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November 24, 2005
Bollinger, Academic Freedom, and Tolerance
Steven Shiffrin: November 24, 2005
Earlier this year President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University
gave the Cardozo Lecture to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.
The subject was academic freedom. Bollinger maintained that academic freedom
included academic responsibilities. One of those responsibilities, he
maintained, was that every professor was to cover the full range of the
complexity of the subject in every course. Why?
According to Bollinger, the goal of university education is
to produce tolerant and non-authoritarian citizens, citizens who have “the
imaginative range and the mental courage to take in, to explore, the full
complexity of the subject. To set aside one's pre-existing beliefs, to hold
simultaneously in one's mind multiple angles of seeing things, to actually
allow yourself seemingly to believe another view as you consider it. . . .”
It strikes me that this perspective on academic freedom is
overly narrow. We can all agree that professor have responsibilities. They must
teach within the confines of the subject they are teaching. They must respect
students whose views are different than those of the professor. In many courses
they should be expected to explore, so far as possible, “the full range of the
complexity of the subject.” (Bollinger, I believe is not so naïve as to believe
that the full range can really be explored in every course. What he means to
counter is one-sided or partisan teaching). But, in requiring this of every
course, Bollinger goes too far. Is it wrong for a teacher in a seminar on law
and economics to explore the subject without having a unit on challenges to law
and economics? For a teacher of feminist thought not to have a unit with readings from fundamentalist patriarchal thinkers? Suppose I teach a seminar on First Amendment Theory and
decide to focus on adherents to one or two theories in depth because I think
exploring subjects in depth is better than seeing the general map of first
amendment theory or because I think these two theories are best and want to
compare them. Is this professionally irresponsible?
It seems to me that Bollinger goes wrong in two ways. First,
he underestimates the extent to which a mission of the university in many
courses is to explore truth wherever it may lead. This may lead to teaching
that some might call partisan. So long as the “partisan” teacher is fair to
those of different views, I believe the cause of truth is advanced in a
university in which such teaching is respected and defended.
The other problem stems from an overly narrow
conception of the first amendment and the makeup of a democratic citizen.
Bollinger has written an excellent book in which he highlights the role of the
first amendment in encouraging tolerant citizens. I, for one, doubt that the
most important feature of the first amendment is nurturing character traits
(though I think it plays a role). But I believe that Columbia Law Professor
Vincent Blasi presents a richer view of the kind of character that the first amendment
might be out to cultivate. Blasi speaks in favor of the claim that a “culture that prizes and protects expressive liberty nurtures
in its members certain character traits such as inquisitiveness, independence
of judgment, distrust of authority, willingness to take initiative,
perseverance, and the courage to confront evil. Such character traits are
valuable, so the argument goes, not for their intrinsic virtue but for their
instrumental contribution to collective well-being, social as well as political.”
Vincent Blasi, The First Amendment and Character, 46 UCLA L.Rev. 1567, 1569
(1999). I believe that what Blasi says of a first amendment culture is true of
a university culture and that Bollinger proposal of a “fairness doctrine” for the
subject matter of every course is unduly restrictive. We need more than
tolerant citizens; we need engaged citizens. Conceding that Bollinger’s
restrictions are appropriate in many introductory courses, a first amendment
culture is more likely to produce engaged students and citizens than Bollinger’s
more restricted culture
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