Academic Freedom Discussion

Over at Michael Berube's, there is a great discussion going on concerning academic freedom, stemming off of a lecture that he gave and posted on his blog. I thought this response,posted byNew Margins was great:


I do not doubt that Dr. V is resisting the “all opinions are equal” perspective that his students bring into the classroom with them. If he were not, he would not have been able to articulate the problem so clearly and succinctly. But their perspective came from somewhere, no? I think it has made its way into the mainstream, originating in academia, over the last couple of decades. Hell, there is now a significant movement within the Christian church called “postmodern Christianity,” and youngsters being raised in conservative Christian homes are cutting their eyeteeth on it. (!) That came from somewhere, and I think it came, originally, out of the universities. Which doesn’t mean it was universally embraced by all professors by a long shot, but nevertheless.

I agree that “all opinions are equal” become identity politics is a mimicry of a mimicry and a parody of a parody, but that doesn’t matter to those who have harnessed it in the service of their attacks on academic freedom, like Horowitz, like the Religious Right. All that matters to them is that it is working for them politically. Which is why what Michael wrote resonates with so many of us. We can dismiss it all we like, and our dismissals will be accurate, in the meantime we’ve got scary folks like Horowitz and the Right posing very real threats to academic freedom in this country via the practice of what we are dismissing.

I think postmodernism has value to the degree that it interrogates and critiques western grand narratives so-called, and to the degree that it moves those who have been historically marginalized and disenfranchised in the direction of subjectivity by recognizing that art, literature, philosophy, ideas, politics emerge out of specific cultural and societal contexts in which some have enjoyed power, visibility and voice and others have not, have been made to be largely invisible and voiceless. My examples were meant to illustrate what happens when the heirs apparent to these western grand narratives—white, heterosexual, Christian men who can readily see their forefathers, men like them, in all of recorded western history—attempt to vault themselves out of power and privilege methodologically by practicing an identity politics arising out of the “all opinions are equal” perspective, intending to preserve, protect and defend a political status quo which protects the power and privilege they continue to enjoy. This is postmodernism turned on its head, but it did began with postmodernism, period.

When Mary Daly was fired, debate over her firing ensued. Instead of young, college-educated feminists and their teachers throwing down over a right-wing punk, backed by a right-wing political organization, taking an aging, brilliant heretic like Daly out, we had them defending the administration, and on what basis? That gender is a construct, it is “performative,” it’s not about what’s “between the legs,” and so Daly should not have forbidden male students. The material consequence, then, is that a right-wing punk takes Daly out and feminists, influenced by postmodern notions of gender as performance, inter alia, applaud and agree, all of which amounts to a victory for the Right in its goal of silencing unpopular teachers and their unpopular views and politics. And so it has gone in the universities where, by way of postmodern perspectives, women’s studies become “gender studies” with the ongoing second class status of women, something which is apparent to anyone who is paying attention, increasingly difficult to describe or confront. If there should be no category “woman,” for example, which is the postmodern perspective, then how will those of us who know we are women because we’re treated as women mount a challenge to those vested in our remaining in that second class status, or in the case of the Religious Right, turning back the clock a century or so? I think this is an example of the “material consequences” of making postmodernism political which Dr. Virago was talking about.

I have not meant to disparage academia. Thank god for feminist professors and women’s studies programs wherever they are, because that is about all we have left of visible feminism in this day and age. I do know that visible, brilliant feminists, including academics, have sounded warnings about the real consequences of postmodern perspectives and that those warnings have too often fallen on deaf ears. All along, though, there have been kickass professors, both men and women, who were not so deaf doing their damndest in difficult circumstances and I did not mean to suggest otherwise