U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Historicizing Discussions of Academic Freedom

This week I’m reading a classic in American intellectual history and the history of higher education: The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, co-authored by Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger and published in 1955 by Columbia University Press as part of the American Academic Freedom Project.

Unfortunately, the work as originally published is no longer in print.  Instead, only Hofstadter’s contribution to the volume, “The Age of the College,” is available, under the title Academic Freedom in the Age of the College.  Roger L. Geiger has written an introduction to this standalone volume published by Routledge.

Making Hofstadter’s half of the volume available to new readers has much more to do with the reputation of Hofstadter than it does with the history of academic freedom, the importance of the topic, or the collaborative work of the authors. Walter Metzger wasn’t exactly chopped liver – for most of his career as a Columbia professor he was the official historian of the AAUP and a member of Committee A, the AAUP committee concerned with defending the academic freedom of professors.  His half of the volume, covering the emergence of the research university and the founding and early work of the AAUP, is absolutely crucial history, and it’s particularly important to read that portion of the volume in the larger cultural moment of its authorship and publication.

The Hofstadter/Metzger volume was but one half of a larger study on the history and current state of academic freedom, the first of its kind, commissioned and funded by the philanthropist Louis M. Rabinowitz and entrusted to the stewardship of Columbia University, which formed a committee for the purpose of carrying out the study. The second volume of the project, Academic Freedom in Our Time, was written by Robert M. MacIver.  (That volume is also unavailable as a reprint, for obvious reasons – “our time” is no longer our time.  But I have it on order.)

My copy of the Hofstadter/Metzger seems not to have been read before, though the bumping on the corners and wear on the top and bottom of the spine suggest that it has been moved from bookshelf to bookshelf, and even from library to library, during its long life.  At some point the dustjacket was discarded, and at least two prior owners, both scholars, have written their names on the inside front board and on the flyleaf.

Inside the used copy I have is a small card indicating that this particular copy of the book was a gift from “The Fund for the Republic,” a Ford Foundation initiative dedicated to protecting freedom of speech — though precisely whose freedom of speech they sought to protect is probably an important question to ask of an organization active during the McCarthy era.

I would love to credit the rollicking after-hours debate at the USIH conference, which called into question the limits of our liberal tolerance here at the blog, for sending me deep into the stacks for more insight into the issue of academic freedom, but these books are on my docket now for a different reason:  I’ve been invited by the program committee of the MLA to be “the historian” on a panel of literary scholars discussing the issue of academic freedom in our time.  My job is to provide historical perspective.

One of the things I plan to do is historicize our discussion itself.  For example, it’s interesting to note that it was not until 1970 that the MLA began discussing putting together a standing committee on academic freedom, out of concern that some professors were being fired for their political views. This strikes me as a relatively late development compared to the much earlier attention given to the issue by historians – “academic freedom” was a topic of reference and discussion fairly early in book reviews and historical notices in the AHR; it appears in the pages of PMLA less often and somewhat later.  I’m puzzling over that disciplinary difference — thoughts and insights would be welcome. Interestingly, the first robust discussion of the topic in PMLA was an address delivered in 1968 by the great cultural historian Carl Schorske – widely known then as a supporter of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.

So every once in a while, at least, when shit starts gettin’ real, the MLA calls in the historians, and this year they’ve called on me. Obviously, I ain’t no Carl Schorske.  But I will do my best.

As those of you attending the AHA conference know, the AHA and MLA, both happening in Chicago at the same time, will be honoring each others’ badges.  So if you’d like to attend this MLA session on academic freedom, it will be taking place on Thursday, January 3, from 3:30 – 4:45 pm at the Hyatt Regency.  You can find more details here.

7 Thoughts on this Post

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  1. Well, wouldn’t you know Hofstadter just tossed “anti-intellectualism” nonchalantly into the middle of a paragraph about the conflicts between New Lights and Old Lights during the Great Awakening. But this particular usage, isolated as it is, and early as it is compared to his later and more influential work, neatly distilled for me precisely what is wrong with Hofstadter’s use of the term “anti-intellectual” — he is begging his question, and really distorting (or at least disregarding) a fair amount of historical evidence to do so.

    That’s not the focus / purpose of my reading here, but I’ve made a note in the margin and I’ll go back to it later. The assumption that “enthusiasm” was anti-intellectual is, I think, a bit of a stretch. It’s an odd charge to make against Jonathan Edwards. For Hofstadter (and for us too, or at least for me too, especially when writing in quick bursts) hostility to higher education in one particular form or another is conveniently lumped as “anti-intellectualism,” and often times that’s a good enough descriptor. But it probably doesn’t do justice to the ways in which some of that hostility, at least, is not against “thought” or “institutions that produce/cultivate thought,” but against the particular thoughts (supposedly) expressed/cultivated there.

    However, those finer distinctions that some people make get lost in a more general animus that we can (rightly?) paint with a broad brush as “anti-intellectual.”

    • Hi LD,

      As you may know, when Hofstadter was doing this work with Metzger, he had already published an article in the Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review 59, 21, Aug 8, 1953, entitled “Democracy and Anti-intellectualism in America,” so his use of the term isn’t too surprising; but nonetheless interesting.
      I don’t have ready access to the book, but it seems that his labeling the New Lights as anti-intellectual echoes his extensive use of familiar binaries and ready parallelisms, such as rational or intellectual vs irrational, emotional, etc. It strikes me that “rational,” a broader term than “intellectual,” does a lot of work in his thinking and that of many of his generation.

      The rationality of political actors in pursuit of their “interests” was a core principle of the consensus politics of the time. Here the contrast was with what at various times he called status, symbolic or cultural politics, often animated by paranoid emotionalism. This analysis was expressed in publications in this same period, such as “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” American Scholar, Winter 1954-5, revised for Daniel Bell’s The Radical Right collection, and later reprinted in The Paranoid Style.

      If it hasn’t already been done or isn’t too banal, maybe a study of Hofstadter’s thinking could be organized around such a notion of rationality as a polysemic term that bridged and linked intellectual history, the history of religion and social movements, and politics.

  2. Hi LD,

    Wow, I really enjoyed this post. I’m very interested in that book (in many ways, I find the Metzger volume more interesting than Hofstadter’s contribution) as well as the general topic of how different disciplines approach the issue of academic freedom.

    I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on the history of the concept of tenure, which was not widely adopted by most non-R1 colleges until quite late (the 1950s, I think).

    I’m also interested in which scholars tie questions of academic freedom to the defense of disciplinary norms / professionalization vs. those who do not. For very different reasons, people like Stanley Fish (English), Louis Menand (English), Robert Post (Law), and Thomas Haskell (History) seem to converge on the notion that there is no such thing as “free speech,” only the speech of authorized professional communities. (These scholars, of course, develop their arguments in very different ways and with diff. implications). On the other hand, English professors like David Bromwich (“Academic Freedom and its Opponents”) and Frank Donoghue (“Why Tenure Doesn’t Matter”) reject the notion of a specialized community of professional discourse, though again, they do so for very different treasons. I guess I want to know: why? Why are some English professors typically less willing than law professors or historians to commit to the strictures of disciplinary norms? (Bromwich views academic freedom as a sub-species of political freedom, adopting a standard from J.S. Mill, while Donoghue takes a more materialist approach to dismiss the concept as idealist / irrelevant in the age of corporate higher education).

    I imagine you already know this one, but I’ll list it here anyways: Richard Teichgraeber’s essay “Tenure Matters: A Historian’s Perspective” takes up some of the same issues that you seem to be tasked with: namely, interpreting the MLA’s own policy statements within a wider historical perspective.

    My hunch about why the AHA addressed these matters earlier than the MLA was simply that members of their guild (Charles Beard is the famous example that comes to mind, though I know there were several others) were more politically active than most MLA members in 1910s and 1920s. Weirdly, the progressive historians in the 1920s (Beard, Parrington) were more “presentist” and politically active than their counterparts in the English departments. My sense (based on Gerald Graff among others) is that most English departments in the 1920s were still primarily organized around philology and rhetoric. I can’t think of too many cases of academic freedom involving English professors until the early 1940s — Newton Arvin was dismissed from Smith for being homosexual (and perhaps a communist?) and even F.O. Matthiessen faced scrutiny, I think.

    • Patrick, you were so right about the value of the Metzger section. Extraordinarily useful. Of course this section has sent my mind careening back up to the bumpers at the top of the pinball machine, where I am bouncing to and fro between old problems and new projects. Basically, I keep returning to what it means if we (or some of us, me included) frame history as a moral inquiry. What does that obligate us to consider? What does that obligate us to rule out? Can we be moral inquiries without behaving like inquisitors? We are trained to “tolerance” as a professional value, when it comes to dealing with ideas that are alien to our own view of the world. What comes along with that tolerance? Tolerance and academic freedom are deeply intertwined, as we know. How do we, individually and as a profession, approach that connection as moral inquirers?

      I don’t have any answers here, but I am deeply grateful for the way that Metzger, much more than Hofstadter in this case, has helped me reframe some questions. Wrote a long post at my own blog tonight, trying to find a different way in to that problem of the politics of citation in the age of #MeToo. I’m deeply unsettled about this — not happy with any of my provisional assertions in this regard, and not happy with any of the current models of dealing with these things. I’ll probably eventually bring some of this discussion back here via more focused blog posts. But in the meantime, just wanted to say you’re 100% on the mark on Metzger.

  3. Thanks to Bill and Patrick for these great comments.

    Patrick, I’m glad you mentioned Donoghue’s book, which is one of the first contemporary “death of academe” / “death of the professoriate” books I read during research. (It was newly out when I read it.) I have a vested interest in using that book in particular — Donoghue wasn’t just a professor at Stanford during the canon wars, but he was my professor there, probably my favorite prof from that year. He was working on (maybe just finishing?) The Fame Machine when I took his class. I find that book related in some very interesting ways to our current moment of economic/social upheaval.

    The course I took from Donoghue was 18th century English poetry, which he told us all was the short end of the stick when it came to English literature of the period — the poetry was the worst of it. However, in his explanation of the profusion of bad poetry during that era, he got into the political economy of publishing in the post-patronage era, explaining the profusion/explosion of print and the intellectual revolution that brought/accompanied it in terms that were eerily prescient (I realized later) in describing the intellectual / literary landscape (and gig economy) of the Extremely Online Age. So there’s a long arc in Donoghue’s work that I’m playing with.

    Bill, I’m glad you mentioned the binaries of Hofstadter’s thinking as being more broadly characteristic of the time — children of light/children of darkness, vital center liberals v. dough faces, what have you (maybe James’s division of all people into the tough-minded and tender-minded types lingered). I wasn’t aware of the earlier piece in the Michigan Alumni review, but I will track it down.

    I teach the relationship between religion and “reason” during the Enlightenment so very differently than Hofstadter (and, frankly, not a few much more contemporary historians) view it. In his half of the volume (which I just finished today), he does allow that there wasn’t really too much serious conflict between science and religion in America ’til Darwin — yet at the same time goes into some depth about professors in the 1830s who dared to challenge (or at least question) the practice of teaching geology according to Genesis.

    But the notion that “faith and reason” or even “populist faith” and “elite reason” were at odds with each other is, I think, a historical oversimplification, and maybe even a misread. Hofstadter is such a subtle thinker, but when he gets into what he calls the “Great Retrogression” in higher education (overlapping with the Second Great Awakening and characterized by the explosive growth of denominational colleges and a resurgence of sectarianism), his verbs are as blunt as sledgehammers — freedom of thought is “stifled,” “strangled,” “throttled,” and so forth. His career-long campaign against “anti-intellectualism” is, it seems to me, not a brief against those who suspect “intellectuals” in the abstract, but very much a defense of the idea of the modern research university and the necessity in particular of academic freedom.

    Is that your sense?

    • Interesting thought, but I can’t really address it, having not read the essay for a very long time.

      Maybe the university and academic freedom had become symbolic for him of much that was often under threat in American society, especially in the late ’60s. Too, subtlety and an occasional use of the sledgehammer are not utterly exclusive!

      What mostly interests me here is that so much thinking in Hofstadter’s time seems to have been structured by this binary frame, with a concept of rationality and its putative opposites used to understand much in economic, political and intellectual life.

      • I agree completely, Bill. I think the easy answer here — which is probably a red herring — is the Cold War context of a world divided between “the free world” and the nations in thrall “behind the iron curtain.” But the easy answer just begs the question. There was nothing necessary (as in, inevitable) about the post World War II order or the sense of needing to square off against an existential threat/enemy. Indeed, if we’re to give ideas their proper due, we should take seriously your identification of binaristic thinking as not the consequence or corollary of the Cold War, but rather the ideational environment in which the Cold War was born.

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