Last week, news broke that Middlebury College had cancelled a talk by a Polish philosophy professor with very close ties to the ruling "Law and Justice" party in Poland, due to "safety" concerns. Calling this professor a "conservative" is quite misleading: he's a reactionary, with strong authoritarian leanings. (A subsequent report says the event was cancelled because of concern about the safety of the students protesting the event, which is even weirder: who was threatening them? Other students? Off-campus fascists in rural Vermont?)
The professor was invited by a student group [BL: SEE UPDATE], so there are no academic freedom issues here, since students don't have academic freedom rights of their own. (There would be an academic freedom issue if a scholarly department at Middlebury had invited him.) So the issues here are more general ones about freedom of expression on campus. Insofar as student groups are generally permitted to invite speakers at Middlebury--which I'll assume is true--then this is a loss for freedom of expression at Middlebury. And, personally, I'd much rather hear from a reactionary philosophy professor than the typical member of "Law and Justice," a party that represents neither. (I'm told by friends in Poland that, his reactionary social and politcial views notwithstanding, this professor is quite "smart," a Plato scholar in fact, and one who probably thinks Plato was right about democracy!)
But now we have a real violation of academic freedom at Middlebury as well: a chemistry professor is put on leave because of an exam question asking students to calculate the lethal chemical composition of the gas used by the Nazis in the gas chambers. As this student defending the professor notes, when the professor was made aware of some students being upset about the question, he apologized, and offered to regrade the exams of those students affected. Instead, the college suspended him from teaching. This is a violation of the professor's core academic freedom: even if the question was in bad taste, as he apparently recognized after the fact, it was hardly out-of-bounds for a chemistry exam. As the student writes:
I am Jewish. Both my uncles are rabbis. I did not mind the question because, frankly, the Holocaust happened, and the gas was used. I took it at face value as an attempt at historical relevance — if he had never said what HCN was, I would not need to write this today and we would all have simply calculated some meaningless jumble of letters. Should he instead have had us calculate rat poison? The lethality of bathroom ammonium? Yes. Should he lose his teaching position? No.
In this case, Middlebury administrators should learn from their wise student. And the AAUP should launch an investigation into the suspension without any due process of this faculty member.
UPDATE: A Middlebury student and reader of the blog has written with some helpful corrections and additional information. First, the reactionary philosophy professor was invited by something called the "Alexander Hamilton Forum," which is not a student group, but is not either a scholarly unit or defined by disciplinary expertise. It is directed by several faculty (and a former Republican Governor of Vermont!?!), none of whom are philosophers. So I'm not sure any of this changes the fact that this is not, strictly speaking, an academic freedom issue, but one about freedom of expression on campus.
Second, the student shared this additional information about events at the college:
Regarding the incident itself, one crucial thing is that the student organizers have clearly stated that they are not intending to disrupt the speech or preventing it from happening at the very beginning. Their intention was to to peacefully protest against the right-wing speaker, his ideology, and the political science department's decision to sponsor the event. There may have been disputes between different sides on the campus, but I believe that the disputes were generally peaceful. Indeed, later on, the school clarified that the event's cancellation had nothing to do with any threats from students. However, unfortunately, the decision to cancel the event has invited some malicious attacks against Middlebury students describing them as "mobs" who once again shut down speakers, including a Princeton's conservative professor's tweet. (Even when he was reminded that the students were not intending to shut down the speaker, he still suggested an ungrounded possibility that some of the students might have wanted to do so.) Such allegation was completely fake. Indeed, after the school cancelled the event, there was a political science professor who invited the speaker to his class upon an unanimous agreement of his students. After the news was spread on the social internet, some students came to audit the lecture and asked questions to the speaker. The student organizers were aware of this and decided not to protest.
It is clear that Middlebury students remained calm and peaceful during the entire process. It is the administration's sudden cancellation of the event that led to some misbeliefs and even slanders against Middlebury students. The administration, not the students, shall be responsible for the mess.
ANOTHER: A brief comment from the Polish legal philosopher Wojciech Sadurski (Sydney), who is also a vigorous and astute critic of the current Polish government.
Recent Comments