Following a freeze on over $500 million in federal funding, Brown University’s President Christina Paxson proclaimed that she “will always defend academic freedom” for the Brown community.
This would be welcome, except Paxson appears to mistakenly believe that the only threat to academic freedom is “external intrusion.” Unfortunately, her blind spot for internal threats to academic freedom has enabled its gradual erosion.
Consider an important aspect of the principle, embodied in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, that is often omitted from the conversation. According to that statement, institutions of higher education “are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole.” The statement continues: “The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.”
In 1967, the Supreme Court echoed this sentiment: “Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”
This brings us to the current situation at Brown.
What purpose does “academic freedom” serve the public if, in the end, those granted its protections cynically use it not to engage in the “free search for truth,” but precisely because they want to cast a “pall of orthodoxy” over an entire academic center or field?
This is not merely hypothetical.
Consider Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies (CMES). At a 2016 CMES event on “The Futures of Palestinians in Israel,” the center’s founding director, Beshara Doumani, was asked by an audience member: “Why not also bring people who represent the security aspect of Israel, the security ideas, the ideas of also the religion there? I would truly like to hear a debate that looks at both sides…” Doumani’s response exposed the problem at Brown:
It’s important to explain that this is not a debate. It’s not meant to be a debate.… So what do we [the panelists] share in common, many of us here, is that Israel cannot be properly understood unless, really, the features of it as a settler-colonial project are understood. If most academics looking at that history think that this is an attractive, and maybe even dominant framework for understanding the conflict, then we start from there, and then we go on to debate well, what does that mean and what can we think about in terms of the future?
Because there is ideological conformity within the CMES on the question of Israel, Doumani argued, there is no need to challenge its predetermined conclusion of Israeli evil.
Here’s @BrownUniversity professor Adi Ophir arguing that Hamas is just defending oppressed Muslims.
No wonder dozens of Brown student groups responded to October 7 by signing a statement calling Hamas’s mass slaughter, mutilation, rape, and kidnapping of innocent men, women, and… pic.twitter.com/0Q2vl6bROi
— CAMERAorg (@CAMERAorg) January 18, 2024
This isn’t the pursuit of truth; it is the pursuit of orthodoxy. At Brown, that pursuit has been swift and surprisingly transparent.
For example, CMES’s initiative, “New Directions for Palestinian Studies” (NDPS), has explicitly defined its mission not as “knowledge production,” but to “shape the agenda of knowledge production…” Conferences organized under NDPS are focused on how “to put intellectual work in the service of emancipatory politics” and “how to imagine an ethical code that transcends disciplinary constraints.”
Students at Brown are being given an incomplete, one-sided, and inaccurate understanding of world events. Consider the university’s programming series titled “Current events in Israel and Gaza,” organized after the October 7 massacres carried out by Palestinian terrorists. Of the 64 speakers and moderators participating in 23 events, not one represented a mainstream Israeli perspective. While most events hyper-fixated on partisan accusations against Israel – over half referenced accusations of “genocide” against Israel and two-thirds discussed “colonialism” – there was only a single mention of Hamas’s use of sexual violence during the October 7 attacks.
Course syllabi talk of “clearing a space for Palestinian subjectivity” and “decolonizing” research, which in effect means excluding large swathes of alternative academic theories and viewpoints. The NDPS boasts of “anti-colonial knowledge” while dismissing alternative viewpoints as “colonial policing.” Readings from the same handful of postcolonial, postmodernist, and/or Marxist ideologues, such as Ilan Pappe, Frantz Fanon, and Edward Said, appear repeatedly on syllabi. Few, if any, alternative viewpoints are included. Multiple classes assign South Africa’s filing at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of “genocide,” as reading. Notably absent are Israel’s rebuttals.
Without voices to challenge their partisan views, the messages from these ideologues masquerading as academics have inevitably grown more extreme and detached from reality. An instructor for a course on antisemitism publicly speaks of Israelis as a “Jewish mob” (or alternatively as a “Kristallnacht mob”) that is “thirsty for Palestinian blood,” combining Holocaust inversion and blood libel. Doumani speaks of “global Israel” as “the north star of the rise of fascism.” Supposedly “academic” conferences held by Brown discuss the “settler colonial death drive implanted in Jews’ hearts” and the “poisoned well of Jewish nature.”
This is just a sampling taken from our research and documentation of the ideological bias and poor academic quality that characterizes Brown University’s CMES.
In 1957, the famed Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote: “A university ceases to be true to its own nature if it becomes the tool of Church or State or any sectional interest…. Dogma and hypothesis are incompatible, and the concept of an immutable doctrine is repugnant to the spirit of a university.”
At Brown’s CMES, students are being fed a dogma in service of a sectional interest which makes no secret of its desire to control the pursuit of knowledge. If Brown wishes to remain true to its nature as an institution of higher education, it must combat threats to academic freedom both from without and within. Should it choose to ignore the latter and cease serving the purpose of academic freedom – the common good of the free search for truth – then it cannot complain when the public no longer sees value in funding its operations.