Columbia: 4 Questions for an Academic Passover

Academia has nothing short of an entire series of mental plagues, centered around entrenched bias and speech suppression. Columbia has shown how deep the plagues go. Can academia make an exodus from them?

Answering this difficult question requires an answer to four more difficult questions:

* Reports indicate that Columbia is playing a double-game on anti-Semitism. We face our first question: Was Columbia’s president dissimulating to the U.S. Government with her promises for reform, so as to ward off the Government and buy time for backtracking on her promises? Or was she dissimulating to radical students and faculty in her statements contravening her promises to the Government, so as to ward off worse rioting and hatred from them? Or perhaps both?

* About the president’s verbal agreement (reported by WSJ) with the faculty and students who were attacking her during her campus meeting with them: Is it a further indication that the ideological imbalance on campus is so great that the universities cannot, of their own free will, correct their policies so as to blunt the trend toward political radicalism and intimidation of non-radicals — specifically, in this case, the intimidation of Jewish students — but will do so only by grace of strong, semi-coercive pressures from the government and public — the very government and public they tend to pour scorn on as ignorant, not able to see these things ‘the right way’, and unfairly applying pressures on them?

* A third question, arising from my experiences at Princeton half a century ago: Were the sometimes anti-extremist, rules-enforcing official stances by Princeton administrators even then a form of dissimulation, meant to pull the wool over the eyes of a supposedly crude society and government that ‘wouldn’t understand it the right way’? Were they motivated by fear for losing Federal grants and subsidies; and was it a good thing that they had that motivation and didn’t behave even worse? Or were they relatively sincere back then in being sometimes moderate, and have become less so in the decades since, as generations of more radical youth cohorts have risen to power in university faculties and administrations?

* Which is worse on balance:

To use external state and societal coercion of universities, in order to protect and expand the actual freedom of academic and dialogical speech at them?

Or, preserve in full their academic self-government, which had been so important for intellectual freedom in medieval times? Even though they tend to equate it with teaching radicalism, and with allowing their radicals to engage in intimidating chants protests, at the expense of academic and dialogical speech?

What are the relative dangers both ways?

A related problem: We need to get Americans, particularly our American media and universities, to face the fact that the 1st amendment protects three distinct freedoms – of speech, of peaceable assembly to petition the government, and of religious worship – not just one. These are three very different things, even though they all involve speech. They require different forms of protection, regulation, and limitation. They vary in in the priority they should get when they conflict.

Thus, ‘peaceable assembly to petition the government’ means just that – in effect, a freedom of intimidating the government, as a way of partially balancing the government’s inherent intimidation of the people — not a right to any kind of assembly anywhere to protest any other social entity than the government, much less to intimidate other people. It has to be regulated strictly, to make sure that is what it is really about. Unless freedom of protest is restricted in this way, its natural intimidating power is bound to get exploited, by the malicious actors that exist in any society, to squelch a far more fundamental freedom: the freedom of speech itself.

Perhaps these four questions about academia and the media are even more important at this time, and certainly more difficult to get a serious answer to, than the four questions we have for commemorating the Passover liberation every year. Perhaps we need to append, to the question of “Why is this night different from all other nights”, several new questions this year:

– Why is academia these last 18 months different from what it was in all other months? Or is it really not so different, just an evolution of a longstanding problem?

– How have the great institutional bearers of freedom of thought and freedom of speech in modern history – academia and the media – turned into the prime institutional movers for suppressing the freedom of thought and speech?

– How can our society make a successful exodus from the unfreedom of mind in academia, without losing the virtues of academia and the benefits of its learning?

– What more do we need to be contribute to the national discussion today, in order to help with getting a more serious exodus of academia from its entrenched problem of mental unfreedom?