"Islands of repression in a sea of freedom". This striking phrase was coined a few years ago by the American scholar Abigail Thernstrom to describe her country's universities. She was reacting to bitter denunciations of her husband Stephan, an anti-racist Harvard history professor, and the reluctance of university authorities to defend him.
Stephan Thernstrom's crime? Reading extracts from journals of white plantation owners to his students so they could learn how slave owners attempted to justify their actions. His attackers charged that this was "racially insensitive".
While Abigail Thernstrom's words were obviously chosen for rhetorical effect, her remarks point to a serious malaise in many universities, and one that is not just confined to America.
A crucial distinction between universities and other kinds of training institutions is that universities are expected to provide an environment congenial to the free inquiry that enhances human knowledge. Such inquiry needs to be rigorous in its adherence to the principles of rational argument, exacting in its use of factual evidence, and critical, in the sense that it should not accept claims to truth simply because people in authority have made them.
This creates a tension between universities and other sectors of society. Free inquiry always has the potential to upset established interests, because it can puncture the myths and rationalisations which they use to support their positions.
Nevertheless, as intellectual openness is an essential part of our cultural heritage, governments in most Western countries, and particularly English-speaking countries, have accepted the need to safeguard academic freedom. Legislation and well-established conventions limit external interference in the content, conclusions, and distribution of university teaching and research.
Today however, the greatest threats to intellectual freedom come not from outside, but from within the universities themselves. Many academics in the humanities and social sciences have adopted a highly ideological view of their role, in which the purported political consequences of ideas are far more important than the arguments and evidence on which they are based.
And their politics are deeply at odds with those of mainstream Australians. These privileged academics see themselves as presenting the views of the "oppressed" people on the wrong side of the fault lines of gender, race, ethnicity and class that supposedly divide our society -- although whether the "victims" themselves see things in the same light is another matter.
Two articles in the current issue of Quadrant magazine describe and condemn these developments. Although Quadrant is identified with conservatism and the right, allowing many in the universities to dismiss its arguments on these grounds alone, both articles are by academics who are associated with the left side of the political spectrum.
Jean Curthoys was a left-wing feminist philosopher at Sydney University. She starts by referring to the vitriolic attack on the author Helen Garner by the academic feminists who contributed essays to the book Bodyjamming. Garner's own book, The First Stone, had cast a critical eye over the actions of radical feminists involved in a sexual harassment incident at Melbourne University in the early 1990s.
Curthoys observes that these essays, written by those who boast of their "intellectual training", show no interest in factual evidence or logical argument. Garner was condemned because of the political implications of her book, and its implicit challenge to the authority of the radical feminists who have become ensconced in many universities.
According to Curthoys, Bodyjamming's approach is no aberration, but typical of much of the culture of academic feminism, with its claims that "feminist truth" is different from, and superior to, "patriarchal truth". She quotes Australia's most prominent feminist philosopher as warning against attempts by women to "correct the bad arguments and inconsistencies of feminist theory", when this is "at the expense of major feminist commitments".
It was Curthoys' dismay at the treatment meted out to those who had tried to correct the "bad arguments", the students and academics "whose confidence, abilities and careers have been stamped on by academic feminists", that prompted her writing. She wants to defend the value of reasoned feminist theory against the "intellectual and moral corruption" into which much academic feminism has fallen.
The other article recounts the bewilderment of Bob Catley, a political scientist who returned to an academic career after many years of working first for the Hawke government, and then as a Labor member of Federal Parliament. Returning first to a new former-CAE university, and then to the University of Adelaide, Catley found that "the intellectual climates of these two institutions were remarkably and disappointingly similar", and that the situation at most other Australian universities was little different.
The academic radicals of the 1970s had lost none of their hostility to the liberal democracies and their social and intellectual achievements. If anything, the collapse of socialism seemed to have intensified their hatred. But the "children of the 70s" now control important parts of the university system, and they have created what Catley calls an "ideological near-consensus" through their ability to influence academic recruitment, promotions, and research funding.
All this doesn't bode well for the hopes of those who see the universities as playing a major part in the lifelong learning necessary for the knowledge-based economy of the twenty-first century. But surprisingly, the kinds of problems identified by Curthoys and Catley -- as well as by many others before them -- do not rate a mention in Learning for Life, the report of the West Committee's review of higher education which was released last week.
Certainly, the report talks about the need to encourage "diversity" in higher education, although by this it mainly seems to mean diversity of administrative and course structures. And at least some of its recommendations are sensible, and might indirectly help to end the rot in some of the worst-affected sections of academia. But if the committee members really want Australia to become "the clever country" (although they do not use this worn-out term themselves), they should have been far more candid about what needs to be changed -- like restoring genuine academic freedom to our universities.
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