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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Free Speech and Higher Education

My day job is teaching—English to be specific—and I have taught at a lot of different places in my autoschediastic career: an elementary school in a YMCA afterschool program, an international boarding school in Switzerland (which probably made most of its money by enrolling the children of Russian and Chinese oligarchs), a language school for […]
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My day job is teaching—English to be specific—and I have taught at a lot of different places in my autoschediastic career: an elementary school in a YMCA afterschool program, an international boarding school in Switzerland (which probably made most of its money by enrolling the children of Russian and Chinese oligarchs), a language school for (mostly unemployed) business professionals, the University of Geneva, Yale, UNC, and various Christian universities.

It’s not a “storybook” academic career—i.e., undergraduate and graduate studies at the Ivies followed immediately by a tenure-track appointment at a flagship state school—but I like the messiness of it. My dissertation supervisor, the late poet and critic Robert Rehder, liked to tell people that his first teaching job was as an ice skating instructor in a nursery school. He studied under R. P. Blackmur at Princeton and had something close to that storybook career, but he also knew that people who made all the “right” moves at the right time could be risk-averse and unimaginative—not that making the “wrong” moves is an indication of either courage or curiosity. Perhaps it’s something he picked up from Blackmur, who was one of our most gifted twentieth-century critics despite never finishing high school.

I’m getting off topic. My point was—is—that I’ve taught at a lot of places, and at each institution there were things I could and could not say. But strangely it was only when I took a job at a Christian school that friends at secular institutions would ask me about free speech. Was I free to say what I wanted? Well, to a large degree, yes, since the main reason I took a job at a Christian school was to say things that, as a Christian and a conservative, I couldn’t say at secular ones and still land or keep a good job. At the Christian schools, what was and wasn’t allowed was clear. In fact, it was explicit. At secular schools, it was unspoken.

Well, it’s not unspoken anymore, as you all know, and Benjamin Schwarz, the former literary editor at The Atlantic and onetime national editor at this magazine, is concerned:

“From its founding in 1890, the University of Chicago has occupied a singular place among American universities. Lacking the ancient lineages and social cachet of the Ivy League schools (Chicago welcomed women and Jews at a time when Harvard, et al, excluded the former and imposed strict quotas on the latter), Chicago, which is consistently ranked among the world’s top 10 universities, has always been known for its fierce intellectualism. ‘I think the one place where I have been that is most like ancient Athens’, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once declared, ‘is the University of Chicago’. Indeed, whereas the Ivy League universities, Stanford and their ilk, admitted – and continue to admit – their undergraduates based on such qualities as athletic ability, family connections, and that vague attribute known as ‘leadership’, students came to Chicago because they prized what it still venerates as ‘the life of the mind’. (Chicago’s students score on average higher on the SAT – a national standardised test that assesses academic aptitude – than do those at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford).

“Given its devotion to rigorous inquiry – to the belief that ‘education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think’, as its former president Hanna Holborn Gray declared – Chicago has been from its inception the most stalwart bastion of free expression in American higher education. Refusing to bow to political and popular pressure, Chicago’s trustees and administration have insisted, from the ‘Red Scare’ of the 1920s, through the McCarthy era and the politically tumultuous 1960s, that its faculty be unfettered to explore the most heterodox ideas and that its students be free to debate any topic and to invite the most unpopular speakers – including, in 1932, William Z Foster, the presidential candidate and future general secretary of the Communist Party USA, and, in 1963, George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder and leader of the American Nazi Party. In 2015, discerning that free speech was under assault in American universities, Chicago reaffirmed its ‘commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the university’s community’. The subsequent statement of policy – the so-called Chicago Principles – is at once stirring and precise; it has been rightly praised as a full-throated (and much needed) defence of campus free expression. In addition to publishing the Chicago Principles, the University has repeatedly and unequivocally promulgated its commitment to free speech on its website and in statements by its president, provost, and deans.

“Alas, however, although the University of Chicago is a unique institution of higher education, it nonetheless inhabits the ecosystem of higher education. So while its administration and most of its faculty and students remain devoted to what is characterised in the Chicago Principles as ‘the spirit and promise of the University of Chicago’, a woke illiberalism is subverting that spirit and promise from within.”

In other news: William D. Cohan writes about a nasty fight at one of New York’s most prestigious day schools.

What really happened to the crew of the H.L. Hunley? “A Duke University researcher’s fascinating new book on the Civil War submarine shines new light on a longstanding mystery.”

In praise of skateboarding: “Along with jazz, movies, modern dance, and comic books, skateboarding is one of America’s great original art forms. A $5 billion industry with 16 million members in the United States, skateboarding fosters entrepreneurship, independence, physical grace and toughness, community, creativity, and freedom. The sport has been a friend to me for almost fifty years, reappearing at various times over the decades to thrill and re-enchant. When it was recently reported that a California skate park was filled with sand to prevent skating and promote social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, it felt to me like someone had spray-painted on the Lincoln Memorial.”

A short history of Oxford Street: “In all its years, the Survey of London has never before accorded an entire volume to a single road. Oxford Street stretches for more than a mile and exhibits, as editor Andrew Saint writes in his lively and erudite introduction, nothing so much as ‘persistent incoherence’. London’s most famous street, if not the most elegant, has been indulging shopping preferences and fashion fads for more than two centuries. Vogue magazine’s fictional Mrs. Exeter might, in the 1950s, have favoured Bond Street, where she window shopped and dreamed expensively, but Oxford Street was already well established as the province of “that increasingly exuberant pair, Mr. and Mrs. Everyman”. The street and its environs, under the intense scrutiny of Saint and his colleagues, reveals itself as a kind of diorama, demonstrably thriving one moment, jaded and playing catch-up the next.”

David Pryce-Jones on Robert Conquest: “The question with Bob is whether he was a poet who happened to be a Sovietologist or a Sovietologist who happened to be a poet. I tend to think the former, because poetry answered to his view of making whatever there is to be made out of emotions, colors, life itself. Published in 2009 when he was in his nineties, Penultimata contains about a hundred new poems. One of them, ‘Last Hours,’ best expresses the let’s-get-on-with-it Bob that I knew and liked.”

Photo: Vernagt

Poem: Dana Gioia, “Tedium”

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