Professors Debate Academic Freedom, Free Speech

Four professors debated academic freedom and the line between squeamish discomfort and real threats in light of recent campus controversies at an event Tuesday night.

The Columbia Political Union originally planned the panel, held in a packed room in the International Affairs Building, to investigate the way the University upheld academic freedom during Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech. The discovery of a noose on the door of a Teachers College professor, the invitation of Sean Hannity and David Horowitz, CC ’59, to speak, and various graffiti incidents on campus added additional perspectives to the event.

After calling Ahmadinejad and University President Lee Bollinger “two peas in a pod,” DeWitt Clinton Professor of History Eric Foner said that contrary to popular belief, academic freedom does not apply to students. Rather, he said, it applies to universities and professors and entitles them to have freedom of expression in the classroom and in research.

Foner said that Columbia endangered academic freedom when previous University President Nicholas Murray Butler restricted professors from voicing anti-World War I sentiments. “Contemporary Cultures emerged as a war issues course to indoctrinate students,” he said. Now, he said, private groups of people that try to interfere with the tenure process endanger academic freedom.

“What we need is vigorous leadership at the top protecting and defending academic freedom,” Foner said. “I hope one day we will get that at this University.”

Professor David Eisenbach, who issued Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist an invitation—later rescinded—to speak on campus in an event which would have been co-sponsored by the CPU, stressed the importance of bringing controversial figures to speak. “Let’s see if we can indeed handle some free speech,” he said.

“Now it’s time to ... bring in Jim Gilchrist,” Eisenbach said, adding that CPU chose not to invite Gilchrist back. “Ideas which are upsetting to people ... need to be brought out and exposed.”

Journalism school professor Todd Gitlin cited John Stuart Mill, saying that all dissenting views must be heard as they prevent popular views from becoming dead dogma. “At this moment we are extremely squeamish about discomfort. One way to offend someone is to make him or her feel uncomfortable,” he said. “It’s as if there were a Nobel Prize for comfort.”

Regarding Ahmadinejad’s speech, Gitlin said that the right for someone to speak at Columbia is a service given to the people hearing the speaker, and not to the speaker himself, a point which Bollinger raised in the time leading up to the event. “We have a right to hear from idiots who haven’t already been denounced,” Gitlin said.

Alex Gourevitch, Ph.D. student at the School of International and Public Affairs, said that while universities claim to uphold the “ritual” of academic freedom, its “meaning” has become hollow. “We can’t think of students and professors as fragile individuals who need to be protected,” he said.

While the panelists condoned the invitation to Ahmadinejad, they generally deemed Bollinger’s opening condemnation unwarranted.

An audience member asked why a noose is threatening and not protected as free speech, to which Gitlin responded, “The first amendment protection for free speech is stretched dangerously when it’s employed to protect the hanging of a noose.”

Joy Resmovits can be reached at joy.resmovits@columbiaspectator.com.