Academic Freedom Came Under Attack in the Post-9/11 United States – Teen Vogue

Soon after the Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003, activists at Columbia University held a six-hour campus protest against the war. One speaker, an assistant professor of anthropology named Nicholas De Genova, angrily condemned the war on terror as an expression of white supremacy, and expressed his wish that U.S. forces in Iraq suffer a million Mogadishus, a reference to a 1993 battle during the Somali Civil War (subsequently dramatized in the Hollywood blockbuster Black Hawk Down) during which Somalian forces shot down two American military helicopters and killed several U.S. soldiers. After major media outlets picked up a student newspaper report of De Genovas comments, right-wing politicians and pundits attacked the professor as anti-American and Republican members of Congress called on the university to terminate him.

At the time, De Genova wasnt fired and Columbia stated that it would not punish him for his comments. But after being denied promotion by Columbia four years later, De Genova claimed that the university had capitulated to the prevailing political climate brought on by the U.S. response to the tragedy of 9/11.

Indeed, that post-9/11 political climate led many who worked and studied at universities to fear punishment for speaking out against war and militarism. Their fear was well grounded: Over a hundred congressional Republicans and several New York State legislators wrote angry letters to Columbias president, Lee Bollinger, to demand De Genovas firing (the latter group explicitly stated that the professors comments should not be excused under the guise of free speech).

For De Genova and many other college professors and students critical of the Bush administrations war on terror, the immediate aftermath of 9/11 might have felt like an unprecedented moment of danger for their academic freedom. But the truth is more disturbing. The chilling post-9/11 climate surrounding campus speech wasnt so much an aberration as a recurrence: Modern American history repeatedly shows that war is the greatest threat to academic freedom.

Academic freedom, the idea that university faculty and students should be able to freely pursue ideas without fear of retaliation, coercion, or censorship, might seem like an obvious social good. But past societies didnt necessarily think so. The religious authorities who established the first universities in western Europe in the 11th century intended them to serve as sites for training loyal, obedient servants of monarchs and the Christian church, not as places to promote free inquiry, as we understand the concept today. These authorities insisted that scholars and students in the medieval university conform to church orthodoxy. As Pope Gregory IX wrote in a set of statutes he issued for the University of Paris in 1231, students and faculty could dispute only such questions as can be determined by the theological books and the writings of the holy fathers. And when secular rulers struggled to wrest control of universities from the church, they proved equally determined to police the classroom by, for example, requiring that professors and students swear loyalty to the monarchs favored church.

Initially, the situation in America wasnt much better. The First Amendment protected Americans from having their right to speak compromised by the government, but it didn't clearly apply to universities in their role as sites of discourse and debate or places of research and teaching. No coherent concept of academic freedom existed in early America, and as debate and eventually civil war erupted over the issue of slavery, professors at Southern universities who challenged the Confederate political orthodoxy found their jobs threatened.

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Academic Freedom Came Under Attack in the Post-9/11 United States - Teen Vogue