Real academic freedom

Academics should be free to call into question our most cherished beliefs - to slaughter a whole herd of sacred cows, if that's what is required. Critical inquiry is the starting point for stable and enduring knowledge about the world, and that often means upsetting people.

But academic freedom doesn't mean that academics can say whatever they like, whenever they like. Academic freedom doesn't mean freedom to swear at their students in class, just as it doesn’t mean freedom to behave badly at dinner parties. There are certain standards and restrictions that academics should be expected to comply with, given their position as professional - and adult - members of society.

So that is why the case of Sal Fiore, a senior lecturer in computing at Wolverhampton, sacked for criticising his employers online, is not really an academic freedom issue. In an online discussion forum, Fiore linked Wolverhampton to bullying allegations, and he also conributed to a blog, 'Bulliedacademics.blogspot.com', discussing his university. Heretical books are one thing, but this is an academic behaving like his students on Facebook, who moan about people they don't like.

Academic freedom means something very specific: the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. This is inherently valuable, and can be exempted from normal administrative and professional regulations. The deputy director of a company would not expect to keep his job if he criticised the ideas of the top director. This is not the case in academia, a sphere based on the free contest of ideas. But an academic could expect the sack if he criticized his boss's hair colour or personality, which is not a matter of ideas at all, but merely a matter of bad behaviour.

So defend academic freedom - for academics that know the difference between ideas and tittle tattle.

Josie Appleton

It's a Shoah-down!

To those searching for the new political battleground of the 21st century - I've found it! The intellectual artillery of the forces of progress and reaction will be fired over... wait for it... er... the speaker's roster at numerous public lectures across the world(!) Armies of Jewish terrorists and Muslim Zionists [sic], dubious academics and free-world vigilanties will square-off over who is allowed to speak where and to whom (and how the promotional material is to advertise the event).

I'll cite a few random recent examples:
- David Irving, professional Holocaust denier, was recently asked to leave a Polish book festival.
- Last week the leader of the New Black Panther Party (a man apparently prone to anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering) provoked outrage in Toronto's Jewish community after being invited to speak to the 'Black Youth Taking Action' group.
- In February, Muslims at the University of California, Davis, protested the invitation to speak extended by campus Republicans to a 'former Islamic terrorist' turned 'Zionist-Islamofacism-warrior'.
- Last week, Muslims at that same university welcomed Norman Finklestein - son of Holocaust-vicitms, anti-Zionist, and alleged Holocaust-denier - which was duly opposed by Jewish students.
- Also in the past week, an Italian university prevented a French Holocaust-denier from speaking on campus.

Now, each case does have its intricacies which complicates the cases slightly. For example, while in the UC Davis cases students invited the contentious speaker, in the last case Robert Faurisson (the denier) had been invited to speak at the University of Teramo by the very director of the master's programme in Middle Eastern studies (for the sake of 'balance', here's a link to the Italian story from an Iranian site, the previous link above being to the Jerusalem Post - though both stories say much the same thing). In addition, the university cited 'security concerns', rather than 'objectionable content' as the reason for denying the denier. In the David Irving case, the festival's planners had legal concerns as Holocaust-denial is illegal in Poland. At UC Davis, the Jewish students complained that while the anti-Islamofascist speaker had been funded privately, the university had paid some $400 to the Muslims group to fund Finkelstein's lecture expenses.

But actually these details are hardly relevant - in fact they're a total distraction (and in most cases they were merely spurious excuses for what was really censorship). The real story of note here is the total absence of political content to these cases. Rather than a proper argument about the Israel-Palestine question or even about the historical understanding of the Holocaust (though really there should be little need to discuss the latter), partisans of both sides engage in lectern-wars over who can and cannot speak. The censorious nature of no-platform policies has been widely discussed (in fact, the columnist for the Sacramento Bee is quite good on this question), but equally worrying is the promiscuous use of inflammatory terms to describe 'the enemy' - something I just indulged in, above. For these political questions - one of the few to still genuinely inflame passions - it is almost as if we need a new language to discuss the issues. The old terms have become tainted through association with the dog-whistle-politics being practiced on university campuses thousands of kilometres (or indeed decades) away from the site of actual political conflict. The bans and counter-bans, the Zionist/Islamofascist name-calling, the promiscuous use of bad historical analogies - these do not constitute politics, they are the enemy of politics.

Alex Hochuli

It's NOT just academic

The latest efforts to restrict the freedom of bloggers come not from authoritarian governments or oversensitive lobby groups, but university administrators. Increasing numbers of academics are being disciplined for criticising their bosses, or other colleagues, on blogs like Bullying of Academics in Higher Education, other online forums or even in emails. As Dennis Hayes of Academics for Academic Freedom tells this week's Times Higher Education Supplement, 'Despite continually promoting the supposed benefits of new technology, in reality universities fear it. Blogs, simple emails or discussion groups and podcasts are new forms in which academics and students can explore ideas freely without permission from any authority. [University managements] view academic freedom of speech as something that happens in the classroom and not something that is to be tolerated elsewhere.' In truth, academic freedom cannot be limited to classrooms, but depends on the more general freedom to speak freely in a variety of contexts, blogs included.

Dolan Cummings

Doorstopping Free Speech

Leeds University has been accused of censorship following its cancellation of a talk entitled 'Hitler's Legacy: Islamic anti-Semitism in the Middle East'. When the speaker, German academic Matthias Köntzel, arrived in Leeds only to be told that his lectures were off, he was shocked. “It is a controversial area but I am accustomed to debate. I value the integrity of academic debate and I feel that it really is in danger here,” he said.

The case is a telling example of the banal nature of censorship today. It was not that the university authorities thought that Köntzel's work lacked merit, nor even that they thought his work was wrong. Rather, they cancelled on 'security grounds'. They insisted that they were not expressing an opinion about his views. It was, they said, merely a bureaucratic matter of not having enough doormen to ensure his safety. So does health and safety become the dull final arbiter of which views get a hearing?

The case also shows that people no longer even listen to viewpoints with which they disagree, let alone engaging with and fighting them. The head of the university Islamic society issued a 'complaint' about the speaker, saying that the title was “provocative” and that his views were “not very pleasant”. Why not just say you disagree, or openly criticise his views as wrong, immoral, or blasphemous? Why not turn up to voice such criticism in person, or lobby the lecture with banners and whistles? Anything but the dull and neutered ‘complaint’ that the title of the lecture was 'provocative'.

There is a risk that we may lose the ability to tell what is and is not an insult. There are criticisms of Islam that are merely provocative and insulting, and that are best ignored. But Köntzel has gone to the bother of writing books and articles, and formulating arguments in the light of historical evidence. The Muslim brotherhood did, in fact, have a relationship with the Nazi Party in the 1930s - though what you make of that is another thing. There are insults, and there are formed opinions, and the latter deserve an opportunity to be heard.

Josie Appleton

'Empowering women' through censorship at Warwick University

There is disquiet among feminist groups at Warwick University. A local nightclub, ‘SMACK’, is running a weekly night called ‘SMACK – My Bitch Up’. As I’m informed by a campaign poster that had previously adorned the Sociology corridor but now sits on my desk: ‘Publicity surrounding this event displays a portrait of a woman who has facial injuries suggesting violence against women.’

When I tell you that other campaigns by such groups at Warwick have included moving lads-mag FHM to the top shelf of the campus newsagent, you’ll understand just how closely this type of thinking associates banning things with the supposed empowerment of women. This time, however, I think we can detect a hint of naivety alongside the usual serving of censoriousness.

Does anyone honestly think that promotional material like this truly reflects a widespread and seductive climate of acceptable violence toward women? Isn’t it more likely that this rather harmless, run-of-the-mill student haunt is using taboo as a way to pass itself off as rather more of a seditious place than it actually is? It is the secret glee of pissing-off captious feminists, rather than the guilty pleasure of beating women, that grants a cruddy promotional campaign any allure it might have.

Ben Walford