With regard to what is commonly meant by  intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the  like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if  it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is  only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing  opinion; against the unprevailing, they may not only be used without  general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses  them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation.

– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

The notion of academic freedom captures several  distinct claims. It asserts that academic peers are best placed to judge  scholarly competence and accordingly that on all such professional  matters they should be granted autonomy. This component of academic  freedom is designed to preempt extra-scholarly considerations from  tainting employment decisions. Beyond the right to professional  autonomy, academic freedom also asserts that pursuit of the life of the  mind requires complete liberty of thought. Insofar as the academic  community is devoted to attaining truth, its mission cannot be  realized if barriers restrict the mind from meandering down paths of  inquiry less traveled. The right of an academic to liberty of thought  additionally means that outside the professional setting, scholars  should enjoy the ordinary rights of a democratic citizen to speak their  minds and accordingly that extramural utterances should not bear on the  assessment of professional competence. Historically, the great battles  over academic freedom in the United States were fought first to free  university life from the hold of clerical bias (sponsored by private  denominations, American colleges were originally the “ward of  religion”), then economic bias (in particular, corporate interference),[i] and then political bias (the periodic Red Scares climaxing in McCarthyism).[ii]

Even if fully redeemed, academic freedom is not quite so unfettered as it might appear prima facie.  Insofar as your colleagues decide your competence, you won’t survive  the academic vetting process very long if they are of the decided  opinion that your speculations, however copiously documented and  compellingly advanced, lack scholarly merit. Ruling the roost,  successful academics develop a stake in the intellectual status quo. In  fields that are highly politicized, these academics, most of whom have  reconciled with the reigning orthodoxy, reflexively quash or, at any  rate, look askance at dissent.  In practice, professional autonomy and  liberty of thought mean that, until gaining admittance to the community  of arbiters, you can express heretical ideas in the academy so long as  your advisors approve your dissertation; so long as refereed journals  approve your articles for publication; so long as expert readers for  university presses recommend your manuscripts for publication; and so  long as, once entering the marketplace of ideas, your publications are  well received among authorities in the field.[iii]

The  most urgent problems regarding liberty of speech arise not from what  can and can’t be said within the university but what can and can’t be  said outside it.

I do not see how a university could function in the absence of such  policing, but it would be unworldly naïve to deny that ego and political  agendas often make a mockery of professional arbitration and free  inquiry. The ultimate consequence of these police functions is that long  before a tenure decision is made, most would-be academics have  internalized the permissible limits of academic freedom. Consequently, few  candidates are denied tenure on explicitly political grounds. However,  inferring a high degree of tolerance in the ivory tower from the paucity  of politicized tenure cases is an optical illusion born of focusing on  the final stage of the socialization process. Such an inference fails to  account for how many aspirants to the life of the mind inconspicuously  and incrementally accommodate themselves to the rules of the academic  game many years before they come up for tenure, or even land a  tenure-track job. It also fails to account for how many leave academia  from intellectual frustration. It was one of the exhilarating  revelations of my graduate school experience at an elite institution how  many colleagues in my entering class fancied themselves Marxists—truly  The Revolution was imminent if even Princeton was replete with  radicals—and one of the sobering revelations how many ceased to be  Marxists once going on the job market.

Having said this, it is nonetheless my impression that academia is a relatively freewheeling place so long as  one’s opinions are kept within university confines. Rightwing  commentators who declaim against liberal bias in many (if politically  the most innocuous) departments of higher education are not far off the  mark. If you stick to speaking only at academic conferences, publishing  only in academic journals, and being formally deferential to your  academic colleagues, pretty much anything goes, at any rate, at  non-elite academic institutions, where faculty opinions have no public  resonance. Just as the number of persons denied tenure each year on  political grounds is, in my opinion, greatly exaggerated, so are the  allegations of “academic McCarthyism” and assaults on academic freedom.  If many choose along the way to forsake the academic track, it is not  because they feel intellectually stifled, but because they prudentially  decide that the sacrifices are not worth the meager rewards (not least  in salary), and because academia is such a petty place rife with cliques  and cabals, backbiting and back-stabbing, preening and posturing.  Probably the only true thing Henry Kissinger said was, “University  politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

The most urgent problems regarding liberty of speech arise not from  what can and can’t be said within the university but what can and can’t  be said outside it. Apart from the constraints that professional  autonomy imposes on intellectual inquiry, the social status conferred on  academics may also impose limits on what they might say. Put otherwise,  what you utter in your civilian life might be, or appear to be, so  offensive to current sensibilities, so unbecoming your professional  stature—so uncivil—that it will jeopardize your right to teach. If such a  conflict rarely arises nowadays it is because most self-described  dissenting academics inhabit a politically correct cocoon world, where  the more bizarre one’s personal orientation, the more protected one is,  especially if one loudly complains how oppressed one is. But if an  academic steps into the public sphere and gives vent to genuinely  heterodox opinions, it is at his or her peril.

It is highly improbable that the Israel lobby would have waged such a  vicious campaign to deny me tenure had I restricted myself to an  academic milieu. In fact, by the current standards of the ivory tower my  opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict are quite tame: I do not  oppose a two-state settlement, I do not extenuate Palestinian terrorism,  and I do not define myself as anti-Zionist. What provoked the national  hysteria was my political activism. I wanted and was able to reach a  fairly wide audience while, worse still, appearing reasonable. Meanwhile  the lobby’s arsenal of conventional smears—“anti-Semite,” “Holocaust  denier,” “crackpot”—wouldn’t adhere: I was Jewish, my parents survived  the Nazi holocaust, and my professional credentials withstood scrutiny.  In an earlier epoch but on a truly grand scale, the eminent British  philosopher Bertrand Russell too endured the tribulations of a dissident  public intellectual.

THE BERTRAND RUSSELL CASE

In 1940 Russell was appointed to the philosophy department at the  College of the City of New York. Almost immediately the Catholic Church  and rightwing forces orchestrated a witch-hunt on account of Russell’s  heretical opinions on religion and morality expressed in publications  geared to a popular audience. A lawsuit was filed against the City of  New York to rescind Russell’s appointment on the grounds of his being  “lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac,  irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful and bereft of moral fiber.”[iv]  In short, he was alleged to be a pervert. Despite an outpouring of  support from his former students, leading lights of higher education,  and the liberal public, the court decided against Russell. “This  appointment affects the public health, safety and morals of the  community,” the judge stated in his opinion,

“and it is the duty of the court to act. Academic freedom  does not mean academic license. It is the freedom to do good and not to  teach evil. Academic freedom cannot authorize a teacher to teach that  murder or treason are good…The appointment of Dr. Russell is an insult  to the people of the city of New York…in effect establishing a chair of  indecency.”[v]

Morally  serious faculty members feel obliged to justify public statements or  actions that appear outrageous rather than wave off criticism as “none  of your business.”

Russell’s advocates pursued two seemingly complementary but really  contradictory lines of defense. Some, such as John Dewey, mainly argued  that the accusations were false and defamatory, Russell’s actual  opinions having been grossly distorted by the court.[vi]  His advocates said that he was of unimpeachable character in every  respect. Others, such as Russell himself, mainly argued that his  opinions on religion and morality were beside the point because he was  hired to teach mathematics, logic and the philosophy of science. In  other words, it was of no account even if his opinions were perverted.

It must be said that, however much the judge might have hyperbolized,  Russell’s opinions on sexual mores did—by the public sensibilities of  his time—constitute an outrage. The claim of Russell’s defenders that  the court lifted all his opinions out of context was disingenuous.  “Exhibit A” for the prosecution and the judge was Russell’s book Marriage and Morals  (1929; reprinted, New York: 1970). Alongside many lyrical passages on  love and sex quoted by his defenders, one could also read:

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“this law [barring homosexuality] is the effect of a  barbarous and ignorant superstition, in favor of which no rational  argument of any sort or kind can be advanced” (pp. 110-11);

“it is good for children to see each other and their parents naked whenever it so happens naturally” (p. 116);

“uninhibited civilized people, whether men or women, are generally polygamous in their instincts” (p. 139);

“where a marriage is fruitful and both parties to it are reasonable  and decent the expectation ought to be that it will be lifelong, but not  that it will exclude other sex relations” (p. 142);

“I do not think that prostitution can be abolished wholly” (p. 148);

“I think that all sex relations which do not involve children should  be regarded as a purely private affair, and that if a man and a woman  choose to live together without having children, that should be no one’s  business but their own” (pp. 165-66);

“I should not hold it desirable that either a man or a woman should  enter upon the serious business of marriage…without having had previous  sexual experience” (p. 166);

“No doubt the ideal father is better than none, but many fathers are  so far from ideal that their non-existence might be a positive advantage  to children” (pp. 196-97);

“Adultery in itself should not, to my mind, be a ground for divorce.  Unless people are restrained by inhibitions or strong moral scruples, it  is very unlikely that they will go through life without occasionally  having strong impulses to adultery” (p. 230).

In addition to these politically incorrect opinions for his time,  Russell also expressed many politically incorrect opinions for our time:

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“during [the 19th century] the British stock was peopling  large parts of the world previously inhabited by a few savages” (p.  245);

“one can generally tell whether a man is a clever man or a fool by the shape of his head” (p. 256);

“The objections to [sterilization] which one naturally feels are, I  believe, not justified. Feeble-minded women, as everyone knows, are apt  to have enormous numbers of illegitimate children, all, as a rule,  wholly worthless to the community….it is quite clear that the number of  idiots, imbeciles, and feeble-minded could, by such measures, be  enormously diminished” (pp. 258-59);

“In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one  race to another. North America, Australia and New Zealand certainly  contribute more to the civilization of the world than they would do if  they were still peopled by aborigines.  It seems on the whole fair to  regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for  work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination  (apart from questions of humanity) would be highly undesirable” (p.  266).

It must also be noted that, following Dewey’s line of defense, if what was alleged about Russell’s opinions were true, it would be grounds for stripping him of his academic post.[vii]  Russell himself could not have been pleased with this inference because  it hit too close to home, which is perhaps why he primarily based his  defense not on the court’s mangling of his opinions but on their  irrelevance to his academic calling:

“I claim two things: 1. that appointments to academic  posts should be made by people with some competence to judge a man’s  technical qualifications; 2. that in extra-professional hours a teacher  should be free to express his opinions, whatever they may be.”[viii]

And yet more emphatically Russell wrote, in a letter to The New York Times  that lent him only tepid support, “In a democracy it is necessary that  people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged.”[ix]

How tenable is Russell’s position? In my opinion, not very. A  collection of articles in defense of Russell included this sober  reflection of a school administrator, which merits lengthy quotation:

As a reductio ad absurdum, think of trying to  retain on any faculty teachers who openly advocate … the assassination  of the President. …[T]here is always a limit. The teacher who thinks  that this limit does not apply to him is not facing reality. The  administrator must necessarily take this fact into account in employing  and retaining faculty members. He must recognize that neither students  nor the public will segregate a man’s teachings in one field from his  general teachings, his statements in class from his public  pronouncements, his philosophy from his life. He must recognize that,  whether or not it ought to be so, students and public consider that the  appointment of a teacher places a stamp of approval on him as a whole;  it invests him with a prestige which seems to justify youth in  considering him an example whom it might be well to follow. The teacher  must be considered in his entirety. This does not mean that he must be a  plaster saint, but it means that his assets must clearly outweigh his  liabilities.[x]

I find it hard to quarrel with this opinion either as a factual  statement—for better or worse a professor will not be judged only on his  professional competence[xi]—or  as a normative one—because students often defer to the moral authority  of a professor and because the title professor carries unique moral  prestige, a professor ought to acquit himself in a morally responsible  fashion.  It cannot be plausibly maintained that a scholar, however  gifted, who advocates the desirability of “lynching niggers” would, or  should, be granted an academic post. Indeed, ought not professors take  pride in the social capital invested in them and conduct themselves in a  manner commensurate with this honor? Every responsible professor  intuitively understands this. It is why we are embarrassed by a faculty  member who in word or deed demeans the stature of the profession—i.e.,  carries on in public like an ass. It is also why morally serious faculty  members feel obliged to justify public statements or actions that  appear outrageous rather than wave off criticism as “none of your  business.” The realistic and responsible question then becomes: What  sorts of conduct should be reckoned unacceptable and accordingly liable  to censure and sanction?

Before turning to this question I want to enter a crucial caveat. In  the ensuing remarks I will be addressing legitimate constraints on  speech outside the classroom. Inside the classroom I am rather  old-fashioned on what is and is not proper. A lectern should not serve  as a soapbox, a classroom should not be a venue for indoctrination, a  professor should not be the conveyer belt for a party/politically  correct line. Plato said, “The object of education is to teach us to  love what is beautiful.”[xii] It is not the worst aphorism, although I prefer a slightly amended, less authoritarian version: The object of education is to teach us to love the mind at play—while  minds fully realized will probably concur on the beauty of many things.  On most topics in the social sciences—really, social  ideologies—arguments can be made on both sides and it is nearly always a  question of weighing and balancing, of preponderances, not absolutes.  There might be consensus on the evil of violent genocide and the  inhumanity of chattel slavery, but no such consensus exists on the evil  of capitalism, which arguably causes millions to perish each year from  hunger and preventable diseases, and the inhumanity of wage slavery,  Chaplin’s Modern Times notwithstanding. Although the issue of  torture once appeared closed, it has now been reopened. So long as an  enduring consensus does not exist on a particular topic, a professor  should feel obliged to make the best case for all sides and let students find truth after weighing and balancing for themselves.  “The university educates the intellect to reason well in all matters,”  John Cardinal Newman wrote, “to reach out towards truth, and to grasp  it.”[xiii]  And the discovery of this truth “has to be made by the rough process of  a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners” (Mill).[xiv]  A professor must play both combatants—the advocate and the devil’s  advocate. Insofar as the human psyche is so contrived that few are  capable of playing a full-fledged devil’s advocate (i.e., making the  very best case against themselves), it is vital that a student be  exposed to those who are willing from conviction to play devil’s advocate. My primary responsibility in the classroom is to stimulate, not to dictate.

If invited to deliver a public lecture, however, I see my task as  mainly to present my viewpoint, the results of my own process of  weighing and balancing, just as others are invited to present theirs.  The distinction might be analogized to the news pages versus the  editorial pages of a newspaper.

INCIVILITY IN PUBLIC LIFE

I want to look now at varieties of incivility in public life.  Consider first statements that might appear uncivil but which are  nonetheless factually grounded. On the Charlie Rose television  program, investigative journalist Allan Nairn claimed that the assistant  secretary of state for Latin America during the Reagan administration,  Elliott Abrams, should be prosecuted as a war criminal under the  Nuremberg statutes, while Noam Chomsky has asserted that on the basis of  the Nuremberg statutes every U.S. president since World War II would  have been hung. In and of themselves such statements are no more  objectionable than calling Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein war  criminals.  It is an altogether separate matter whether the statements  are factually accurate: Nairn and Chomsky might be guilty of  misrepresentation, recklessness, or libel, but not incivility. Likewise,  it is not ad hominem to accuse Jewish organizations and lawyers of turning the Nazi holocaust into a blackmail weapon, as I did in my book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering, or to accuse a professor of being a plagiarist and falsifier of documents, as I did in Beyond Chutzpah. Such allegations denote definite crimes and misdemeanors, the veracity of which is subject to proof or disproof.

Consider next statements which are uncivil but might nonetheless be  warranted by the circumstances. I want to emphasize that I am referring  to incivilities directed against those wielding power and privilege. I  see no virtue in holding up to ridicule and contempt the poor and  powerless, the humbled, hungry, and homeless. Again, Chomsky dubbed  Jeane Kirkpatrick “chief sadist in residence of the Reagan  Administration.”[xv]   Kirkpatrick was serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, where  she whitewashed atrocities being committed by the U.S. government and  its proxies in Central America. Such a turn of phrase might be uncivil  but under the circumstances hardly objectionable. Young people in  particular yearn for a respected moral figure to speak the impolite and  impolitic truth, to give vent to the purity of moral indignation they  feel the occasion warrants. There are moments that might require  breaking free of the shackles imposed by polite discourse in order to  sound the tocsin that innocent people are being butchered while we speak  due to the actions of our government. The problem is not uncivil words  but an uncivil reality; and uncivil words might be necessary in order to  bring home the uncivil reality. An ad hominem attack should not  be a substitute for reasoned thought—and no one would accuse Chomsky of  failing to argue his case or footnote it—but neither should a cri de coeur, however astringent, be ruled beyond the ambit of legitimate public discourse.

Beyond being a vehicle to convey moral indignation, incivility might also serve to expose pretense, fatuity, and charlatanry.

It is also pertinent to recall that Chomsky’s caustic phrase appeared  in a book pitched to a popular audience. It might be the case that in  content and form a publication hovers on the juncture between the  civility of the ivory tower and the tempestuousness of the town square,  and an author might want to reach these two constituencies at once.  There is no necessary contradiction between the stolid scholar who meets  the most exigent standards of academic protocol and the scrappy scholar  who leaps headlong into the public fray. Karl Marx appraised Das Kapital a “triumph of German science,”[xvi] while even conservative economists such as Joseph Schumpeter reckoned Marx an “economist of top rank.”[xvii]  Nonetheless, as Frederick Engels recalled at his comrade’s funeral,  Marx wrote not just for “historical science” but also for the “militant  proletariat”; he was “the man of science” but “before all else a  revolutionary.”[xviii] Indeed, Marx applauded the French publisher’s serialization of Das Kapital,  for “in this form the book will be more accessible to the working  class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.”[xix]

It scarcely surprises then that Marx’s magnum opus seamlessly  interweaves scholarly detachment and highbrow literary allusion with  partisan polemic and lowbrow lampoon—or, in Schumpeter’s colorful  phrase, “the cold metal of economic theory is in Marx’s pages immersed  in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not  naturally its own.”[xx]  Bastiat is a “dwarf economist,” Young “a rambling, uncritical writer  whose reputation is inversely related to his merits,” and MacCulloch “a  past master…of pretentious cretinism”; Say’s standpoint is one of  “absurdity and triviality,” Roscher “seldom loses the opportunity of  rushing into print with ingenious apologetic fantasies,” while Ganilh’s  tome is “cretinous,” “miserable,” and “twaddle.”  Even—and, in my  opinion, inexcusably—Mill wasn’t spared Marx’s verbal rapier: “On a  level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of  our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its ‘great  intellect.’” As for the subject of Marx’s scientific treatise, “Capital  is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor,  and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” and came into the world  “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”[xxi] On  the general question of partisanship and passion in scholarship,  it merits quoting a top-rank intellect of vastly different temperament  whom we have already encountered. “A man without a bias cannot write  interesting history,” Bertrand Russell observed, “if, indeed, such a man  exists. I regard it as mere humbug to pretend to lack of bias….Which  bias is nearer to the truth must be left to posterity.”[xxii]

Beyond being a vehicle to convey moral indignation, incivility might  also serve to expose pretense, fatuity, and charlatanry. Doesn’t the  person proclaiming the emperor’s nakedness belong to an honorable  tradition? When Steven Katz sets out to demonstrate that The Holocaust  was “phenomenologically unique” in a “non-Husserlian, non-Shutzean,  non-Schelerian, non-Heideggerian, non-Merleau-Pontyan sense,” it would  seem fair game for the tag line, “Translation: The Katz enterprise is  phenomenal non-sense.”[xxiii]

It is also cause for wonder why the clever, witty, or erudite putdown  that is a staple of academic life should be preferred over incivility  of language. Henry Louis Gates juxtaposes a pair of statements  hypothetically addressed to a Black freshman at Stanford:

(A) Levon, if you find yourself struggling in your  classes here, you should realize it isn’t your fault. It’s simply that  you’re the beneficiary of a disruptive policy of affirmative action that  places underqualified, underprepared, and often undertalented black  students in demanding educational environments like this one. The  policy’s egalitarian aims may be well-intentioned but given the fact  that aptitude tests place African-Americans almost a full standard  deviation below the mean, even controlling for socioeconomic  disparities, they are also profoundly misguided. The truth is, you  probably don’t belong here, and your college experience will be a long  downhill slide.

(B) Out of my face, jungle bunny.

“Surely there is no doubt,” Gates concludes, “which is likely to be more ‘wounding’ and alienating.”[xxiv]  He wants to illustrate the inherent inadequacies of politically correct  speech codes, but the point might fairly be broadened to embrace the  issue of incivility as well. I see no reason to prefer polished insults  that, as Gates shows, might be more vicious and hurtful, to blunt  language. Indeed, such stylishness is more often than not testament to a  self-indulgent verbal pedantry and lack of a moral core.

In this regard the hypocritical use to which the incivility charge is  typically put deserves mention. During my tenure battle Professor Alan  Dershowitz posted on Harvard Law School’s official website the  allegation that my late mother was—or I believed she was—“a kapo” who  had been “cooperating with the Nazis during the Holocaust.” For the record, my late mother was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Maidanek  concentration camp and two slave-labor camps. She lost every member of  her family during the war and after the war served as a key witness at a  Nazi deportation hearing in the U.S. and at the trial of Maidanek  concentration camp guards in Germany. In a decent world Dershowitz’s  crude and conscious defamation would, I think, be deserving of  censure. He not only suffered no sanctions but then-Harvard Law School  Dean (and current U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Elena Kagan refused to  remove his posting from the HLS website.[xxv]

In a Haaretz interview, Benny Morris called the whole of the  Palestinian people “sick, psychotic,” “serial killers,” whom Israel must  “imprison” or “execute,” and “barbarians” around whom “something like a  cage has to be built.”[xxvi]  If directed against any other nationality, it is hard to conceive that  Morris would not have suffered professionally. Yet his mainstream  reputation as an objective scholar and commentator on the  Israel-Palestine conflict survives intact and untarnished. It might be  called Holocaust affirmative action whereby Jews wrapped in the mantle  of the Nazi holocaust profit from moral immunity and impunity. It was  also this affirmative action at work when Alain Finkielkraut—in France he is regarded as a philosopher of equal stature to Bernard-Henri Lévy, rightly so—told Haaretz  that France’s soccer team “arouses ridicule throughout Europe” because  it was “composed almost exclusively of black players,” and that  colonialism sought only to “bring civilization to the savages.”[xxvii]  It cannot but amuse how the spewing forth of such venomous hatred is  seen as courage. Finkielkraut packaged himself in the interview a martyr  “striving to maintain the language of truth.”

I have acknowledged that the extramural life of an academic is bound  to be, and should be, subject to some constraints. There are forms of  incivility that might degrade a position on which society has conferred  prestige and on which its principal constituency—students—rightly have  higher than normal expectations. However, in nearly all the examples I  have adduced—which draw from politics, not the more problematic domain  of social mores—I either exculpate or extenuate an alleged incivility.   Indeed, it is my opinion that the supposed incivility of political  dissidents pales beside what normally passes for civility in academic  life. When you consider that our best universities eagerly recruit  indubitable war criminals—Henry Kissinger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Donald  Rumsfeld; when you consider that many professors—as Edward Said put it,  referring to the Vietnam War era—“were discovered to be working,  sometimes secretly and sometimes openly, on such topics as  counterinsurgency and ‘lethal research’ for the State Department, the  CIA, or the Pentagon”;[xxviii]  when you consider that a professor at one of our best universities  advocates torture and the automatic destruction of villages after a  terrorist attack: when you consider all this, it becomes clear that,  however real, the question of civility—whether or not a dissident  academic abides by Emily Post’s rules of etiquette—is by comparison a  meaningless sideshow or just a transparent pretext for denying a person  the right to teach on account of his or her political beliefs.

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***With permission from the author, this article was edited and adapted from an earlier version published in The South Atlantic Quarterly, fall 2009. It was written after the author’s  controversial tenure denial case at DePaul University in Chicago.***