Questioning:

Cal State Long Beach Professor Snider, the subject of the posts below, also makes the following claim on the page that describes the papers he wants his students to write. Recall that the papers are supposed to contain well-reasoned argument supported by the evidence:

Dr. Clifton Snider
English 100
California State University, Long Beach

Notice to my students: someone has published illegally in what purports to be an “article” material from my web site, that is, portions of my assignments. The article, among many misrepresentations, implies I require that you write about certain topics. As you know, you have always had a wide choice of topics to write about in your papers. The same is true for the Argument Paper. I believe in and practice academic freedom.*

. . .

*According to university policy, passed by the Academic Senate on 28 February 2000, the “primary responsibility [of professors] to their subject is to seek and to state the truth as they see it.” As far as academic freedom goes, “the special nature of universities protects professors from being question[ed] about their lectures” (CSULB web site).

Let’s look at Prof. Snider’s use of evidence here. I searched for the quote he gave, and I did find it on a “CSULB web site”: It’s “The special nature of universities protects professors from being questions about their lectures,” and it’s at a page labeled “Lecture Notes: Academic Freedom.” My guess, from the URL of the page (http://www.csulb.edu/~crsmith/41acfre.html), is that it’s maintained by Prof. Craig Smith. I’d imagine that a typical reader seeing the notation “CSULB web site” would assume that Prof. Snider is referring to an official CSULB web site (did you assume that when reading it?), not the opinions of another professor, no matter how respected he might be. It would seem to me more accurate to cite it as “Prof. Smith’s web page,” not “CSULB web site.” (My apologies if Prof. Snider is pointing to some other site, but the page I describe below is the only one I found, and Prof. Snider certainly didn’t link to any other page.)

But much more importantly, consider the context in which Prof. Smith makes this statement:

II. The special nature of universities protects professors from being questions about their lectures.

Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957) the Court was faced with the question of whether the Attorney General of New Hampshire could prosecute an individual for refusal to answer questions about a lecture delivered at the state university concerning the Progressive Party of the United States. In holding for the teacher, the Court stressed the “essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities,” and warned against “imposing any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities.”

Sweezy did hold that university professors have some immunity from being coercively questioned by government bodies. Sweezy was, after all, prosecuted for refusing to answer questions that he was ordered to answer by a state legislative committee.

Rendering this as “the special nature of universities protects professors from being question[ed] about their lectures,” in the process of protesting criticism by nongovernmental critics, strikes me as quoting out of context. Sweezy did not say anything about professors’ being questioned by TownHall columnists, or by their students; as Prof. Smith’s Web page points out, it spoke of a rather different sort of “question[ing]” — coercive questioning by the government, with the threat of legal punishment for silence. To press the “protects professors from being question[ed]” language into the very different context of questioning by columnists, without any acknowledgment that the quote originated in a very different context, strikes me as improper use of evidence. I would expect that Prof. Snider would mark down any paper that quoted material out of context that way.

Finally, even setting aside the use of evidence, does Prof. Snider really believe that academic freedom protects academics from being questioned — which is to say, criticized — for what they teach? Wouldn’t Prof. Snider’s critic (as it happens, himself an academic) himself have a First Amendment right to criticize Prof. Snider? Free speech is speech free of government restraint, not free of others’ exercise of their own freedom to criticize. I would have thought that Prof. Snider, with his asserted respect for freedom, would appreciate this.