A columnist in the Rocky Mountain News writes:
Remember the proclamation of 29 professors at the University of Denver College of Law denouncing the inquiry into Ward Churchill because “the critique of conventional wisdom, or the accepted way of doing (or seeing) things, is essential to fostering the public debate that is necessary to prevent tyranny”?
Remember the ringing declaration of 199 faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder, also in defense of Churchill, on the importance of an “environment in which ideas may be exchanged even in the face of widespread doubt, incomprehension and hostility”?
Does such an unfettered intellectual environment actually exist on any Colorado campus?
In the journal Academic Questions, former Gov. Richard Lamm recounts an incident that suggests, once again, the answer is emphatically no.
Lamm, who is a tenured professor at DU, tried to publish an article in The Source, a newspaper run by the administration there, “in response to a particularly offensive screed on white racism by one of our affirmative action officials.”
Yet despite personal pleas he took up the DU ladder right into the chancellor’s office, his essay was repeatedly rejected.
It is now online at educationation.org/blog/?p=51. . . . [I]f Churchill can call for violence and the destruction of America, surely Lamm can argue that the cultural component in personal success is much larger than many of us wish to concede.
Or can he?
A couple of people, including InstaPundit, have also suggested that the refusal to publish Lamm’s piece is an academic freedom violation (whether or not a serious one). But I don’t think it is, nor do I think it is an attempt to “fetter” the “intellectual environment”; and it seems to me that the analogy to calls for Churchill’s firing is quite unsound.
The Source is run by the administration, and is basically the voice of the administration — it places a quite direct imprimatur on everything it runs in this publication (as opposed to the outside publications of university faculty members, which have historically not been seen as having the university’s imprimatur, and which universities often distance themselves from). The administration is entitled to choose what goes in this publication, just like other editors are entitled to choose what goes into their publications.
The administration may be faulted for being a bit closed-minded, or for not serving its readers well, if it refuses to publish important and interesting commentary. But the administration may also respond that, important and interesting as the commentary may be, it’s not commentary to which it wants to give its stamp of approval. The intellectual environment would still remain free if the administration refused to publish Gov. Lamm’s piece — Gov. Lamm could publish his articles in student newspapers that choose to carry them, or give speeches on campus about this topic, or publish the articles elsewhere. It’s just that the administration’s own publication would in this instance not be adding Gov. Lamm’s article to that intellectual environment.
Likewise, if the publication is a means of building goodwill among potential donors and others the administration may reasonably want to not publish things that may undermine this goodwill. The Source is not a scholarly journal aimed at advancing knowledge, but seemingly part of the university’s public relations effort. (As I read Governor Lamm‘s preface to his online article, The Source had published what it saw as “a particularly offensive screed on white racism by one of our affirmative action officials,” which might mean that the administration is willing to sacrifice public goodwill in the service of its favored ideologies; but if so, then the administration should be faulted for that, not for alleged interference with academic freedom.)
Of course, the administration would have been equally free to refuse to publish Ward Churchill’s speech — and the administration is equally forbidden by academic freedom principles from punishing Lamm for publishing his essay elsewhere. But I think that we must distinguish (1) decisions not to publish something in an administration-run publication (and a publication that is a public relations vehicle rather than a scholarly journal) from (2) decisions to punish a faculty member for publishing his work elsewhere. The decisions in category 1 aren’t violations of academic freedom.
UPDATE: InstaPundit blogs further on the subject.
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