Sunday, January 17, 2010

Freedom of Inquiry at Universities

The Economist has a review of Jonathan R. Cole's The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected. It looks like an interesting book. Since I haven't read it, I can only argue with its contents as seen through the Economist. According to the review:
The author describes how these institutions built upon Germany’s model of the 19th century, with its combination of research and teaching; how they benefited from America’s early enthusiasm for mass education as a route to social mobility; and how they hit the jackpot in the 1930s, when many brilliant academics in Germany and Austria fled to American universities (some of which had recently been purging Jews from their own academic bodies).
So the American universities learned from the Germans, then benefited when the Germans chased out their Jews. Later in the review, however, this thought leads to another:
Certain areas of study, such as climate change, stem-cell research and work on the Middle East, are particularly vulnerable to political pressure. Professor Cole tells how two respected scholars, Joseph Massad at Columbia and Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard College, were harassed by the Jewish lobby—and asks what would have happened had American universities given in to rampant institutional anti-Semitism and “resisted hiring the Jewish scientists and scholars from Nazi Germany”?
Well, no, not necessarily. The reviewer, and probably the author, assume full freedom of inquiry is always good, and any questioning of it is bad. This overlooks the well documented fact that the free German universities hosted dangerous and increasingly crackpot ideas from the late 19th century, and by the interwar period - in spite of still including many fine teachers including Jews - they were churning out large numbers of the most destructive men history has known. As historians such as Goetz Aly, Sussane Heim, Ulrich Herbert and others have shown, it was the university-trained generation of the late 1920s and early 1930s who gave Nazi Germany its most potent cadres; moreover, it was the universities which were their main spawning ground.

The telephone is morally neutral, as is the Internet. They can be used or misused by people. Strange as it may sound, freedom of inquiry can also be used or misused by people. A careful amount of surveillance of all three is not a bad idea.

5 comments:

Barry Meislin said...

"Two respected scholars...."

"...harrassed by the Jewish Lobby...."

And one is supposed to take this guy seriously?....

Anonymous said...

In reading some articles on Nadia Abu El-Haj, there's a reference to
"... what is likely to have been the first Islamic government complex in Jerusalem has been excavated and opened for public viewing."
Anyone know what and where that is?

I also had no idea that one of the founders of Palestinian archeology was an American Lutheran named Albert Glock or of the whodunnit surrounding his murder.
t34zakat

Anonymous said...

Apparently Cole objected to the President of Columbia's introduction to Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University
http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=3189
I'd like to see whether the book has any criticism of negative leftist political or methodological influences. I am, however, inclined to agree with Barry on this one.
t34zakat

Anonymous said...

I haven't read Cole's book and probably won't, but:

"Professor Cole tells how two respected scholars, Joseph Massad at Columbia and Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard College, were harassed by the Jewish lobby—and asks what would have happened had American universities given in to rampant institutional anti-Semitism and “resisted hiring the Jewish scientists and scholars from Nazi Germany”?" ??

First of all, Massad's "harassment" ended with his being found guilty of some of the accusations made against him, exonerated of others, and still in possession of his teaching post at Columbia. El-Haj's ended with her receiving tenure. There is no evidence here of an American university giving in to rampant anything, so what parallel is Cole trying to draw?

The second issue is what has become the bog-standard Left-academic attitude: Expressing opinions is Academic Freedom when I or my buddies do it, and Harassment By the Jewish (surely he meant "Zionist"?) Lobby when you do.

Paul M.

Anonymous said...

Except that "academic freedom" should not cover the right to lie and fabricate. In the sciences if you fake experiments and get caught, no one argues about your "right" to freedom of expression. You are normally out on your ear, whereas in Middle East Studies you get to be a tenured professor at an Ivy League university.

Danny