The Future of Academic Freedom
New Yorker | Jeannie Suk Gerson
Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk Gerson highlights threats to free speech and academic freedom posed by the current moment.
After 10/7, Gerson saw that “The two sides had effectively flipped: activist students, whose politics overlapped with principles of D.E.I., were engaged in speech that some faculty members, who were supportive of academic freedom, now wanted the university to treat as harmful.”
Soon, it dawned on her that “my signature on a letter calling on the university to condemn the attack in Israel, in a moment when students were being criticized for political speech against Israel, was implicitly—or not so implicitly—urging the university to denounce its own students.”
Gerson then asks all of us— “Imagine if a university had a code of conduct under which expression of the viewpoint ‘the State of Israel should not exist,’ or ‘Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza is justified,’ or, for that matter, ‘George Floyd’s death had nothing to do with race,’ was punishable, rather than merely subject to sharp criticism by those who disagree or feel offended. The treatment of such controversial viewpoints as discrimination, harassment, or bullying would make any semblance of open inquiry on those topics impossible.”
Her fear is that, “To demonstrate that it is against antisemitism, Harvard may face pressure to expand its definitions of discrimination, harassment, and bullying, so as to stifle more speech that is deemed offensive.”
The right move? Gersen says that “in order to resist such pressures, the university needs to acknowledge that it has allowed a culture of censoriousness to develop, recommit itself to academic freedom and free speech, and rethink D.E.I. in a way that prizes the diversity of viewpoints.”
She goes on to explain, “Though some argue that D.E.I. has enabled a surge in antisemitism, it is the pervasive influence of D.E.I. sensibilities that makes plausible the claim that universities should always treat anti-Zionist speech as antisemitism, much in the way that some have claimed that criticizing aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement—or even D.E.I. itself—is always discrimination.”
Gerson says the university is at a crossroads, “where universities will be tempted to discipline objectionable speech in order to demonstrate that they are dedicated to rooting out antisemitism and Islamophobia, too. Unless we conscientiously and mindfully pull away from that path, academic freedom—which is essential to fulfilling a university’s purpose—will meet its destruction.”
