I hate it when I have a book in press and people keep writing about the subject anyway. You would think that they would have the courtesy to hold their fire until I have had my say. I raise the issue because
my book on academic freedom (“Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution”) will be out in about a year and the online Journal of Academic Freedom (published by the American
Association of University Professors) has just posted its fourth volume consisting of essays on a topic that figures prominently in my analysis — the boycott of Israeli universities by academic institutions
and scholars housed in other countries.
For those of you who haven’t heard about this movement, let me briefly rehearse its history. Since the early 2000’s a number of academics have been arguing that because Israel is a rogue state
engaged in acts of oppression and apartheid, and because Israeli universities are by and large supported and administered by the state, it must be assumed that those universities further the ends of a repressive
regime, either by actively supporting its policies or by remaining silent in the face of atrocities committed against the Palestinians. Accordingly, it is appropriate, and Read more…
Ronald Dworkin, a professor of law and philosophy at New York University, was arguably the most influential legal philosopher of the past 50 years. Dworkin, who died in February, was (and will continue to be)
known for his critique of positivism, a view of law that locates its authority in what is “on the books” — what has been enacted by those who are in a position to back up their pronouncements
with sanctions and penalties, including the loss of property and life. Dworkin argued that here must be more than that; there must be an underlying or overarching set of values in relation to which legal
particulars are intelligible and have meaning.
Rather than reading statutes and clauses in the Constitution as discrete entities “related to one another through pedigree” — through the politically authoritative source they happen to
share — Dworkin asks us to read statutes and clauses in the Constitution as parts of a continuing effort by the judiciary “to construct, reinspect, and revise, generation by generation, the
skeleton of liberal equal concern,” the virtue whose elaboration is, in his view, at the heart of the constitutional project. (“Freedom’s Law,” 1996.) So when the question arises
as to whether a form of activity is protected by the Constitution, one should answer it, according to Dworkin, not by parsing words or deferring to majority rule or deferring to the executive, but by determining
whether the protection of that activity is demanded by the spirit — the commitment to basic values like the value of equal concern — the Constitution breathes.
In what turned out to be his final book, “Religion Without God,” Dworkin brings this argument to bear on one of the more
vexing questions of modern jurisprudence: to what extent and on what basis should constitutional protection be afforded to religious activities, especially when those activities are in conflict with settled
law? Any answer to that question must first define what religion is (something the courts have never been able to do), and Dworkin begins boldly in his very first sentence: “The theme of this book
is that religion is deeper than God.” Dworkin doesn’t mean that being religious and believing in God are incompatible; he means that the latter is a possible version of, but not the essence
of, the former.
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In my previous column I suggested that new developments in on-line teaching bring with them a loss of community and human interaction. Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, has been invited by the editors and me to reply to my account of her position.
My fellow professor Stanley Fish makes some very valid points about Derek Bok’s “Higher Education in America” and William Bowen’s “Higher Education in the Digital
Age” in his recent column, “The Two Cultures of Education Reform”; however, it’s valuable to highlight two alternative perspectives regarding the use of technology in higher education.
First, when we discuss the role of digital media within the context of education reform, we do not want to confound forward technological progress with a rejection of all that came before us. Second, we
must leverage, not fight against, the changing tide of the preferences of a new generation — the digital natives.
In “Higher Education in the Digital Age,” I’m quoted as saying that with the help of the digital media, “we can release ourselves from the shackles that we have gotten used to in
the context of in-class teaching.'” Here, I’m referring to the potential of online education to enhance, and not replace, professors’ interactions with their students. Giving the
same lectures time and again takes up thousands of hours of a professor’s time. By making more lectures and informational materials available to students online, along the same lines of assigning
work from a textbook, professors can be freed to spend more time engaging in high-quality activities and discussions with their students.
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About halfway through his magisterial study “Higher Education in America,” Derek Bok, twice president of Harvard, identifies what he
calls the “two different cultures” of educational reform. The first “is an evidence-based approach to education … rooted in the belief that one can best advance teaching and learning
by measuring student progress and testing experimental efforts to increase it.” The second “rests on a conviction that effective teaching is an art which one can improve over time through personal
experience and intuition without any need for data-driven reforms imposed from above.”
Bok is obviously a member of the data and experiment culture, which makes him cautiously sympathetic to developments in online teaching, including the recent explosion of MOOCs (massive open online courses).
But at the same time, he is acutely aware of the limits of what can be tested, measured and assessed, and at crucial moments in his analysis that awareness pushes him in the direction of the other, “ineffable”
culture.
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The Florida Stand Your Ground law is often characterized as an expansion of the venerable “castle doctrine” — because a man’s home is his castle, he is justified in repelling intruders
with force if necessary — but, as many have observed, it may be more accurate to see it as the return to the contemporary American landscape of the “shoot first” ethic of the old west,
at least as it has been portrayed in dozens of movies.
The opposite of standing your ground is to retreat, and in many states the rule still is that if you are confronted outside your home and violent conflict seems imminent you have a duty to retreat (provided
that an avenue of retreat is available) before resorting to deadly force. Stand Your Ground laws remove that duty; your home is now any place you happen to be as long as you are there lawfully. Wherever
you are, you have the right to be there and no one has the right to push you around.
In fact, “stand your ground” is more than a declaration of a right; it is an injunction — stand your ground, be a man. Retreating in order to avoid violence is not the commendable act of
a prudent man, but the act of a coward, of someone who runs away. It is this aspect of the Stand Your Ground laws — their implicit affirmation of a code of manliness — that links them to the
novelistic and filmic representations of the old west.
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In recent columns both David Brooks and Verlyn Klinkenborg have remarked (as almost everyone else has) on the decline of the humanities in our colleges and universities.
Brooks speculates that “many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise” and have replaced traditional aesthetic concerns — “the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness”
— with overtly political concerns. (I have some sympathy with this complaint.) Klinkenborg laments the erosion of writing skills — again I am compelled to agree — and deplores a “vocational
emphasis” that has resulted in a precipitate drop in the number of literature majors. He, too, lays some of the blame at the door of the humanists themselves, decrying the “technical narrowness”
of specialization and a “theoretical emphasis” that, he thinks, is more suitable to graduate than to undergraduate courses. (Here I disagree; when specialists drill down, what they and their
students find waiting for them is a deep flowering of the general; and theory rigorously employed sheds more light on “old notions of truth, beauty and goodness” than anything else.)
Klinkenborg also points to a public relations failure. Humanists, he says, “do a bad job of explaining why the humanities matter” and he cites, as does Brooks, a report recently issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences titled “The Heart of the Matter.” Produced in response to a Congressional request, the report is clear about what is needed: “At
a time when economic anxiety is driving the public toward a narrow concept of education focused on short-term payoffs, it is imperative that colleges, universities and their supporters make a clear and convincing
case for the value of Liberal Arts Education.” The report promises to show the way by making the case in general and suggesting some specific actions that might be taken.
The promise is not redeemed, and I predict that this report — laden with bland commonplaces and recommendations that could bear fruit only in a Utopia — will be dutifully noted by pious commentators
and then live a quiet life on the shelf for which it was destined.
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I have sold my books. Not all of them, but most of them. I held on to the books I might need while putting the finishing touches on a manuscript that is now with my publisher. I also kept the books I will likely
need when I begin my next project in the fall. But the books that sustained my professional life for 50 years — books by and about Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Skelton, Sidney, Herbert, Marvell,
Herrick, Donne, Jonson, Burton, Browne, Bacon, Dryden, Hobbes — are gone (I watched them being literally wheeled out the door), and now I look around and see acres of empty white bookshelves.
The ostensible reason for this de-acquisition is a move from a fair-sized house to a much smaller apartment. It is true, as Anthony Powell said in a title, that books do furnish a room, but in this case, too
many books, too little room. But the deeper reason is that it was time. What I saw on the shelves was work to which I would never return, the writings of fellow critics whom I will no longer engage, interpretive
dilemmas someone else will have to address. The conversations I had participated in for decades have now gone in another direction (indeed, in several other directions), and I have neither the time nor,
if truth be told, the intellectual energy required to catch up. Farewell to all that. So long, it’s been good to know you. I’m sure you’ll do fine without me.
In the hours and days following the exodus of the books I monitored myself for a post-mortem (please excuse the hyperbole) reaction. Would I feel regret? Nostalgia? Panic? Relief? I felt nothing. What should
have been a momentous event barely registered as I moved on to what seemed the more important task of choosing a new carpet. I was reminded of what a colleague who had left a university after 23 years replied
when I asked him if it was difficult to do. He said, “It was like checking out of a motel.”
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The more militant members of the N.R.A. and most of its leaders may be un-American.
By “militant” I don’t mean those who wish to protect recreational shooting and hunting; nor do I mean those who, like Justice Antonin Scalia, believe that there is a constitutional right
to defend one’s home and family with firearms. These are respectable positions (although I am deeply unpersuaded by the second). I mean those who read the Second Amendment as proclaiming the right
of citizens to resist the tyranny of their own government, that is, of the government that issued and ratified the Constitution in the first place.
The reason this view may be un-American is that it sets itself against one of the cornerstones of democracy — the orderly transfer of power. A transfer of power is orderly when it is effected by procedural
rules that are indifferent to the partisan, ideological affiliations of either the party exiting power or the party taking power. A transfer is disorderly when it is effected by rebellion, invasion, military
coup or any other use of force.
Those who are engaged in a disorderly transfer believe that their actions are inspired by the highest of motives — the desire to set right what has gone terribly wrong. Somehow the forces of evil have
gained the levers of power, and unless they are dislodged, the values necessary to the sustaining of everything we cherish will be overwhelmed. Violence is ugly, but if tyranny is to be defeated, it may
be necessary. Given tyranny’s resilience and its tendency to fill any available political space, we must always be ready; the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Read more…
I’m trying to think my way through the controversy provoked by a student at Florida Atlantic University who complained when his instructor asked members of the class to write the name “Jesus”
on a piece of paper and then step on it.
Putting it that baldly makes it easy to understand why media reports of the incident were followed by expressions of outrage (from the Florida governor on down) and by complaints that, once again, college students
were being taught to scorn religion and family values.
In fact, nothing of the kind was happening. The instructor, Deandre Poole, identifies himself as a strong Christian. The author of the teacher’s manual he took the exercise from teaches at a Catholic
college and explains that the purpose of the exercise is to get students to think about the power of cultural symbols. Most students, he reported,
“hesitate” to step on the paper, and many decline. (No one is forced to participate.) “In fact,” he adds, “the point is knowing that they won’t do it. I accept that
and then ask them ‘Why won’t you do this?’ Then they reaffirm their faith.”
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