A university provides amazing resources and assets. I would even defend its overall structure to a degree. For one thing, it is robust against faddish ideas. If a university could change more easily, then a discipline like classics would have been shut down long ago. But classics is an exciting and generative field today (see this and this). It has survived the tough times because universities have institutionalized tenure, credentials, and departments to resist change.

Still, these structures frustrate many valuable innovations, especially when academia might interact better with the outside world. Courses must last for about 13 weeks even though real-life projects continue far longer than that. Professors must demonstrate regular results, but some especially worthy projects cannot yield publications quickly enough. Faculty must teach students who happen to be enrolled at their own institutions, even if more appropriate groups could be assembled by drawing on many colleges and including non-students.

These are just examples of the ways in which academia is “kludgy.” When you face a jury-rigged mechanism that still works for many purposes, you can just go with it, you can reject it and try to build something new, or you can add hacks: “inelegant but effective solutions.” Many of my favorite academics make hacks because they love the university but don’t think it quite works for their purposes. For instance, they teach their classes in state prisons. Or they assemble a set of “semi-formal learning groups” within a large state university and actually name it “hackademia.” Or they start meeting weekly for discussions of political economy and 30 years later have a virtual international network. Or they build tools with and for lay partners and reflect critically on the results. Or they create a Summer Institute without tuition, grades, credits, or official enrollment, and teach it off season at (for example) Tufts.

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IMF chief Christine Lagarde, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Colorado state Sen. Michael Johnston (D) are among the commencement speakers who have drawn objections from students this year. Several have withdrawn from speaking or been disinvited in the face of such criticism.

Compared to the people who decry student bigotry in these cases, I take a relatively complex, three-part view.

First, protesting a commencement speaker is not a violation of free speech; it is an act of free speech. Joel Whitney argues that point well in The New Republic. A commencement podium is not an open forum like Hyde Park Corner or a public access cable channel. It is allocated as a high honor to one person whom the institution explicitly endorses. Students may contest that endorsement.

For example, in announcing the choice of Johnston to be the Harvard Ed. School’s speaker, the dean said, “As a teacher, principal, and entrepreneur, Mike’s leadership has made a real difference in the lives of countless students.” (I can’t resist noting that the previous sentence contains a dangling modifier.) Dean Ryan continued, “As a legislator in the Colorado State Senate, [Johnston] is a nationally recognized advocate for school finance reform, fair teacher evaluations, and education equity. I believe that our community will be inspired, as I have been, by his passion and his willingness to find solutions to notoriously difficult challenges in education.”

That was a substantive statement and a prediction. The dean stated that the invitee was great and the whole community would be inspired by him. I have no objection to Sen. Johnston, but students are entitled to contest these claims.

Smith President Kathleen McCartney is right that “an invitation to speak at a commencement is not an endorsement of all views or policies of an individual or the institution she or he leads. … Such a test would preclude virtually anyone in public office or position of influence. Moreover, such a test would seem anathema to our core values of free thought and diversity of opinion.” But an invitation to speak at a commencement is a claim that the invitee is excellent in some respect, and the institution should expect objections if members of the community are known to disagree.

Second, when students protest a commencement speaker, neither the invitee nor the institution should back down. To withdraw in the face of criticism is to frustrate free speech. After Smith College invitee Lagarde, and some students objected, the IMF chief withdrew, saying, “In the last few days, … it has become evident that a number of students and faculty members would not welcome me as a commencement speaker. I respect their views, and I understand the vital importance of academic freedom. However, to preserve the celebratory spirit of commencement day, I believe it is best to withdraw my participation.”

If a commencement is just a celebratory occasion, spoiled by controversy as easily as a picnic by rain, then colleges should invite completely uncontroversial figures to share pabulum from the podium. If a commencement is an opportunity for learning, then it will draw dissent, and both the institution and the speaker should expect that. If they drop the speaker to avoid controversy, they don’t care about free speech.

Third, being exposed to views you disagree with is valuable. It’s educational and challenging. It is most valuable when the views are forcefully expressed by someone who genuinely holds them. Thus liberal students may benefit from hearing Lagarde, Rice, Ali, and Johnston, even if they don’t enjoy these talks all that much on their graduation day. There is a valid principle implied in the claim that these speakers have “free speech,” even if it’s wrongly interpreted to mean that they have some kind of individual right to give a commencement address. (If we have such a right, I’m cashing mine in and speaking next year at the University of Hawaii). “Free speech” doesn’t mean a right to give a commencement address, but it is shorthand for the value of exposure to challenging views.

Therefore, I don’t think students should express their objections in this form: “We despise the invitee and demand that she not speak here at all.” Instead, I think they should say, “We despise the views of the invitee for the following reasons and plan to make our arguments known during commencement.” That reflects an embrace of free speech rather than a fear of it. One model is the critical letter that Catholic University professors wrote to John Boehner after he was invited to speak there. They first offered a strong, substantive, moral critique:

Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings. From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.

That was actually a devastating rebuke. But the professors went on to welcome him to campus and held out hope that the interchange might influence him:

We congratulate you on the occasion of your commencement address to The Catholic University of America. It is good for Catholic universities to host and engage the thoughts of powerful public figures, even Catholics such as yourself who fail to recognize (whether out of a lack of awareness or dissent) important aspects of Catholic teaching. We write in the hope that this visit will reawaken your familiarity with the teachings of your Church on matters of faith and morals as they relate to governance.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that every group of angry students must use exactly this model, but it is one worth considering. And then they should get their money’s worth on graduation day by engaging an interesting speaker, actively and critically.

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They say that academia is an ivory tower, sheltered from the tumult of human experience. But I’m fortunate, thanks to my job, to meet a very wide range of people in highly diverse settings. In fact, I don’t think many people in other walks of life are as fortunate in that respect. Within the past month, in the line of duty (so to speak), I have

• Heard a “legalese-hatin’, cowboy-boot-wearin’, unafraid-to-admihuit-it liberal judge who rules from the [Arkansas federal] bench in a rocking chair” tell hootin’-and-hollerin’ jokes at the expense of his own profession.
• Done a windshield tour of the poorest neighborhood in Champaign (IL), where the small decaying frame houses are scattered on the edge of the prairie.
• Sat in the hushed office of the president of Duke, amid rubber trees, leaded Gothic windows, and framed honors, discussing the place of the humanities in public life.
• Visited a game-design studio in Madison, WI, where hip young coders sit on stools of different heights and take breaks playing with Nerf balls and huge inflatable bowling pins.
• Lectured in the Grecian rotunda of Mr. Jefferson’s University, a World Heritage Site.
• And heard up-and-coming country singers in a bona fide Nashville honky-tonk on a Friday night.

We may be on the verge of wrecking it–and we certainly need better institutions to govern it–but it’s still a great country and a privilege to be able to see so many facets of it.

(On to DC this evening.)

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Today is the board meeting of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts, where I work. Immediately after that meeting, I will fly to Durham, NC, to begin chairing the external review of Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, which plays a somewhat similar role to Tisch College. It’s a day of thinking about strategic plans for scholarly/activist centers at fine universities.

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(Madison, WI) I am here very briefly for a meeting, having come from this morning from Urbana/Champaign. My calendar for this six month period also shows days in Ann Arbor, Indianapolis, Bloomington, Chicago, and Detroit.

I don’t think the full glory of our Midwestern state universities is sufficiently appreciated. As an academic myself, I am prone to overestimate the importance of higher education. But in my mind, this region is a prairie studded with fine research institutions, like Greek city states or walled Renaissance towns, each boasting its famous thinkers and its cosmopolitan reach, each tied to the state that sustains it (and each, unfortunately, ready to send a mercenary army into symbolic battle with the others). Champaign, IL–just for example–houses the second biggest university library in America, whose 13 million volumes put it behind only Harvard. I am reminded of what the late Tony Judt once wrote:

By far the best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American—their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears…a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.

I am not as critical as Judt of the “scrubscape” and its people. But I agree that there’s something miraculous about these huge intellectual conglomerates rising from the fruited plain at the command of their state legislatures. Hopping around the region on commuter planes, you see professorial types with the New York Review spread on their knees and kids in college hoodies. I know that the universities’ funding is now mostly private and their students come increasingly from a global elite. I know they can be ivory towers or tools of Monsanto or the NSA. And yet, when people assess our era centuries from now, I think the great Midwestern public universities will warrant respect.

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(Charlottesville, VA) From Mr Jefferson’s University, here are some thoughts about free speech in academia.

This may seem a simple topic: students and faculty should be able to express themselves freely. But I think it is quite complicated, for two reasons.

First, the university is all about adjudicating and rewarding quality, which conflicts with freedom. Every admissions letter, grade on a paper or a class discussion, decision about hiring or promotion, peer-review, invitation to give a lecture, or choice to acquire a book for the library is a decision about quality. The First Amendment gives you the right to say what you like. But if you write a weak argument for a paper, or express yourself on an irrelevant topic, you will get a lower grade. An institution thoroughly dedicated to making high-stakes assessments cannot also be a free-speech zone.

Second, educators and students both have claims to freedom of speech, and those claims may conflict. Duke Provost Peter Lange was once presented with this scenario:

In the Jan. 25 issue of the Chronicle, a Duke student complained about what he perceived as propagandizing in one of his classes: “One of the most insulting moments of my Duke education occurred in an ancient Chinese history class in spring 2003, when the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq. Our teacher took a break from Confucius and the Han Dynasty to stage a puzzling “teach-in” about Iraq in conjunction with some national organization. During this supposedly neutral discussion, she regaled us with facts and assertions suggesting that the Iraq war was scandalous, foolish and doomed to fail …”

Of course, the Iraq war was scandalous, foolish and doomed to fail. But the teach-in, if accurately described, sounds improper to me. This kind of complaint leads to the provision in the “Academic Bill of Rights” that “Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.” But that clearly trades off against a different provision in the same document: “Academic freedom consists in protecting the intellectual independence of professors …” An intellectually independent professor could choose to indoctrinate (or could speak in a way perceived as indoctrination by students who disagree). As Lange said, to ban that kind of expression limits the professor’s freedom of speech.

Perhaps professors have no valid claim freedom within their classrooms. Let them talk freely on their own time; when on the job, their purpose is to educate the students in their charge. That argument presumes that the value of free speech accrues to the speaker alone–it is about protecting her liberty, dignity, or sheer preference. But free speech also benefits the listeners, including listeners who sharply disagree. As J.S. Mill argued, you cannot test an idea unless you can hear it forcefully expressed by someone who actually believes it. To prevent professors from expressing their own ideas is to take those ideas off the table. In a famous statement from 1894, the University of Wisconsin Regents claimed that professorial freedom would lead toward truth:

We cannot for a moment believe that knowledge has reached its final goal, or that the present condition of society is perfect. … In all lines of academic investigation it is of the utmost importance that the investigator should be absolutely free to follow the indications of truth wherever they may lead. Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.

That is an eloquent expression of one side of the debate, but we should not ignore the other side: the rights of the students. A professor has the power to set the agenda and can assign grades for what students say and write. Untrammeled liberty by professors can definitely “chill” the freedom of expression of their students. I think the evidence that professors actually indoctrinate on any substantial scale is weak.* But it could happen.

To make things even more complicated, educators talk to educators; and students, to students. They should all be able to express themselves freely, and yet one’s expression can hamper another’s freedom and flourishing. That is especially true when the balance of power among them is unequal: for instance, when one side outranks or outnumbers the other or has more social clout. “Microaggressions” are exercises of speech that suppress the welfare–and perhaps the liberty–of others. To those who are wholeheartedly committed to confronting microaggressions, I would recall the importance of the speakers’ freedom. Unless people are permitted and even encouraged to say what they think, their ideas cannot be debated, and we can pursue the truth. On the other hand, to those who see the language of “microaggression” as oppressive political correctness, I would argue that some statements really do undermine the standing of our peers and are incompatible with the demanding norms of speech in a university. That doesn’t mean that rules against demeaning speech are wise, but we should be able to denounce a verbal aggression when it occurs.

Since I am here as the guest of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, among other sponsors, I will end by quoting Jefferson: “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.” But he was also the author of the Senate’s “Manual of Parliamentary Practice,” with its elaborate rules to promote civility and mutual respect. That balance is difficult but crucial.

*(As I noted in a previous post, Yates and Youniss find that a powerful dose of Catholic social doctrine does not convert predominantly Protestant African American students, but provokes them to reflect on their own values. McDevitt and colleagues (in a series of papers including this one), find that political debates in school stimulate critical discussions in the home. Colby et al. find that interactive political courses at the college level, although taught by liberal professors, do not move the students in a liberal direction but deepen their understanding of diverse perspectives. Evidence of the effects of college ideological climates is ambiguous because of students’ self-selection into friendly environments.)

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(Providence, RI) According to a new paper by David Figlio, Morton Schapiro, and Kevin Soter,* if you take a class with a non-tenure track (contingent) professor, you are more likely to choose to take another class in the same subject and you will get a higher grade on that next class than if you studied with a tenured professor or someone on the tenure track. You are especially likely to benefit from having a contingent professor if you scored relatively low on academic measures before the course.

The measures of success seem reasonably persuasive, and the method seems tight. (The authors compare first-semester students, who generally don’t pick their instructors, and they look at changes in the same students’ grades over time.) The main limitation is that the study only involves Northwestern University, which is certainly not typical of American higher education and could have quirks other than just being highly selective and well-resourced.

It’s also possible that the tenure-track and contingent faculty differ in other ways than their tenure status. I would like to see the results adjusted for the age of professor. I don’t want to be ageist, but that could be a factor, and given the ban on mandatory retirements and the demographics of the tenured professoriate today, it could just turn out that the contingent faculty are younger.

This study is not an argument against tenure, which has other benefits–notably, academic freedom. But it is a cautionary note. It certainly reminds us of the enormous skill and dedication of the many young scholars who are working as adjuncts today. Many would have easily gotten tenure 30 years ago and are now working for $3,000 a course. On the other hand, there is nothing completely new here. As Max Weber said in his lecture “Science as a Vocation” (1917):

According to German tradition, the universities shall do justice to the demands both of research and of instruction. Whether the abilities for both are found together in a man is a matter of absolute chance. Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation [getting the most advanced degree], the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says lasciate ogni speranza [abandon all hope]. But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: ‘Of course, I live only for my “calling.”‘ Yet, I have found that only a few men could endure this situation without coming to grief.

*See Figlio, D. N., Schapiro, M. O., & Soter, K. B. (2013). Are tenure track professors better teachers? (NBER Working Paper 19406). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w19406

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