Statements like the above became very common following the police murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. The right to issue them might seem to be fundamentally protected by the principle of academic freedom. On the other hand, the corporate nature of such statements — which speak, supposedly, for every member of a department — raises hard questions about conformity and dissent. Mightn’t some faculty members, especially untenured ones, feel pressured to endorse political positions from which they actually depart? I have known several faculty members who report, privately, feeling just such a pressure. As David A. Bell wrote in an essay about the ethics of departmental statements last year, “We do not need advanced cultural theory to understand how intimidating it can be for an untenured instructor to speak out against powerful senior colleagues.” And as Keith E. Whittington points out in his new analysis of the Barnard situation, departmental political statements might seem to subject “current and future members of the faculty” to an ideological litmus test. Surely expressions of departmental political solidarity risk dictating a political orthodoxy to job applicants.
These problems reflect a deeper question of value and purpose: Are expressions of solidarity, in general, the business of academics when speaking corporately, that is, on behalf of a department, field, discipline, or professional organization? In 1969, leftist radicals like the historian Eugene Genovese — who had become infamous a few years earlier for publicly declaring his desire for a Vietcong victory in Vietnam — nevertheless resisted efforts to get the American Historical Association to adopt a resolution formally opposing American involvement in the war. Genovese and his allies felt that such moves were both tactically risky (because they might trigger a right-wing backlash) and intrinsically objectionable (because they might inappropriately impose ideological constraints on research and teaching). As H. Stuart Hughes put it at the time, neutrality is necessary because otherwise “we will experience a polarization of the faculty and the campus, and wherever this has happened, whether under the auspices of the right or of the left, the result has always been a lowering of intellectual tone and the near-impossibility of teaching controversial subjects such as contemporary history.” (I have relied on Seymour Martin Lipset’s Rebellion in the University [1972] for this summary and Hughes’s quotation.)
Barnard’s new policy, though, doesn’t just apply to departmental websites. It also prohibits faculty members from making political statements as individuals, at least on college websites or on college grounds without prior approval. According to the Times, some faculty members report being asked to take down pro-Palestinian signs from their office doors. The administration’s justification for those restrictions is the same as for the restriction on the WGSS statement — in both cases, the objection is to the use of college-owned platforms for the expression of political views. When it comes to individual faculty expression, that seems quite chilling. Is Barnard’s position that a faculty member cannot, for instance, post a sticker advocating for a political candidate on an office door, merely because Barnard owns the door? It might be more sensible to introduce a formal distinction between corporate and individual faculty expression, and confine restrictions to the former. As it is — and especially because statements like that of the Africana-studies department on George Floyd remain in place — it is hard to avoid the impression that Barnard, like Indiana University, entertains a “Palestine exception” to its campus speech policies.
