In an otherwise dull piece in the Guardian on the latest convention of the American Sociological Association, Jonathan Steele notes:
The US has 13,000 career sociologists, a potential for extraordinary intellectual hegemony. They flexed their muscles last year, becoming the only US professional association to oppose the invasion of Iraq. A few unions denounced the war and even the normally conservative trade union federation, the AFL-CIO, passed a mildly worded vote of criticism. But with the exception of the sociologists, America's professions were coy about raising their collective voice.
Steele's report is confirmed by an ASA press release. On every level, this is not good. In some respects, it is simply farce. There is Steele's (presumably unintentionally)comic remark about the ASA flexing its muscles. You can just see the panic in the White House and the Pentagon. "Eeek. The ASA has turned against us. Quick. Pull back." As if anyone in the Bush administration cares about the views of a few inconsequential academics. One of the more pathetic characteristics of academics is an inflated sense of self-importance. Academics are people who have, for the most part, done well in school, and are used to the praise that goes with it. It can be very hard on them to discover, when they go out into the big world, that the rest of the world does not always value highly what they do.
This statement is not issued, and should not be construed in any way, as supporting the dictatorship of President Hussein or his regime. Our major concern with Bush and Blair’s policy is not the stated end but with the means.
In other words, "I want the world to be the way I want it, and I want it done my way." The statement is utterly silent on how the ASA crowd would deal with Saddam. That way, they can proclaim their moral superiority to everyone else. "We want Saddam gone, but in some unspecified morally superior way."
But most disturbing is the utter contempt the resolution shows for free inquiry, and this from people who would get all snotty about Galileo and the Catholic Church. A professional association is like a university. Its responsibility is to lay the foundations of free inquiry. When it calls for votes on issues not central to its functioning, it becomes an advocacy group, decreeing what ideas are welcome and which are not. The Kalven Report, issued at the University of Chicago in 1967, remains the best statement of academic freedom I know of. In calling for universities to neutral on issues outside its actual functioning, it says this:
The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society. A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.
The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.
Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues.
The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints. And this neutrality as an institution has its complement in the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest. It finds its complement, too, in the obligation of the university to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues.
Note that very important line:
It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted.
The ASA press release notes a disturbing change in the profession.
By contrast, a similar resolution circulated in 1968, during the Vietnam War, was also voted on by the ASA membership, but defeated. This earlier resolution had called for an end to the bombing of Vietnam and the immediate withdrawal of American troops. While a simultaneous poll of opinions indicated that a majority of the Association’s voting members favored the resolution’s policy position, a majority was not willing, at that time, to view a policy position on such an issue to be consistent with the role of a scientific and professional society, thus defeating the resolution.
In his Guardian piece, Steele asserts that "The profession's centre of gravity is moving left." If the left stands for politicized science and hostility to free inquiry, then he is right.Posted by sjostrom on August 24, 2004 11:20 AM
