Anxious in academe; higher education in the world of Bush and Cheney.

I was not disappointed to have been omitted from David Horowitz's compendium of what (he claims) his publisher calls "The 101 Most Dangerous Professors in America." Admittedly, it was something of a downer to have to confess that, for all my purported radicalism, I was not considered much of a threat. Still, had I made the A-list, it probably would have increased the number of crank e-mails I receive and might well have raised a few eyebrows among the trustees at my institution. Not that anyone in the administration would have mentioned the issue, but it is possible that my annual merit raise might have been smaller than usual. Of course, since I'm a tenured professor there would have been no threat to my job. Nor, I suspect, will any of the more "dangerous" 101 face the prospect of dismissal--unless, that is, they lack tenure. Such violations of academic freedom are a thing of the past.

That was not always the case. During the 1940s and 1950s, thousands of people were fired for political reasons. Despite their rhetorical adherence to the concept of academic freedom, America's colleges and universities took part in the anticommunist ablutions. (1) They did not, it is true, maintain an explicit (though secret) blacklist like the entertainment industry. Nonetheless, academe's more subtle procedures ensured that most of the hundred or so faculty members who tangled with HUAC or the FBI were fired and then barred from most American campuses for at least a decade. Because the concept of academic freedom required a minimal measure of due process, most institutions that eliminated their politically tainted instructors not only justified it on professional grounds but also implemented the dismissals after some kind of internal investigation.

Initially, it was just active members of the Communist party who were purged from the nation's faculties; by the early 1950s, however, the academy was willing to fire former members and other leftists who refused to name names or collaborate with the witch hunt in other ways. Neither tenure nor faculty governance provided much protection. True, it was easier to eliminate junior professors; and, to my knowledge, only one non-tenured Fifth Amendment witness retained his job--and the president of his university was planning to let him go after the furor subsided. Understandably, public institutions were more vulnerable than private ones, but even such supposedly progressive schools as Harvard and Reed College let people go. And, in many cases, faculty committees collaborated with the process. Though some tried to defend their colleagues, others, swayed by considerations of institutional loyalty and their own anticommunist beliefs, capitulated to their administrations' demand for political conformity, while the AAUP, crippled by a dysfunctional leader, conveniently absented itself from the scene. Significantly, although the institutions involved insisted that the teachers they fired had somehow violated their academic responsibilities, at no time did they provide evidence or even claim that these supposedly unqualified professors had misused their classrooms or skewed their research findings.

Those kinds of purges would not happen today. The academy, if not the rest of society, has learned from McCarthyism. True, as Ward Churchill's travails reveal, the squeakiest wheels lack protection; but that has always been the case. For the rest of us, the procedural guarantees that exist on most American campuses are sturdy enough to ensure that, unless the political situation degenerates drastically, we will not see a replay of the McCarthy eras mass dismissals. Even at the height of the post-9/11 furor, as a special AAUP investigation revealed, there were few, if any, attempts to fire individual faculty members because of their politics. (2) Despite the strong parallels between the current demonization of Muslim fundamentalists and the earlier one of Communists, universities are more discriminating. Today's sanctions come mainly from the state. In the one serious violation of tenure that we know about, it was the federal government's indictment and incarceration of the Palestinian nationalist Sami al-Arian that encouraged the University of South Florida to fire its controversial computer scientist. And the AAUP was on the scene within weeks.

And yet, as even the AAUP's investigators admitted, the paucity of traditional academic freedom cases does not necessarily mean that academic freedom is alive and well in the land of Bush and Cheney. While it may be something of an exaggeration to say that the situation is worse today than it was during the McCarthy era, there is, nonetheless, a strong undercurrent of anxiety within the nation's colleges and universities, a sense that the most basic values of American higher education are under attack and that the academic community is hard pressed to defend them.

David Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights is only the most highly publicized manifestation of that campaign against the academy. In the contentious area of Middle East studies, organized groups, many supporting a right-wing Zionist agenda, openly criticize individual professors and--in the name of balance and objectivity--demand changes within the field. As the furor over the article about the so-called Jewish lobby by the Harvard and University of Chicago political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt reveals, the issue is so toxic that no American journal would publish the piece, even though it was written by two of the most distinguished political scientists in the United States. What happened to Walt and Mearsheimer is happening throughout academe--and not just with regard to Israel. The conservative political zeitgeist is marginalizing mainstream academic expertise. After years of right-wing punditry, most American citizens have come to view the nation's campuses as havens of tenured radicals and man-hating feminists who work twelve hours a week and write incomprehensible prose. If the negative stereotyping of academe continues, having a Ph.D. might well become as debilitating as holding a Communist party card in the 1950s.

No doubt Horowitz and his supporters would like to purge the nation's faculties in the good old McCarthyist manner. Their activities could have that effect if their demand for the imposition of external political controls over the university is ever realized. Were that to happen, it is possible that those controls could be manipulated to eliminate political undesirables. Unlikely as such a prospect would have been a few years ago, Yale's refusal to offer an appointment to Juan Cole, the current president of the Middle East Studies Association, does raise disquieting questions--though more about blacklists than actual purges. What is more likely, and a much more serious threat, is that the current campaign for so-called "intellectual diversity" may determine what gets taught on our campuses. Whether the impetus for such external regulation comes from the federal government, the state legislature, or a private group like Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch, the prospect of interested parties from outside the academy scrutinizing one's reading lists and grade sheets is positively chilling. Like the dismissals of alleged Communists during the McCarthy era, that kind of censorship is a direct assault on academic freedom--and is being recognized as such. The academic community is mobilizing and, at least for the moment, has successfully turned back most inroads against its professional autonomy. Submitted to some twenty state legislatures, the Academic Bill of Rights has yet to be adopted by any, though it has spawned an investigation in Pennsylvania and may well be incorporated in the Higher Education Authorization Act. Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, with its emphasis on accountability and penchant for privatization, may pose an even greater danger to America's universities.

The professoriate's response to all these measures is contradictory. On the one hand, complacency reigns. As the gradual decline in the AAUP's membership may indicate, few college teachers are particularly concerned about academic freedom. On the other hand, at every moment when something like the Academic Bill of Rights appears on the horizon, faculties rush into action. Local activists rally their colleagues, circulate petitions, testify before legislative committees, and manage to suppress the threat. Thus, for example, when Columbia University's Middle East Studies department came under attack and President Lee Bollinger waffled in its defense, the faculty organized a protest and pressed him to take a stronger stand. Such a response, as well as the normally successful lobbying of college professors (and, it must be conceded, some administrators) in states where the Academic Bill of Rights has been introduced, indicates that the academic community still harbors an underlying respect for and commitment to academic freedom. However, the increasingly frequent need for such emergency mobilizations indicates how little most other Americans (including our students) know or care about that freedom. A recent AAUP poll confirms that observation: not only did 62% of the respondents feel that Communists or similarly radical faculty members should be fired, but only a slim majority even knew what tenure was. (3) We operate, in other words, in a triage mode, constantly struggling to overcome the public's misunderstandings about the nature of higher education and the role of the faculty within it. Why this should be the case speaks to one of the main reasons for the academy's beleaguered status.

To begin with, we are saddled with a conception of academic freedom that does not always fit the current situation, since its emphasis on protecting professors from interference with their teaching and scholarship or institutional retaliation against their off-campus political activities seems limited and slightly out of date. There are few legal guidelines. The federal judiciary's rulings in the area are muddled and often contradictory. While insisting that academic freedom is "of transcendent value for all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned," the Supreme Court has yet to decide whether that freedom belongs to individual professors or to the institutions that employ them. (4) As a result, the nation's college professors must rely on their schools' voluntary adherence to the AAUP'S traditional formulation of academic freedom. That formulation, embodied in the organization's foundational documents of 1915 and 1940, is still serviceable in many respects. It creates a strong buffer around the classroom, guaranteeing nearly complete autonomy there to instructors who adhere to the disciplinary and professional norms of the system. That definition, however, offers fewer protections outside the classroom, especially for academics who teach at private institutions and so can neither rely on the First Amendment's protection against state interference with their freedom of speech nor invoke the contractual guarantees obtained through collective bargaining. The weakness of the AAUP's traditional language about off-campus speech became clear during the McCarthy period when people lost their jobs for political reasons that had nothing to do with their academic work. In response, the Association beefed up its interpretation of the 1940 statement in 1970 to emphasize that professors should not be punished for exercising their First Amendment rights as citizens. And, in fact, they rarely are--even at private institutions.

But there is a serious technical problem here. The main mechanism for protecting the academic freedom and autonomy of individual professors is tenure, the unlimited appointment of faculty members who successfully complete a seven-year term of probation. Theoretically, a university cannot dismiss tenured (or, in most cases, untenured) professors without navigating a complicated set of procedures designed to ensure that their rights are not violated. In reality, however, the financial, psychological, and professional cost of fighting an unjust dismissal in today's litigious society may be so high that, even with tenure, an aggrieved individual may simply opt for a one-time pay-out and a quiet departure. Moreover, it is by no means obvious that tenure as we know it will remain. A few years ago, its abolition was on the agenda of higher education reformers, who claimed that the practice not only coddled academic dead wood but also restricted the flexibility that the nation's colleges and universities needed if they were to meet the challenges of the new millenium. Fortunately, that frontal assault on tenure failed. Few schools went so far as to eliminate tenure outright, although many did adopt post-tenure review procedures that could threaten the job security of senior professors. The real danger, however, comes from the increase in contingent faculty appointments, the overwhelming majority (65 percent and rising) of the nation's faculties who teach part-time or off the ladder. Subject to dismissal at any moment, these people have none of the job security that earlier generations of tenured and tenure-track academics enjoyed. Accordingly, it makes little sense to talk about defending academic freedom without addressing the structural barriers to it imposed by the growing percentage of adjuncts and off-the-ladder instructors on the nation's faculties. *

But it also makes little sense to talk about tenure and academic freedom if we can't insert a strong case for them into the current public debate about higher education. Otherwise, that defense can be seen as a self-serving campaign for the retention of special privileges on the part of tenured radicals and their supposedly lazy colleagues. Certainly, we can and must invoke the all-American reverence for free speech to explain why faculty members should not lose their jobs for speaking out, but, as we have seen, the First Amendment has its limitations and, in any event, may be unable to protect professors against other threats to their autonomy. For that reason, and because the academy does require a special kind of protection, we need to go beyond the free speech argument to convince the rest of the nation of the educational, as well as political, value of academic freedom. We need to explain why the academic work of a college professor--her teaching and research--requires the special protection that only the job security of tenure can provide. And, equally important, we must show why interference with that academic work can be so deleterious.

The argument here is two-fold. Not only must we explain why we need autonomy in our teaching and research, but we must also--and I think this is elided in most discussions of academic freedom--demonstrate why that teaching and research is so important in the first place. Such a demonstration requires us to emphasize the crucial function of higher education within American society, not only for the utilitarian benefits that emerge from its research laboratories and classrooms--i.e., the trained workforce and scientific innovations that a modern economy requires as well as the individual mobility that a college degree confers--but also for its role in nurturing the reasoned deliberation upon which our democracy depends. Neither of these functions necessarily requires a home in the university; corporations carry out a considerable amount of training and research and there are still a few autodidacts and independent intellectuals around. Nonetheless, at least since the 1950s, most of this country's basic scientific research and serious critical thought does take place on campus.

Although the immigration constraints and other security precautions imposed in the aftermath of 9/11 are beginning to erode the preeminence of America's colleges and universities, the U.S. system of higher education remains the finest in the world. One reason for that superiority is the academic freedom its denizens possess. We have only to look at how Germany's once-vaunted universities declined during the Third Reich to understand how important freedom is to the academic endeavor. If that endeavor is to flourish, its practitioners need to operate without external constraints. Not only is this the case with their research where they must be free to pursue whatever line of inquiry their investigations unearth, but they must also possess that same autonomy within their classrooms so that their students can learn to use their own minds. Academic freedom, in other words, is a professional attribute that enables scholars and teachers to do their work. It is also, as we shall see, necessary for maintaining the quality of that work.

Although the academy must resist outside interference with what goes on in its classrooms, libraries, and labs, it does not--it cannot--operate within a totally unregulated environment. Its members must follow the rules of their disciplines. These professional requirements ensure that the research individual academics do contributes to the broader body of knowledge within their field and that their teaching accurately imparts that knowledge to their students. The academic community does this by means of peer review, the self-policing process through which the academic community makes sure that its members adhere to the norms of their profession. Hiring and tenure committees, university presses, scholarly journals, fellowship programs--the list of institutions that regulate the academic profession is long and varied, indicating how seriously its members take their responsibility for monitoring their colleagues' teaching and research. Naturally, conflicts arise, academics can be as petty and partisan as anyone else. Nonetheless, there is a fairly firm, though evolving, consensus within each field about what constitutes good scholarship and appropriate classroom behavior.

For this system of enforcing professional standards to operate effectively, however, it must be handled by people within each discipline. Who but another physical chemist can assess the grant application of someone who is working on the structural stability of giant polyoxomolybdate molecules? Who but another Medievalist can decide whether to publish a manuscript about thirteenth-century monastic regimes in Burgundy? And who but other economists can determine whether the teaching and scholarship of a young econometrician meet the criteria for tenure in their department? These kinds of decisions can only be made by men and women who have the expertise to ensure that their discipline's standards for competence and integrity will be met. Outsiders, no matter how well-meaning, lack the specialized training and experience that will enable them to judge the quality of someone's academic research. Nor do they have the background for prescribing the content of what gets taught. For these very good reasons, faculties have traditionally controlled most decisions about hiring, promotion, and curriculum. Although the current public debate about higher education tends to devalue the professional expertise of the academy, the quality of the nation's colleges and universities attests to the efficacy of its established practices.

But the faculty's traditional sphere of responsibility has been shrinking. The direct threat that something like the Academic Bill of Rights poses to the professoriate's autonomy diverts us from addressing the forces closer to home that are already undermining it. At many schools, activist administrations encroach upon the faculty's customary role in academic matters by seeking to replace their institutions' collegial mode of governance with a more corporate, hierarchical style of decision-making. Invoking such current buzz words as "flexibility" and "accountability," many administrators dilute the power of their faculties by hiring ever larger numbers of adjuncts and off-the-ladder instructors and by creating independent programs that circumvent traditional departmental controls over personnel and curriculum. Whether intentional or not, such practices destroy the collegiality that shared decision-making requires by creating a two-tiered instructional workforce and by encouraging individual professors to make special deals that sap the faculty's collective will. In the long run, unless these structural changes can be reversed or modified, they will almost certainly erode the professional autonomy of most college and university teachers.

Broader economic forces are, of course, responsible for these developments. The neoliberal assault on the public sector, characterized by cutbacks in the percentage of state and federal funding for higher education, has made most institutions ever more dependent on tuition payments and ever more desperate to attract students. As a result, marketing, rather than educational, considerations drive the allocation of resources, starving library budgets and less trendy humanities departments, while pouring funds into computer systems and state-of-the-art recreational centers. Vocational programs proliferate to the detriment of the traditional liberal arts. At the same time, the competition for grant money pushes universities to favor fields, like the biomedical sciences, where corporate funding can be found. Significantly, faculty members rarely have much, if any, say over these decisions even though they clearly affect what and how they teach and how they conduct their research. While few academic administrators are inherently autocratic, the many constituencies they must court in their constant struggle for resources lead them to slight shared decision-making with their faculties.

Because we tend to think of governance as somehow separate from academic freedom, we sometimes underestimate how seriously this administrative aggrandizement erodes the traditional autonomy of the nation's faculties. But, once we view academic freedom as a professional attribute that requires professors to control their own academic work, it is obvious that they must have a say in how their schools are run. Traditionally, faculty members exercised that power through a variety of mechanisms, from independent faculty senates and departmental committees to collective bargaining agreements. Maintaining these arrangements does not mean that professors need to run their universities, simply that they must be consulted about those areas of the institutional enterprise where academic expertise is required and--this is important--must have the information necessary for making effective decisions. Unfortunately, that kind of shared governance is becoming increasingly less common. While Harvard professors may still possess enough clout to force the resignation of their school's ineptly authoritarian president, few other faculties have that much power. Instead we see abusive administrations and boards of trustees that terrorize entire faculties. Or, what is probably most common: the administrators' gradual appropriation of academic decision-making from their university's passive and overworked faculty members.

In such a situation, with the faculty's autonomy under assault from both within and without the institution, it is obvious that America's college teachers must mount a collective defense of their own autonomy and professionalism. The low morale and pervasive disunity on so many campuses make this a difficult proposition. Nonetheless, it is possible that the current political offensive against the university might galvanize the academic community, forcing it to recognize its common interests and reestablish its credibility with the rest of the American public. Given today's conservative political climate, overcoming decades of negative publicity will not be easy. Yet, unless the nation's college teachers and administrators recognize how seriously academic freedom is being challenged and forge a common defense, the future of American higher education, not to mention that of our democratic political system, will be at risk. We cannot let that occur.

* Because there is already an excellent literature on academic contingent labor, I am not going to explore that issue in this essay. For starters, visit the website of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, hap:// www.caut.ca/cocal/links.asp. See also Tony Scott, Leo Parascondola, and Marc Bousquet Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003) and Patrick Kavanagh and Kevin Mattson, Steal This University: The Rise of The Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (New York: Routledge, 2003).

NOTES

(1.) For a more detailed account of McCarthyism's impact on the academic community, see my No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

(2.) "Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis," Report of an AAUP Special Committee, http://www.aaup. org/statements/REPORTS/ Post9-11.pdf

(3.) Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, "Americans' Views of Political Bias in the Academy and Academic Freedom," May 2006, http:// www.aaup.org/surveys/ 2006Gross.pdf

(4.) A useful recent discussion of the legal status of academic freedom is Philippa Strum, "Why Academic Freedom? The Theoretical and Constitutional Context," in Beshata Doumani, ed., Academic Freedom after September 11, (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2006).