Not just, “I,I,I” and “me, me, me”

The interviewee appears to be a considerate, well-meaning person. Unfortunately, the speaker appears to have neglected a few points:

* ~80% of academia is owned and operated by state taxpayers. Academia also receives support (direct and indirect) at the federal tax level.

* Those funders (taxpayers) are under substantial financial stress. They are increasing their demand to know what return they get on their tax monies — prior to any decision to reduce their financial support.

* The interviewee mentioned the needs of AAUP and Ward Churchill at length.

* Very little (nothing?) was directly mentioned about the funders’ needs. That is: high professional performance standards and conduct, well-established and broadly-based knowledge foundation, clear and timely access to information about the aforementioned, and accountability.

There’s an old saying in advertising: I don’t know who you are, don’t know what you do, don’t know anything about you — now, why should I support you?

L.L., at 10:40 am EDT on June 7, 2007

Academic freedom

Academic freedom is in trouble in this country because it is a value universally misunderstood or flat out rejected by the vast majority of citizens, including teachers at every level as well as judicial “guardians” of the Constitution. Teachers generally and judges, almost absolutely, believe it is the function of schools to turn out model citizens, that is to say, easily managed, obedient consumers who ask no hard questions, who regurgitate propaganda on cue, who do or say nothing that disturbs the established order. I found it peculiarly ironic that my local managers (Sixth Circuit of the Federal Appellate Court) of delusional freedom issued a ruling on August 15, 2001 ostensibly defending academic freedom (see HARDY v. JEFFERSON). This was the precise date upon which I began serving the first of two semester long suspensions for having the audacity to speak my mind in a college classroom. HARDY, in probable fact, was a scramble to cover the turd these same justices had left on the floor months earlier in BONNELL v. LORENZO. In HARDY, the justices actually exonerated a terminated adjunct professor who had uttered terms such as “nigger” and “bitch” in a community college classroom. They did this despite the complaint of a black woman in the class and her church’s minister. However, they accepted the professor’s word choice only because it was meta-communication: talk about talk. Had he used the words in any other fashion—as, for instance, in a dramatic simulation of some imagined character’s speech, without an accompanying homily on the intrinsic viciousness of such diction—his speech would have been unprotected, even reprehensible. As a consequence, there are some two dozen words,including “damn,” “hell,” “shit,” “bullshit,” “goddamn,” that one or more teachers at my college have been warned that they face instant termination should they ever make the mistake of uttering them, unless the Anglo Saxon crudities are inscribed in the object text. Messages are still okay, though increasingly under fire (consider the works of Mark Twain or Flannery O’Connor); mere messengers may be fired. And it does not matter whether the words are aimed at or pertain to any student in the classroom; their very utterance is forbidden. This madness is supported by justices who presumably have heard of COHEN v. CALIFORNIA (US SupCrt, 1971) wherein John Harlan intoned that a government that stoops to banning words will soon be banning ideas. (Which is my experience also: an anecdote I have used episodically for over three decades but which a contemporary student did not like, even though couched in “safe” Latinate terminology, was deemed discipline-worthy. That became the second semester-long suspension, accompanied by mandated Soviet-style re-education in the virtues of civic mindedness.)

If this nation truly prized freedom of expression, it would do everything imaginable to protect it. Adjunct teachers, because of their very vulnerability, would be accorded a maximum “firewall.” Any possible suggestion that such a teacher was dumped because of speech should shift the entire burden of proof onto the administration (or faculty review committee), to make it perfectly clear that the termination would have happened regardless of any speech events. This would not stop all dishonesty and hypocrisy, but it would be a beginning. And, yes, this would add a tremendous “burden” on administration—a small price to pay for a people who really practiced the best of their preachments. The Supreme Court of the last quarter century, of course, is much more interested in whether the trains of efficient management run on time, rather than in the “inalienable rights” of the little people. (See CONNICK v. MYERS and WATERS v. CHURCHILL, for chilling starters.)

As G. Orwell phrased it sixty years ago, where the people value freedom of speech, there will be such freedom, regardless what the law says. Where the people do not value freedom of speech, there will be no such freedom, regardless what the law says. This much honored prophet must have been referring to America.

John C. Bonnell, Professor of English at Macomb Comm. College, at 3:45 pm EDT on June 7, 2007