Sometime in October, Yale University hosted Professor Jytte Kalusen of Brandeis in connection with the launch of her new book, The Cartoons That Shook the World. Little known was a controversy that ensued over a decision made by Yale President Richard Levin and the Yale University Press not to include in her book the 12 Danish cartoons (that became the center of a crisis in the Netherlands about a year ago). Their rationale was that such depictions of the Prophet Muhammad” were rooted in fear of violence” and might pose an imminent danger to the university and to society at large.
Peter Berkowitz, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, in his Wall Street Journal article,” Academia Goes Silent on Free Speech“, argues that while rights are subject to limits, freedom of speech and press is fundamental to a university: “A right as fundamental to the university and the nation as freedom of speech and press should only be limited in cases of imminent danger and not in deference to speculation about possible violence at an indeterminate future date.”
Likewise, a group of Yale alumni in a letter to Yale’s President, argues that “”Above all, every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression in the university. No member has a right to prevent such expression. Every official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed.”
The seeming tension between academic freedom and the requirements of social living in a democracy is best exemplified in this incident. The pursuit of the intellectual life sometimes may seem at odds with the practical goals of social living. It is so when we are beset by the useful and the practical. As Allan Bloom had argued in his The Closing of the American Mind, we are constantly concerned by solutions to our most pressing problems: “The for-its-own sake is alien in the modern democratic spirit, particularly in matters intellectual.”
Hence, the life of the mind takes refuge in a university, “which exists for the sake of democracy and for the sake of preserving the freedom of the mind.” Yet, the American university fails to do just that. It ministers to society. It addresses itself to society’s problems (poverty, disease, war) that should be addressed outside the university. If the Danish cartoons are offensive to a particular group of people, students are entitled to know why. Learning entails the pursuit of truths in all their facets.
The university as an institution must compensate for what individuals lack in a democracy and must encourage its members to participate in its spirit. As the repository of the regime’s own highest faculty and principle, it must have a strong sense of its importance outside the system of equal individuality. It must be contemptuous of public opinion because it has within it the source of autonomy – the quest for and even the discovery of the truth according to nature . . . (Bloom, 254)
. . . it (the university) need not concern itself with providing its students with experiences that are available in a democratic society.They will have them in any event. It must provide them with experience they can’t have there . . . (Bloom, 256).
The Yale censorship incident, sad to say, is reflective of a nationwide phenomenon of professors, university administrators, and yes, even university presses expressing indifference to the most important right of a university – the right to freedom of thought and expression t – and to the most important right of every student – the right to know. As Berkowitz puts it:
“As the controversies at Yale, Duke and Harvard captured national attention, professors from other universities haven’t had much to say in defense of liberty of thought and discussion either. This silence represents a collective failure of America’s professors of colossal proportions. What could be a clearer sign of our professors’ loss of understanding of the requirements of liberal education than their failure to defend liberty of thought and discussion where it touches them most directly?
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