seems to epitomize
the world Yale asked Graeber to leave. Yet on this,
certainly, they agree wholeheartedly. "I'm inclined to think
that people should contribute to the public dialogue,"
Butler said. "If they want to say it, they should do it,
just as thousands and thousands of people write letters to
the editor to every newspaper in America. And maybe someone
down the street doesn't like what they have to say. And
maybe someone at the grocery store doesn't like what they
have to say. But they say it. That's the nature of our
democratic society."

[Lenin's Law]

Good article.

It is unfortunate that in the US in particular there is a huge wave of reactionary trash being spewed against academia (one of the few institutions not completely overrun by bourgeois politics and still retaining a small amount of liberty...therefore the incessant need to attack it) by the most vulgar of right-wing propagandists: the likes of the idiotic David Horowitz and his gang of McCarthyite-wannabees.

On their website, which I mercifully will not link, they have named names of teachers and professors who they believe have stepped out of the doctrinal lines and have (gasp) become left-wing!! Horowitz even wrote a book naming the 101 "worst" (read: Best) professors in America. I breezed through it one day while at a bookstore just to amuse myself and see if any of my old teachers were on it. There were, and all from the English Department!

Seriously though, this campaign to intimidate, threaten, and possibly expel leftist professors and teachers from their positions simply for their own personal beliefs is outrageous and should be actively opposed by all the comrades and revolutionaries here. I believe it is a sign of weakness that the more reactionary, more vicioius layer of the capitalist class have decided to mount so serious an offensive against academia.

Teachers who are being attacked deserve our solidarity and support whenever possible, it is worth checking out in your community if any teachers are being pressured by the right wingers and thier puppet organizations.