The AAUP Abandons Academic Freedom
Also: The winners of the inaugural First Things poetry prize, George Scialabba on free will, revisiting the work of H. L. Mencken, a new map of the human brain, and more.
The fall semester starts today at Regent University, where I teach, and it is going to be a busy one with five classes and some service responsibilities that will take a fair bit of time. Regent is mostly a teaching university rather than a research one, and so heavy course loads are common. The good news (for me at least) is that the spring should be lighter.
Regent is also a religious school. I have been here eight years, and colleagues at secular schools sometimes ask what it’s like to teach at a place like Regent. The short answer is: The students are good and intellectually curious, the campus is beautiful, and, all things considered, the pay is fair.
“But what about academic freedom?” Well, it is constrained in some ways, but those constraints are explicit and consistent. The university does state clearly that it expects faculty research to support the school’s mission, but what counts as supporting the mission is defined broadly to give as much space as possible to professors exploring more abstract questions or problems.
Secular schools constrain academic freedom, too—all schools do—but those constraints are rarely explicit and not always consistent. I don’t work at a secular school, so I can’t say for sure, but it seems to me that academic freedom is increasingly under attack at these institutions, and it may get worse if the American Association of University Professors’s new boycott policy is any indication of what’s coming.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Cary Nelson, who was president of the AAUP from 2006 to 2012, writes that the new policy, which states that students and faculty have “an unqualified right” to boycott any decision they think is wrong and should face no discipline for doing so, will lead to disastrous results—especially for Jewish students:
I predict that hundreds of those and other individual micro-boycotts of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty will be initiated during the 2024-25 academic year as a consequence of the AAUP policy change. There will also be dedicated group efforts to criminalize collaborative research projects between faculty in America and Israel, projects that often entail institutional endorsement and support.
The AAUP’s position that “academic boycotts should neither involve any political or religious litmus tests nor target individual scholars and teachers engaged in ordinary academic practices, such as publishing scholarship, delivering lectures and conference presentations, or participating in research collaborations” will be honored in the breach. That principle is in tension with the unqualified freedom that the organization grants to individuals to boycott or not to boycott. Expect organized demonstrations against collaborative American and Israeli research programs. Expect more efforts to block study-abroad programs, efforts that compromise student academic freedom.
Writing in City Journal, Joshua T. Katz explains that this new policy is not the only recent decision the AAUP has made that indicates a move away from supporting academic freedom:
Six months ago, the AAUP announced that it was establishing a Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, made possible by a grant of over $1.5 million from the Mellon Foundation. According to the press release, the center “will compile a database of the political organizations, think tanks, donors, and political operatives most responsible for the current wave of attacks and evaluate their success in shaping the trajectory of US higher education.” But would you believe it? The unpalatable think tanks, donors, political operatives, and current attacks are all on the right! In May, the center’s director, Isaac Kamola (coauthor of the 2021 book Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War), published a lengthy white paper titled “Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023.”
Surely the AAUP should be able to issue a report that criticizes would-be excesses on the right without ignoring the fact that much of the apparatus of the American professoriate is propelled—financially, intellectually, and pedagogically—by far-left individuals and groups inside and outside the academy who do not believe in free speech, academic freedom, or the right of Israel to exist. It is telling that neither Kamola nor any of the 15 fellows of the center, whose names were announced in June, are among the nearly 900 members of the AFA. Nor are any of the AAUP’s 14 “elected leaders,” or the chair of Committee A (on whose progressive activism my AEI colleague Samuel J. Abrams has commented), or any of the other 13 current members of said committee (two of whom are also among the elected leaders). Nor, furthermore, are any of the people associated with the Journal of Academic Freedom, at least in recent years: neither of the two “faculty coeditors” or any of the 21 or 19 other contributors, respectively, to the latest issue, vol. 14 (2023), or vol. 13 (2022); and neither of the two editors of vol. 12 (2021) or any of the 26 other contributors to that number (one of them Kamola).
The good news is that an open letter opposing the AAUP’s new policy has already received thousands of signatures. Let’s hope the AAUP changes its mind—again.
In other news, over at First Things we have announced the winners of our inaugural poetry prize: Josiah Cox for his poem “Two Owls” and Ryan Wilson for his sonnet “Gather Ye.” Both poems will be published in the October issue. I was also pleased to accept several other poems for publication that didn’t win one of the two prizes. If you aren’t a subscriber to First Things, why not give it a try—especially if you love poetry?
Speaking of poetry, New Verse Review has published its first issue. It includes work by Sally Thomas, Ben Myers, Jennifer Reeser, Matthew Walther, J. C. Scharl, James Matthew Wilson, Dan Rattelle, Matthew Buckley Smith, Maryann Corbett, Marly Youmans, and many others. Check it out here. I am particularly happy to see New Verse Review come on the scene after the (likely) end of Literary Matters.
George Scialabba reviews two new books on free will:
Skepticism about free will is said to produce two disastrous but opposed states of mind. The first is apathy: We are bound to be so demoralized by the conviction that nothing is up to us, that we are not the captains of our fate, that we need no longer get out of bed. The other is frenzy: We will be so exhilarated by our liberation from responsibility and guilt that we will run amok, like Dostoevsky’s imagined atheist, who concludes that if God does not exist, everything is permitted.
Note that it is not the absence of free will but only the absence of belief in free will that is said to have these baneful effects. People who never give the subject a thought are neither apathetic nor frenetic, at least not for these reasons. Should we just stop thinking about the whole question?
For twenty-five hundred years, no generation has succeeded in doing that: So we may as well wade in. What is free will? It is the capacity to make uncaused choices. This does not mean that nothing causes my choice—it means that I do. But surely something has caused me to be the person who makes that choice. And doesn’t whatever causes me to be the person I am also cause the choices I make?
Ben Boychuk revisits the work of in H. L. Mencken in Chronicles:
One of the few worthwhile collections of H. L. Mencken’s newspaper writing, as it appeared originally in The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere, emerged in 1991 under the title The Impossible H.L. Mencken. In an otherwise laudatory review, Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley called the book’s title “silly.” “To call H.L. Mencken ‘impossible’ is excessively cute and unwittingly condescending,” he sniffed.
The title, selected by editor Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, was intended to suggest Mencken was too stubborn, too difficult, too exasperating—which certainly many of his readers and critics believed. Yet this was also a man who in his lifetime was celebrated as America’s Samuel Johnson and George Bernard Shaw, and compared to no less than Mark Twain for his humor and biting wit.
All of that might have been true when Mencken was active on the scene, and even 33 years ago when Rodgers was prominent in helping keep the man’s memory and legacy alive. But today the appellation takes on a different meaning. The “Sage of Baltimore’s” career and ideas simply would be impossible today.
What is Tom Wolfe so widely read? David Brooks attempts an answer: “Wolfe was known for his style, but it was his worldview that made him. He read Max Weber at Yale and it all clicked: Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for surfaces, for the care with which people put on their social displays. He had the ability to name the status rules that envelop us in ways we are hardly aware of. He had a knack for capturing what it feels like to be caught up in a certain sort of social dilemma.”
Rachel Cooke reviews Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness: “The Island, though highly biographical, is not a biography; the book it most resembles in my eyes is Peter Parker’s Housman Country: Into the Heart of England, a study of AE Housman (though Parker’s instincts – I mean this as a compliment – are more demotic than Jenkins’s). Broadly speaking, it is about the many things that worked on the young Auden, feeding into his poetry; Jenkins, miner-like, digs down into the verse and brings every influence up to the surface (again, I picture a fissure on a hill). The first world war is everywhere, of course: every bit as powerfully black for Auden as ‘the immense bat-shadow of home’, for all that his generation did not fight.”
Zan Romanoff writes about Frank Zappa’s daughter’s memoir of her childhood, which was apparently terrible:
One night in 1979, 11-year-old Moon Unit Zappa falls asleep to the sound of her parents arguing. They argue plenty, so this isn’t unusual. Her father, Frank, is a musician and composer with a knotty, complex aural style and a seemingly insatiable appetite for sleeping with his fans. Her mother, Gail, helps him manage his business, and the two are often in conflict about money, other women or both.
But on this particular night, things spiral out of control. And after a few hours of sleep, as Zappa recalls in her new memoir, Earth to Moon, she’s awakened by her father standing over her bed saying, “Gail is on a rampage. I need you to hide the gun.”
Maxwell Carter reviews Sjeng Scheijen’s The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935: “Four years before the revolt that overturned Russia’s political order, the painter Mikhail Larionov called for likeminded Muscovites to spurn convention and affect what we might today call ‘hipster style.’ His 1913 ‘Manifesto for Man’ encouraged the adoption of dubious beards and mustaches, beribboned hair, tattoos and sandals. True to his word, Larionov was soon to be found parading up and down Kuznetsky Most sporting dramatic blue and red face paint. ‘Life has invaded art,’ he declared, ‘now it is time for art to invade life. Face-painting is the beginning of the invasion’ . . . Such outbursts, [Scheijen] remarks, ‘mark the arrival of the avant-garde in Russia, a movement encompassing a whole spectrum of artists who all had at least one thing in common: the desire to unite art and life.’ The Russian and Soviet avant-garde is neither school nor style but ‘a mentality.’”
The most detailed map of the human brain ever made: “Biologists and machine-learning experts spent 10 years building an interactive map of the brain tissue, which contains approximately 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses. It shows cells that wrap around themselves, pairs of cells that seem mirrored, and egg-shaped “objects” that, according to the research, defy categorization. This mind-blowingly complex diagram is expected to help drive forward scientific research, from understanding human neural circuits to potential treatments for disorders.”
Charles Fain Lehman reviews Nate Silver’s On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything: “A couple of years after I graduated from college, concerned that my ability to understand philosophy was stagnating, I spent part of a year reading A Thousand Plateaus, the inscrutable magnum opus of French continental philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. The book is hard to describe: Its chapters seem to have very little to do with each other, in turn invoking strange ideas about ‘rhizomes’ and ‘war machines’ and ‘blank faces.’ (The chapter I remember best spends a lot of time trying to explain the philosophical significance of the shape of lobsters.) . . . reading On the Edge left me with the same experience of reading A Thousand Plateaus—it felt like the author was, through a series of somewhat disjointed stories and discussions, attempting to change how his readers see the world.”
‘ Zappa recalls in her new memoir, Earth to Moon, she’s awakened by her father standing over her bed saying, “Gail is on a rampage. I need you to hide the gun.”’
So? My siblings and I spent our youth and early adulthood hiding guns, knives, sharp scissors, and bats from our parents and you don’t see any of us writing memoirs! Mom and Dad both died of old age two months apart. In fact, we thought their animosity was pretty normal, at least during childhood. We all raised our own kids in a different environment however.