Over at Corey Robin's blog, in a discussion of the Salaita case, I posted my letter. In response someone questioned the results of academic freedom: "Do you believe that the academy today encompasses the “widest possible range of views” on the Israel-Palestine conflict? Do you believe it encompasses a wide range of view in general?" I wrote an earlier version of the following, which now represents edits thanks to FB discussion:
The purpose of academic freedom is to provide a protected sphere of opinion so that society as a whole can benefit. It has nothing to do with the range of opinion within academia; it protects the process of producing opinion, whatever the results of that process. Whatever the range of opinion in academia regarding the role of Israel in the Gaza war, even one percent disapproval would still provide to society a greater range of opinion than did the US Senate with its 100-0 approval vote. This exaggeration illustrates the way academic freedom exists to provide a counterbalance to the conformist pressure exerted by concentrations of political and economic power.
The commenter you refer to seems to me to have a point. The widest range of views is not represented by academia. But nonetheless, if the point of academia, as you say above, is not to bother with a range of views but rather to protect the process of producing opinion, and if as your commenter implies, that there is no real range of opinion in academia (assuming with your commenter that the "range" from center-left to far-left hardly represents a wide range, especially when they agree on policy matters) then the process is either failing or biased or somehow managed to hit on a correct answer that (the conservative) half of the country just doesn't get. If either of the first two is true, then why protect a failing or biased institution? If the latter is true, then academia is failing at its one true goal, to compellingly convey their ideas to the public. Therefore, academia's status quo hardly seems worth protecting as it is.
(((The fact that there are institutions that once a year are more one-sided than academia is irrelevant. (Analogously, as we are constantly lectured by the left, the fact that there are many institutions orders of magnitude more violent and oppressive than modern Israel, for example, does not mean that we should stop talking about how murderous Israel is.) We are told not to look at such things relatively.)))
Posted by: Karl | August 10, 2014 at 12:15 PM
"The commenter you refer to seems to me to have a point. The widest range of views is not represented by academia."
What studies can you adduce to support this claim?
Posted by: John Protevi | August 10, 2014 at 12:51 PM