Self-Censorship in the Academy
By: Aaron Kunin
Tags: Academia, Political Correctness, Society, Ideas, Education

The strongest case against academic freedom is that professors are not a freedom-loving people. H. L. Mencken made this argument a century ago. Professors show by their choices that they do not love thinking and speaking freely. They have gone into the business of education, a civilizing business where they manufacture “citizens who are as nearly like all other citizens as possible.”

Mencken had a point. Professors (I am one of them) are mainly selected from the category of people who got good grades in school. Let us hope that our grades are a mark of our intelligence, our excellent work, maybe even — if schools are sound institutions — our expertise in our fields of study. Our grades might also indicate other, darker talents and inclinations. Maybe we received high marks because we have the gift of pleasing our teachers. Maybe we are the kind of people who want to please our teachers. Maybe we love thinking and speaking agreeably.

What is it like, today, to study at a small liberal arts college in the U.S.? Are these schools the “rolling mills” of conformity that Mencken wrote about? Part of an answer is suggested by a Gallup poll conducted in 2018 at Pomona College (where I teach): 88 percent of students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “the climate on my campus prevents students/faculty from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.” Sixty-three percent of faculty agreed or strongly agreed with the same statement. At a faculty forum where Gallup representatives presented the results of the poll, one result stood out: 70 percent of faculty said they had changed their approach to teaching in order to avoid offending students.

Some claim that this is an encouraging result. The wish to avoid giving offense, they say, is not a sign of self-censorship; it is common politeness. Perhaps the faculty and students here are decent people who care about others, enter into the feelings of others, and avoid saying hurtful things.

Unfortunately, this is a misinterpretation of the poll question. Respondents did not say that their virtue or their good manners prevented them from saying what they believed. They were agreeing with a statement about the prohibitive influence of the campus climate. (I am astonished that anyone could misinterpret the question. However, since the people who propose this misreading are the same professors and students who were polled in the first place, I must admit the possibility that a perhaps considerable number of them made the same reading mistake when they answered the questions — which would mean they thought they were being polled about their social graces.)

Maybe, like Mencken, they think that schools in the U.S. are mere finishing schools rather than research institutions. Self-censorship, whether motivated by fear or agreeableness, polishes students and professors until they are “as smooth as possible, and rub one another as little as possible.”

How does self-censorship degrade academic honesty? The classic account is Glenn Loury’s 1994 essay “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse.” In Loury’s model, you know what I say but you don’t know what I think. I say that I’m not a Nazi, but Nazis rarely own up to being Nazis, so you might still wonder if I am thinking Nazi thoughts.

The trouble is that Nazis are human beings, and they have many benign thoughts along with their antisemitism. So I might avoid repeating some ordinary, unthreatening statement uttered by someone with a Nazi reputation, lest you think that I sound like a Nazi. Soon only actual Nazis and a few weirdos who don’t care what other people think are willing to repeat these unthreatening statements — which now appear rather threatening. In this regime of self-censorship, even arguments defending academic freedom (which is not a traditional Nazi commitment!) or aesthetic judgment (a commitment shared by many people, including a few Nazis) can look like signs of crypto-Nazism. This increases the costs of honest discussion.

As the poet Paul Muldoon said in a recent interview attempting to explain why he and a few hundred other members of the Princeton faculty signed an open letter that proposed, among other measures, to investigate and discipline their colleagues for publications they deemed racist, “Some ideas may need to be overstated to be stated at all.” The climate at Princeton is so bad that Muldoon has gone way past the point of omitting to say what he thinks; he feels compelled to use his voice to say what he does not think, and thereby to support a policy he does not in fact support. He wants to say that he deplores racism; he does not want to say that his colleagues must give up their freedom of inquiry in the name of antiracism. Somehow he has to say the latter in order to say the former.

Where I teach, job applications, tenure reviews, and promotion reviews all require that candidates submit a personal statement about “mentoring a diverse student body” and “fostering an inclusive classroom.” What does this requirement say about academic freedom here? When I submit my statement, is the college inviting me to say what I think, or is it telling me what to think?

My sense is that students and faculty are unsure of the meaning of inclusive teaching. To the extent that we feel any certainty, we do not agree with one another. To take an example from my own field, it seems obvious to many people that the best way to create an inclusive classroom in literary studies would be to choose books for the syllabus so that the identities of the authors correspond to those of the students. That way, students from underrepresented minority communities will see themselves reflected in the readings. The students will feel included, and empowered to succeed, when they read works by writers who look like them.

This is a popular view in literary studies. Lots of people hold to it. However, there are also a lot of people in my field who don’t hold to it. I’m one of them.

I think that the only good reason to study a work of literature is that literature itself has value. When I teach poems by Robert Burns, I want my students to value these poems. Burns’s experiences may not be particularly relevant to their lives, but his experiences are not the ingredient that makes the poems so good. His experiences find purchase in poetry only if he has sufficient artistry to shape them into verse. I want minority students and other students to have Burns’s art in their lives. If my students must identify with the authors they study, I hope they identify with them as thinkers, writers, artists. I want to say to them: what Burns did with words, you can do with words. I reject the notion that they can only do that, or that they can most constructively do that, if Burns shares an ethnic or racial background with them.

I would go further still and say that the first, popular view does a disservice to minority authors and students in that it tends to create two literary traditions representing competing discourses of value. For example: we read Burns for literary value, but we read Gwendolyn Brooks for inclusivity. A better reason for studying Brooks would be the same as the reason for studying Burns, which, as I said, is the only good reason. Brooks, who studied Burns, might have said the same thing.

In some of the oldest and greatest works of art in history, the identities of the artists start to disappear. The traditional stories told about Homer and Sappho are infused with myth. Scholars have established the names of the writers Zhuangzi and Kalidasa — although the names are a little uncertain — but not their precise dates. (Imagine this statement on your CV: “active sometime between the 18th and the 21st centuries.” At that scale, both Burns and Brooks would be your contemporaries.) George Kubler, who specialized in ancient American art and architecture, did not know the names of any of the artists from the Mayan classical period. The identities of the individual artists, he wrote, “emerge indistinctly from their works, and if it were not for their works, we would not apprehend personalities at all.”

I want my students to read Burns, Brooks, Homer, Sappho, Zhuangzi, and Kalidasa. I also want them to study ancient American art. I even think it would be a good idea for them to learn about the identities of the artists. But the identities are worth studying for the sake of the works of art rather than the other way around. To study Brooks for her racial identity rather than her extraordinary poems is a cheat. It is a way of saying: “Artistry does not belong to you. Somehow your identity got into a work of art without the intervention of an artistic intelligence. It has value because of your identity, but not as art.”

I could be wrong. I don’t insist on the rightness of my argument. I insist only that there is a disagreement in the field of literary studies.

But perhaps at the administrative level this disagreement cannot be acknowledged because doing so would complicate certain positions, and even certain results, that the college leadership accepts to be true. G. Gabrielle Starr, the president of the college, recently gave an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which she touted an inclusive method of teaching biology that has had a statistically significant effect on student performance. But she must know that this question is controversial in literary studies, because she and Kevin Dettmar, another colleague from the English department, participated in exactly this controversy in their response to Michael Clune in the Chronicle last year. They argued that literature professors “don’t transmit value” but instead teach “metacognitive skills” such as empathy — a tutelage they connect to the master-value of “diversity.” (A columnist in The New York Times characterized their argument as “insane.” But my colleagues are not naturally mad. There is no lunacy in them, only agreeableness.)

What does the disagreement mean for the implementation of our guidelines on tenure and promotion?

As I see it, there are two ways to proceed. One way would threaten our professional ethic of free inquiry. If I must revise my teaching to conform to a popular view of inclusivity that I do not share, then my freedom of inquiry has been unfairly limited. As the literary scholar David Bromwich argued in Politics by Other Means in response to similar measures proposed in the 1990s, any school policy that requires me to affirm a position on a controversial question is effectively a loyalty oath and a threat to the academic freedom of the entire faculty, regardless of whether individual members of the faculty agree with the position.

The other way would be to use the disagreement as an opportunity to do intellectual work. We have given ourselves an assignment. Every voting member of the faculty has to study the uncertain, controversial problem of inclusivity. If we put our brainpower into studying the problem, we will come up with some interesting answers, but we won’t all come up with the same answers, and we won’t always like the answers that our colleagues give. For some members of the faculty, this assignment might mean thinking seriously about inclusivity for the first time. For some members of the faculty who have been studying inclusivity for a long time, sharing this assignment with their colleagues might mean letting go of a sense of certainty.

Last year when I proposed to teach a seminar in which the syllabus would include essays by Ralph Ellison, two of my colleagues wrote to the Curriculum Committee, as well as to the dean and the president of the college, objecting that it would be “literary blackface” for me to study Ellison. I am pleased to say that my department does not yet have a curriculum that would restrict white readers to studying books by white authors, and black readers to studying books by black authors, but there is at present an uncomfortable tension between the pressure to teach inclusively that seems to require all professors to teach more books by black authors, and the pressure to teach inclusively that would prohibit as “literary blackface” the teaching of black authors by white professors. It is not easy to do intellectual work in these conditions!

I do not believe that my colleagues really propose to rewrite the curriculum so as to segregate course materials by race. The phrase “literary blackface” is just nonsense. Speech of such low value can’t easily be defended — it has no intellectual merit and probably does not represent the sincere view of the speakers. The only solid defense of this phrase is to appeal to the principle of academic freedom in its most expansive sense. Academic freedom gives even low-value speech a little bit of value. If weird, wrong, offensive speech says nothing else, it says: this is a place where people are free to speak their minds, and all may avail themselves of this freedom.

That is one of the uses of academic freedom: we tolerate ideas that we think are wrong, because we could be wrong. If I am wrong, it is nonetheless my right to say what I think, and it is my privilege (a writer’s privilege, not a white man’s) to think that I am right.