Professors and Their Politics

8. Challenging Neutrality: Sixties Activism and Debates over Political Advocacy in the American University

c h a p t e r e i g h t Challenging Neutrality Sixties Activism and Debates over Political Advocacy in the American University julie a. reuben In 2003, David Horowitz launched the organization Students for Academic Freedom to rid the university of what he saw as political preaching (Horowitz 2007). Horowitz has used this group as a platform to lobby state legislatures to investigate charges of political indoctrination at public universities and to pressure colleges and universities to adopt the “Academic Bill of Rights,” a document that many within higher education believe, contrary to its name, threatens academic freedom by inviting outside interference in college classrooms.1 Horowitz is one of several conservative critics who over the past few decades have attracted public attention by arguing that American higher education is being destroyed by radical professors. According to these critics, leftist professors distort scholarship to promote their political causes, use the classroom to indoctrinate students in their political ideology, and block the appointment and promotion of faculty members who hold opposing political positions. These critics trace the abuses back to the 1960s, arguing that former student activists are today ’s powerful professors. No longer protesting against the university, these professors are instead pushing their political causes from within the academy. Critics believe that these professors, by hiring like-minded colleagues, now control large portions of the academy and the professional societies that set standards for their disciplines. Administrators, in this view, either support the professors ’ agenda or have been unwilling to rein them in. Hence, conservatives have called on the public to apply pressure in whatever ways it can to help reverse this situation. The response within higher education to these conservative critics has been mixed. Some of the critics are themselves academics and have like-minded colleagues in organizations such as the National Association of Scholars. But many within higher education find the threats of outside intervention dangerous and believe that conservatives’ portrait of America’s universities is highly distorted. 218 Formative Periods Academics have tried to combat conservatives’ critique in various ways: some have pointed out its inaccuracies and exaggerations, others have offered alternative analyses of power dynamics in the academy, and still others have questioned its fundamental assumptions about the nature and purpose of scholarship and education. But the underlying historical narrative has not been carefully examined. Did campus activism of the 1960s fundamentally change the political role of the university? Are conservatives correct that the 1960s marked a turning point after which the university became a tool for leftist politics? This essay explores these questions by examining debates in the 1960s and 1970s over institutional neutrality, the idea that universities should not assume political roles or advocate political positions. Activists did attack the ideal of neutrality, arguing that it was both untrue, because universities were in fact political actors, and wrong, because universities should commit themselves to positive social change. Although activists gained advocates within universities, the ideal of neutrality was not abandoned. On the contrary, it was reaffirmed but redefined. For most of the twentieth century, the ideal of institutional neutrality was closely linked to norms of individual professorial neutrality: for a university to be trusted to be nonpartisan, its faculty would also have to be free of partisan attachments. As the Red Scare made abundantly clear, though, this equation could have negative consequences for faculty. Some professors recognized the challenge to institutional neutrality as an opportunity to sever this link. Instead of joining the call to end institutional neutrality, they defended it but reinterpreted it to allow for individual partisan activity. They argued that institutional neutrality created a “free market” that protected faculty members’ right to political advocacy of all kinds. This redefinition proved to be a popular middle ground in the debates over institutional neutrality. Thus, conservative critics’ historical analysis contains some truth and some exaggeration. Sixties activism did change norms governing professors’ political advocacy, and this made certain political positions more visible on and off campuses. But critics wrongly portray the 1960s as the beginnings of a newly politicized university. The ideal of institutional neutrality was preserved, and the nature of universities’ interactions with society did not change significantly. In the late nineteenth century, the creators of the modern university insisted that the new university—as distinguished from the traditional college they were trying to reform—should be free from outside control and be autonomous. They were particularly concerned about religious control because colleges at...