The Review

The abrupt resignation last week of Nemat (Minouche) Shafik from the presidency of Columbia University gratified two otherwise opposed camps. For the New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Shafik’s head joins Claudine Gay’s and Liz Magill’s, one more trophy in her hunting lodge: “THREE DOWN, so many to go,” she tweeted. For the Columbia law professor Katherine Franke, whose statement on Democracy Now about the threat supposedly posed by Israeli students was the subject of some of Stefanik’s interrogation, the former president got her just comeuppance: “President Minouche Shafik threw me under the bus when she testified before Congress,” Franke tweeted, “but I’m still an employee of Columbia University. She’s not.”

Shafik’s performance during the congressional hearing in April was widely perceived as disastrous. “It was shocking,” as Louis Menand wrote in The New Yorker, “to hear her negotiating with a member of Congress over disciplining two members of her own faculty, by name, for things they had written or said.” (Besides Franke, the other faculty member was Joseph Massad, who had celebrated October 7 as “innovative Palestinian resistance” in The Electronic Intifada.) Why didn’t Shafik simply say she couldn’t comment publicly on personnel matters? And why did she fail to mention academic freedom, even once? Her cringing posture of appeasement before her inquisitors felt almost indecent to watch.

“Academic freedom” did make it into Shafik’s letter of resignation, which calls it Columbia’s “North Star,” alongside “free speech; openness to ideas; and zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind.” That was salutary, even if her formulaic prose doesn’t convey entire conviction. Shafik’s successor will, with luck, entertain a more robust and principled sense of the university’s mission. It may be true that everything is ultimately a question of politics. But not everything is a question of the degraded partisan politics represented by the Congressional hearings on antisemitism to which Shafik so readily succumbed. Her refusal to muster any compelling principled defense of academic freedom in that persecutory setting may not have saved her her job — but then, neither did her acquiescence.

Speaking of academic freedom, Indiana University and Purdue University are involved in an interesting legal case regarding SEA 202, an Indiana bill mandating “intellectual diversity” in public colleges. As Steve Sanders, a law professor at Indiana University at Bloomington, explains, a group of IU and Purdue faculty members, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, allege that the law violates their First Amendment rights. “IU and Purdue are defendants (since their boards of trustees must enforce the law), but the [attorney general’s] office was allowed under federal procedure to intervene as an additional defendant, since the constitutionality of a state statute is being challenged.”

Here’s where things get interesting. Todd Rokita, Indiana’s attorney general, filed a legal brief asserting not only that the case is premature (because no faculty member can yet show that their speech has been curtailed) but also that no First Amendment right to classroom speech exists. That’s the theory — held by Ron DeSantis, among others — that public-college faculty are vessels of “government speech.” According to Rokita, “Any speech pursuant to the teacher’s ‘official duties’ and ‘professional responsibilities’ is subject to state direction.” As Smith writes, “Under this theory, taken to its logical conclusion, faculty members with advanced credentials and years of training could be reduced to ventriloquist dummies for whatever political faction happens to wield power on a university board of trustees or in the state house.”

In defending this idea, Rokita draws on the 2006 Supreme Court case Garcetti v. Ceballos, which I wrote about last year. Garcetti was not about higher education, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion, expressly refrains from making a call about faculty speech: “We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship and teaching.” But those concerned about the future of academic freedom have long worried that it contains a significant threat.

At first, as Sanders writes, “Indiana University and Purdue University allowed their lawyers last month to ‘embrace’ and ‘join in’” to the entirety of Rokita’s brief — including its theory that classroom teaching is government speech. Most of Sanders’s essay is devoted to criticizing IU’s and Purdue’s legal teams for co-signing a brief that would, if its arguments were accepted, evacuate academic freedom entirely. “The arguments in the Rokita brief are completely irreconcilable with IU’s own clear academic-freedom policy, as endorsed by the trustees,” Sanders observes. IU’s policy insists that “The teacher shall have full freedom of instruction, subject to adequate fulfillment of other academic duties. No limitation shall be placed upon the teacher’s freedom of exposition of the subject in the classroom or on the expression of it outside.”

Three days after Sanders published his critique, the lawyers changed their tune. In a “supplemental notice,” they clarified that they endorse only Rokita’s arguments about the prematurity of the plaintiff’s complaint, but not his arguments about the absence of First Amendment protections for faculty speech in the classroom.

Recommended

• “Unfortunately, Stalin had little aptitude for such instruction.” In The Charnel-House, Ross Wolfe recounts Stalin’s fraught relationship with his philosophy tutor, Jan Sten, whom he eventually murdered.
• “Taken together, these fragile papers, newspapers, and genealogies provide Hecimovich and thus the contemporary reader with a powerful sense of what once existed, what the enslaved suffered, and what and who have been lost to history.” In The New York Review of Books, Brenda Wineapple reviews Gregg Hecimovich’s The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of the Bondwoman’s Narrative.
• “When read by their underground philosophy group, Nietzsche became a bulwark against fascism, not its cheerleader.” In Jacobin, Peter Salmon writes about Nietzsche’s rehabilitation by two Italian scholars, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, by way of Philipp Felsch’s new book on the subject.
  

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin