A talk on Faculty Freedom Today (today was 5.10.22) by Matthew Finkin was revolving around conventional topics: when faculty speech is protected; what are the latest vectors of attack on it etc. It had that quintessentially American flavor of pragmatic legality: establish some semblance of law (statements by AAUP, insofar they are cited by the courts) justified by the public need, and proceed from there. Nice, wholesome fun.
A short discussion emerged, on whether political statements by academic entities (such as departments, or campuses) are allowed. Individual professors can utter whatever they want (as long it doesn’t muddle the basics of their trade), but what about the organizations? Finkin’s position (seemingly similar to that of UofI academic senate’s committee on you know what) was that they shouldn’t: roughly speaking, a statement can say something like “an overwhelming majority of the department supports position X,” but cannot assert that the department itself does.
This reminded me of a sorry episode when individual faculty members offered their views on an issue, but made it appear so that they were interpreted as the departments’ positions.
I am talking here about a collective letter from thirty-something department heads at U of I, condemning the administration’s decision to un-hire Salaita. Signature of our then Chair, Matt Ando, was there, and didn’t go unnoticed. Corey Robin, a progressive luminary, reacted:
What’s even more amazing is where it has expanded: three of the signatories are chairs of the departments of chemistry, math, and statistics. The opposition has spilled beyond the walls of the humanities and social sciences.
Corey Robin’s blog
I asked Robin back then whether he thinks this indicates the position of the whole department (rather than some administrator-specific views). He responded:
In my experience — and I’m now a department chair — most department chairs are pretty loathe to stake out positions, and sign onto statements as chairs, that are well out in front of their departments. It’s a sure-fire way to getting yourself in hot water with the department. We try to stay within the zone of consensus.
ibid.
Within the zone of consensus… Well, if anything there was no consensus. If anything, the heated department meeting we had in Fall 2014 showed that the spectrum of opinions is broad and fully populated. Nobody even attempted to come up with a collective statement, so obvious it was that the department is deeply divided.
To check, I asked Matt Ando back then, how he meant his signature, – as “my personal position,” he replied. (Signings as campus leaders continued, though.)
I do not judge Robin. After all, he, along with hundreds of others participants of the movement was acting within the organizational framework that was, and is sharply focused on, roughly speaking, the culture wars. In a war, you don’t examine your munition too carefully. You fire it.
(Similarly, when you realize your munition is not potent anymore, you throw it away. This objectivization happened to Salaita, and it is perhaps even sadder that the unhiring fiasco itself. Once a proud fighter on the frontline, he is now a mere token, an exemplar of the Palestinian exemption. Robin was extolling Salaita’s intellect in 2015, but the search of his website shows the latest mention of that brilliant scholar was made in 2016, on the occasion of Salaita losing his last academic position, at the American University in Beirut…)
The goal of the culture wars used to be to shape the public opinion about facts on the ground that we all believed to be there. Today, the culture wars are about creating disjoint, non-overlapping sets of phenomena we then rush to discuss. These acts of creation of alternative realities are most dangerous when staged by the public officials whom we are supposed to trust. Public officials, from Putin and Trump all the way down to humble chairs and deans of provincial universities, – they fork reality with abandon, using the clout of their offices.
That’s what bothers me most…