Some thoughts on academic freedom for a Saturday night

by Bob Brigham [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

Last month, we discussed the awful conservative campaign against Erwin Chemerinsky. After the flip, are some quotes without comment and without the context needed to truly understand, but it has been on my mind a great deal as of late and history needs to be told to be prevented.
First:

The waitress comes with the steaks and we knife right into them. That work on the cycle has given me an appetite.

"Something else that ought to interest you," John says. "They were talking in the bar about Bozeman, where we're going. They said the governor of Montana had a list of fifty radical college professors at the college in Bozeman he was going to fire. Then he got killed in a plane crash."

"That was a long time ago," I answer. These steaks really are good.

"I didn't know they had a lot of radicals in this state."

"They've got all kinds of people in this state," I say. "But that was just right-wing politics."

John helps himself to some more salt. He says, "A Washington newspaper columnist came through and put it in his column yesterday, and that's why they were all talking about it. The president of the college confirmed it."

"Did they print the list?"

"I don't know. Did you know any of them?"

"If they had fifty names," I say, "mine must have been one." They both look at me with some surprise. I don't know much about it, actually. It was him, of course, and with some feeling of falseness because of this I explain that a "radical" in Gallatin County, Montana, is a little different from a radical somewhere else.

And more:

The state of Montana at this time was undergoing an outbreak of ultra-right-wing politics like that which occurred in Dallas, Texas, just prior to President Kennedy's assassination. A nationally known professor from the University of Montana at Missoula was prohibited from speaking on campus on the grounds that it would "stir up trouble." Professors were told that all public statements must be cleared through the college public-relations office before they could be made.

Academic standards were demolished. The legislature had previously prohibited the school from refusing entry to any student over twenty-one whether he had a high-school diploma or not. Now the legislature had passed a law fining the college eight thousand dollars for every student who failed, virtually an order to pass every student.

The newly elected governor was trying to fire the college president for both personal and political reasons. The college president was not only a personal enemy, he was a Democrat, and the governor was no ordinary Republican. His campaign manager doubled as state coordinator for the John Birch Society. This was the same governor who supplied the list of fifty subversives we heard about a few days ago.

Now, as part of this vendetta, funds to the college were being cut. The college president had passed on an unusually large part of the cut to the English department, of which Ph?drus was a member, and whose members had been quite vocal on issues of academic freedom.

Ph?drus had given up, was exchanging letters with the Northwest Regional Accrediting Association to see if they could help prevent these violations of accreditation requirements. In addition to this private correspondence he had publicly called for an investigation of the entire school situation.

At this point some students in one of his classes had asked Ph?drus, bitterly, if his efforts to stop accred- itation meant he was trying to prevent them from getting an education.

Ph?drus said no.

Then one student, apparently a partisan of the governor, said angrily that the legislature would prevent the school from losing its accreditation.

Ph?drus asked how.

The student said they would post police to prevent it.

Ph?drus pondered this for a while, then realized the enormity of the student's misconception of what accreditation was all about.

That night, for the next day's lecture, he wrote out his defense of what he was doing. This was the Church of Reason lecture, which, in contrast to his usual sketchy lecture notes, was very long and very carefully elaborated.

It began with reference to a newspaper article about a country church building with an electric beer sign hanging right over the front entrance. The building had been sold and was being used as a bar. One can guess that some classroom laughter started at this point. The college was well known for drunken partying and the image vaguely fit. The article said a number of people had complained to the church officials about it. It had been a Catholic church, and the priest who had been delegated to respond to the criticism had sounded quite irritated about the whole thing. To him it had revealed an incredible ignorance of what a church really was. Did they think that bricks and boards and glass constituted a church? Or the shape of the roof? Here, posing as piety was an example of the very materialism the church opposed. The building in question was not holy ground. It had been desanctified. That was the end of it. The beer sign resided over a bar, not a church, and those who couldn't tell the difference were simply revealing something about themselves.

Ph?drus said the same confusion existed about the University and that was why loss of accreditation was hard to understand. The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by police. He explained that when a college lost its accreditation, nobody came and shut down the school. There were no legal penalties, no fines, no jail sentences. Classes did not stop. Everything went on just as before. Students got the same education they would if the school didn't lose its accreditation. All that would happen, Ph?drus said, would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. It would be similar to excommunication. What would happen is that the real University, which no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this place was no longer "holy ground." The real University would vanish from it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the material manifestation.

It must have been a strange concept to all of the students, and I can imagine him waiting for a long time for it to sink in, and perhaps then waiting for the question, What do you think the real University is?

His notes, in response to this question, state the following:

The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.

In addition to this state of mind, "reason," there's a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.

But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist.

Confusion continually occurs in people who fail to see this difference, he said, and think that control of the church buildings implies control of the church. They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations.

They see the second university, but fail to see the first.

Let's keep in mind the first. And it rocks that you can read the entire book online.