Op-Ed: Jeff Garofano

In Justice Black’s dissent to the opinion of the Court in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) he wrote that it was outside the purview of schools to “broadcast political or any other views to educate and inform the public.” Subsequent Supreme Court cases have trended towards his dissent, and because I believe this to be a case in which law has some overlap with morality, I think Black’s view has import for the respective roles of academic and political inquiry in modern academia. I think that universities and colleges should remain apolitical to the largest extent possible, mimicking the conscious commitment that judges bring to this task.

I will try to explain what I mean by this and elaborate my views across a few case studies. Take, for example, the recent political flashpoint regarding U.S. military recruitment on the Middlebury campus. I have been very pleased with President Liebowitz’s administration of the College, but his incidental mentioning, in a student-wide email, that he agreed with the protestors of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was an overstep into politics. Conversely, former president McCardell, with his Choose Responsibility campaign, is acting solely in his capacity as a private citizen — sure, with the added weight of being a former college president of a top NESCAC school, but certainly without the College’s imprimatur.

Global warming is a matter of considerable scientific, social and political intrigue. As such, it should be studied for its scientific rigor, scientific implications, impact on popular culture and orientation with respect to the platforms of political parties. The mistake made by NASA scientist James Hansen was to believe that a potential scientific state of affairs leads inexorably to a political prescription. Similarly, Middlebury might very well view it within our institutional strategic interest to build a woodchip gasification plant, but College administrators and faculty should be motivated by a professional desire to analyze academic questions, not to decide political ones. They should therefore abstain from pronouncements of “belief,” institutional or personal, in such matters as long as they’re hemmed in by campus boundaries (which, for professional reasons, should be viewed as the antithesis of a free speech zone).

There is nothing about the art of teaching that I view as inevitably political. Sure, everything is political in the sense that the term of a semester is finite, and the curricular choices inscribed in syllabi could be seen as taking the place of alternatives. But there ought to be an overriding rationale for curricular choices. And balance isn’t a virtue — black radicalism, conservatism, and gay studies are all issues of academic salience, and any one would individually be ripe for academic inquiry. None of these suggest that a professor must weigh in on the merits of political questions. Indeed, legal scholar Stanley Fish describes the real situation of a young Earth creationist who has a PhD and teaches evolutionary biology. To act professionally, a professor simply needs to exercise the domain specificity appropriate to classrooms and voting booths.

Political commentator John McWhorter, on his “Minding the Campus” blog, writes a 40th anniversary retrospective on African-American Studies majors across the United States. His assessment is grim: “Too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black. The question is whether this, for all of its moral urgency in the local sense, qualifies as education under any serious definition.” I am fine with the study of any academic subject as far as budgetary demands permit, but I, too, worry far more about the creep of politics into newer and less traditional majors. This was my experience in a women’s and gender studies class, which I enjoyed as long as the express purpose of the course was not anti-homophobia (despite being a cause toward which I’m sympathetic). While we did learn how entrenched and repugnant homophobia is, I never read a secular case against gay marriage (Megan McCardle of The Atlantic Monthly makes an interesting argument for remaining aloof on the question). Professors of all subjects must guard against such reductionism, which, aside from forsaking academic professionalism, risks belittling the complexity of their subjects.

I do not think that such a policy of agnosticism on political questions will always be easy. Fish suggests that it is a principle so important that campus banners proclaiming “Diversity is Strength” should be taken down, as they are political statements. The most challenging case, in my opinion, would be one such as the widespread divestment campaign that colleges and universities mounted against South Africa during apartheid. Fish suggests that, insofar as such practices establish universities as having real relationships with international politics, they should stop. You can imagine a situation in which, hypothetically, an investment in the sovereign debt of Darfur might profit the College — are we only beholden to providing returns?

All of this debate strikes at the heart of a foundational question: what is the purpose of liberal education? Fish, someone who has written frequently about politics in the classroom, suggests that universities “are not or should not be in the social justice business.” Therefore, he says, they have no obligation to counteract the legacy of slavery, anti-Semitism, misogyny, or the treatment of Native Americans. To Fish, to justify liberal education is to diminish it by implying that its value lies elsewhere. I’m very glad of the fact that universities are unwittingly in the social justice business — college degrees grease the skids for class mobility and contribute to technological progress. And I have found my education as useful in informing my normative views. I’m confident that, with education, the truth will out. It’s just that it doesn’t need an endorsement.