Truth, Balance, and Freedom

Akeel Bilgrami Truth, Balance, and Freedom THOUGH THERE IS MUCH RADICAL— AND OFTEN UNPLEASANT— disagreem ent on the fundamental questions around academic free­ dom, these disagreements tend to be between people who seldom find themselves speaking to each other on an occasion such as this or even, in general, speaking to the same audience. On this subject, as in so much else in the political arena these days, one finds oneself speak­ ing only to those with whom one is measurably agreed, at least on the fundamental issues. As proponents of academic freedom, we all recog­ nize who the opponents of academic freedom are but we seldom find ourselves conversing with them in academic conferences. We only tend to speak to them or at them in heated political debates when a contro­ versy arises, as for instance at Columbia University over the promotion of faculty in Middle Eastern studies, or in those states where the very idea of a curricular com m itm ent to modern evolutionary biology is viewed with hostility. I will not be considering such controversial cases of overt political influence on the academy. This is not because they are not important. The threats they pose are very real, when they occur, and the need for resistance to these threats is as urgent as anything I am grateful to Jonathan Cole, Isaac Levi, and Carol Rovane for helpful comments on a draft of this paper. I have also benefited ftom the discus­ sion of a fragment of this paper presented to a workshop on pragmatism at the Institute of Public Knowledge at New York University, in particular the verbal commentary made during the discussion on that occasion by Craig Calhoun, Benjamin Lee, and Richard Sennett. social research Vol 76 : No 2 : Summer 200 9 417 in the academy. But they raise no interesting intellectual issues at a fundamental level over which anyone reading this essay is likely to be disagreed. If there is disagreement, it is likely to be on relatively marginal questions, such as, for instance, whether academic freedom is a special case of the more basic constitutional right to free speech or whether instead it is a special form of freedom tied to the specific mission of universities? W hat m ight a philosopher—I am announcing my disciplin­ ary location—contribute to these more marginal questions? In this brief paper, I would like to make a fuss about standard arguments for a conception of academic freedom that we all seem to subscribe to when it is coarsely described but which, when we describe it more finely, and look at the arguments more closely, is quite implausible and leads directly to thoroughly confused ideas about displaying “balance” in our classrooms and our pedagogy quite generally. I will then use some of the points and distinctions I make in this critique to explore whether there is scope for locating more subtle and interesting kinds of threat to academic freedom than the obviously controversial ones that I mentioned above which many, I assume, find an abomination, and which, as I said, raise no interesting issues for any of us, even if they ring urgent alarms. At the very end, I will venture to advocate imbalance of a very specific kind in the “extramural” domain, when it is neither inquiry nor classroom curriculum that is at stake but the effort to engage the intellectual and political culture at large. NO MATTER WHICH STAND IS TAKEN ON THE MARGINAL QUESTION AS to w hether academic freedom is a special case of the constitutional right to free speech or something special and apart, there is a great and recurring tendency in the literature on the subject to appeal to the same arguments and metaphors and intuitions to describe the justifications for academic freedom along roughly the following lines. First, there is a statement of purpose or goal: academic institutions are sites for intel­ lectual inquiry and research and therefore one of their chief goals is the pursuit of truth and the pedagogical project of conveying the truth, as 418 social research one discovers it and conceives it in one’s research, to students, and to set students on the path...