Free Speech Under Fire? - The Case of Steven Salaita

Earlier this year, The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof used his column to call upon academics to engage a wider public beyond their usual audiences.  Kristof argued that our society needed the best and the brightest among us in order to solve some of the vexing problems we currently confront, noting the misfortune that “[S]cholars have periodically submitted meaningless gibberish to scholarly journals — only to have the nonsense respectfully published. ...” while concluding, “So, professors, don’t cloister yourselves like medieval monks — we need you!”

Kristof’s views raised a number of objections from many academics who essentially countered that many scholars already are engaging a broad public through their teaching and their writing, which often appears beyond professional scholarly journals and in outlets like the op-ed pages of major national newspapers, blogs, and other alternate venues.  While Kristof’s opinion may have been valid in spirit to some extent, he and some of his critics ultimately missed a major point about the current climate on contemporary college campuses – namely how academics increasingly are being discouraged if not out rightly punished for speaking publicly on important topics of the day.

One needs to look no further than the case of Steven G. Salaita.

Image Steven G. Salaita from Inside Higher Ed

For those unfamiliar with this situation, here are the basic facts.  Dr. Salaita was offered a tenured professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).  Ultimately, UIUC Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise voided Dr. Salaita’s appointment when she refused to advance his nomination to the University’s Board of Trustees, which was to vote on Salaita’s joining the UIUC faculty.  Chancellor Wise cited Dr. Salaita’s public comments via Twitter about the ongoing violence in Gaza – comments some characterized as uncivil at best and as anti-Semitic at worst.  During the subsequent weeks, the UIUC Board and Chancellor received criticisms that their actions and their justifications of them on the basis of "civility" are tantamount to an attack on academic freedom, freedom of speech protections, or both.

Writing for The Chronicle of Education’s blog "Vitae", Georgia Perimeter College Associate Professor Rob Jenkins discusses the chilling effects punitive actions such as those taken by the UIUC administration can have, stating:

I’m not denying that academic freedom is taking a beating all over the country.  But what is even more endangered, it seems to me, is the right of faculty members to speak their mind outside of the classroom, off-campus, and apart from their contractual duties.  In return for a paycheck, faculty members are increasingly expected to surrender their personal beliefs on controversial topics, lest—God forbid—they say something that might “embarrass the institution.”

My point here is not to weigh whether or not Dr. Salaita’s Twitter comments constitute anti-Semitism.  Rather, I wish to express my own concern about the broad application of so-called civility and similarly vague or ambiguous dispositional characteristics as the basis for punitive actions against scholars and academics by the institutions they serve or by the administrators responsible for the integrity of those institutions.

We must consistently bear in mind that colleges and universities are institutions founded on the free exchange of ideas.  Many scholars do what they do in order produce and advance knowledge for the benefit of all of society.  As such, practitioners of the various academic disciplines should challenge conventional wisdom and speak truth to power.  Indeed, this was a motivating factor for me in becoming an historian.

In his brilliant primer, History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2000), John H. Arnold addresses this idea, writing:

[H]istory is an argument, and arguments present the opportunity for change.  When presented with some dogmatist claiming that “this is the only course of action” or “this is how things have always been,” history allows us to demure, to point out that there have always been many courses of action, many ways of being.  History provides us with the tools to dissent (page 122, original emphasis).

As Dr. Salaita’s case demonstrates, punitive institutional actions against those charged with producing and disseminating knowledge can take tremendous tolls on both the professional and the personal levels.  Yet, I believe it is the work of academics and scholars - the producing and disseminating knowledge and speaking truth to power - that can serve as a corrective to such aggressions.

The Pastness of the Past, or the Past in the Present?

Among my professional responsibilities is teaching a methods course for aspiring secondary history teachers.  I customarily use the opening weeks of each semester to engage my students with open-ended, abstract questions, including “What is history?” and “Why study history?” believing that unless my students can answer these questions for themselves, they cannot help others – especially their own students – answer them.  To that end, I assign particular theoretical pieces for my students to read, helping them formulate their own responses to these abstract questions.  In preparing this semester’s syllabus, I was surprised to discover that this month marks the 80^th anniversary of the publication of a piece that has had a great influenced my own thinking about these questions.

Charles Beard’s essay, “Written History as an Act of Faith” appeared in the American Historical Review in January 1934.  Granted, this was the published version of his Presidential Address to the American Historical Association from the year before, but it is highly unlikely that any of today’s practicing historians heard that original speech, and so I choose to mark the anniversary of the essay's publication (AHR, 39:2, pp. 219-231.)  Despite the milestone, it seems that the 80^th anniversary of the publication of “Written History as an Act of Faith” seems to have passed with little fanfare.  That is too bad given the essay’s importance, which rests not only in Beard’s observations about the nature of history for the professional historian, but also for the layperson.  Beard successfully demystifies history to some degree and in so doing makes the discipline accessible to more than trained academics.

Charles A. Beard
(Image from Wikipedia)

In his essay, Beard argues for, “History as past actually [which] includes, to be sure, all that has been done, said, felt, and thought by human beings on this planet since humanity began its long career.”  Beard deconstructs that totality of the past first as “record…the monuments, documents, and symbols which provide such knowledge as we have or can find respecting past actuality,” and then “history as thought…thought about past actuality instructed and delimited by history as record and knowledge.”

In understanding the relationship between record and thought, Beard argues for three broad conceptions of history.  “The first is that history as total actuality is chaos,” Beard writes, suggesting further that people may not be able to understand or interpret that chaos, either objectively or subjectively.  “The second is that history as actually is part of some order of nature and revolves in cycles eternally,” such as the season of the year, election cycles, or similar rotating occurrences.  “The third is that history as actually is moving in some direction away from the low level of primitive beginnings, on an upward gradient toward a more ideal order...”

Beard qualifies each of these constructions, writing:

“The hypothesis of chaos admits of no ordering at all; hence those who operate under it cannot write history, although they may comment on history [original emphasis].  The second admits of an ordering of events only by arbitrarily leaving out of account all contradictions in evidence.  The third admits of an ordering of events, also by leaving contradictions out of consideration.  The historian who writes history, therefore, consciously or unconsciously performs an act of faith, as to order and movement, for certainty as to order and movement is denied to him by knowledge of the actuality with which he is concerned.… His faith is at bottom a conviction that something true can be known about the movement of history and his conviction is a subjective decision, not purely objective discovery.”

For Beard, then, “any selection and arrangement of facts pertaining to any large area of history…is controlled inexorably by the frame of reference in the mind of the selector and arranger,” or as he had stated earlier in his essay, “any written history inevitably reflects the thought of the author in his time and cultural setting.”

Such an assertion has led critics to accuse Beard of being a relativist.  I think this is an unfair characterization.  To demonstrate this point for my students, I use the example of U.S. history textbooks.  One could chart the development of such tome though their treatment of blacks, Hispanics, women, or other historically marginalized groups within their pages.  Clearly such texts provide evidence of how written history is informed by its authors' cultural times and settings.  (Two worthwhile defenses against charges of Beard as a relativist that I encountered recently are Jack W. Meiland’s “The Historical Relativism of Charles A. Beard,” History and Theory, 12:4 [1974], pp. 405-413; and Ellen Nore’s “Charles A. Beard’s Act of Faith: Context and Content,” Journal of American History, 66:4 [March 1980], pp. 850-866.)

For as much as I appreciate “Written History as an Act of Faith,” I am embarrassed to admit that I did not encounter Beard’s essay until my first semester of graduate school, in the Fall of 2001.  Such an admission suggests that I had graduated from Loyola with a history major and had been teaching high school history devoid of this fundamental understanding of the nature of history.  I have a better understanding now, however; and while I cannot change the past, I can use it to better inform the present for my students and their students yet to come.