So do you think academic freedom should also protect a professor who advocates that slavery should be legalized in the U.S. again, or that interracial or inter-religious marriage should be illegal?

With academic freedom comes responsibility. A faculty member must be able to present their viewpoints in a manner that does cross the line into harassment targeted at a protected group. NYU (and New York City law) recognizes sexual orientation as a protected group. Thio Li-ann does not, and vociferously harassed students, staff, and the LGBT community at large. Moreover, I doubt even Liberty University would have hired her had they actually seen the bankrupt logic of her speech and book.

Blogging about topics as complex as Thio without actually doing the research is quite disastrous.

Bob,

If you think expressing repellant viewpoints per se can be construed as harassment of protected groups, then you are the one who needs to do the research. You might start with the extensive explanations of the flaws in that argument elaborated at www.thefire.org.

Perhaps there should be no protected groups.

John Drake wrote:

Perhaps there should be no protected groups.

Nah . . . all animals are equal, except some are more equal than others.

Or so I heard.

Sorry. I wouldn't hire anyone, for any position, who was a young earth creationist. Or a Holocaust denier.

We wouldn't hire someone who was dumb for a job that required smarts, right? And unless you're some kind of relativist, you should have the courage of your convictions that your intellectual positions are truthful. And while on some issues you might think that different interpretations or viewpoints are valid, you should ultimately believe that there *is* a truth to be discovered, eventually. And so if you want a smart person for a job, and the person you are interviewing holds positions you believe are false or dumb, you should not wish to hire them. Unless you think there is no truth, or unless you think truth is something each person has personally.

Matt, You are confusing untenable intellectual positions (which can be assessed with reference to fact) with controversial political ones (which are opinions). No one is saying Holocaust deniers should get equal play at the hiring stage--or the classroom, or the promotion process, for that matter--if the "scholarship" is all about Holocaust denial. However, if you are an engineering professor and your academic work is all about physics--you have freedom of extramural utterance, as argued by the AAUP, as part of your academic freedom. See the case of Northwestern engineering professor Arthur Butz. See also the ACTA blog, 2006, for the case of Kevin Barrett, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who was prevented from attempting to indoctrinate his students with his crackpot ideas--but was still allowed into the classroom to teach his subject.

LB...those who hire and manage people should always be concerned about avoiding the abuse of authority. If you're hiring welders for a factory, it's a legitimate exercise of authority to ask how good they are at welding. It's abuse of authority to ask about their political and religious opinions. I don't see any reason why the principles should be any different in academia.

I once had a small group of computer programmers working somewhere in my organization who, I was surprised to discover, were devout Christians. (Surprised because this isn't particularly common among programmers) I didn't inquire as to the details of their religious beliefs, but it's possible that some of them might have been young-earth creationists. Should I have denied myself the benefits of their design and programming skills (and they were very good) because of their religious and metaphysical beliefs? Would it have been ethical to do so? Would it have been *legal* to do so?

I'd hire Thio Li-ann at my school in a heartbeat. I'd also have lots of fun satirizing some of her ideas in the school paper. It wouldn't be hard to whip up an argument that people who mistake the voices in their head for God are a lot like those awful gays: delusional, objectively disordered, and harmful to society. It would be especially fun to write, with the level of graphic detail that graces her infamous speech, about the nasty, disease-spreading acts that heterosexual women so often perform with their mouths and their anuses, and their mouths and men's penises, and their mouths and men's anuses....

Presumably Li-ann would agree with me that women have no right to engage in nonprocreative sex outside of marriage, which might not sit too well with a lot of the conservative guys on campus, but when those voices inside your head start talking, what are you gonna do?

Li-ann would be free to respond, of course. The students would have a ball following the debate, and everyone would learn a lot about the depth and tenacity of our divisions--what's not to like?

Viewpoint discrimination is for wimps.

I don't exactly get Johnson's point. Surely academic freedom IS a "limited right" and surely it applies differently in hiring vs. termination/ retaliation situations. Putting aside political views, it is clear that hiring departments have a right to evaluate whether a candidate's academic or pedagogical views are out of the mainstream in a given discipline. Although we would all probably agree that search committees should focus on quality rather than conformity, not liking someone's scholarship or approach to teaching is surely a legitimate reason not to hire them. Of course, conformity can be a bad thing for institutional life and the vitality of disciplines, so faculty who have "proven themselves" as teachers and scholars are granted tenure as a form of protection. This seems pretty basic to me.

The question, then, is whether political extramural remarks should be accorded *additional* protection in the hiring process (that is a protection that scholarship and teaching are *not* given). I'm agree with David that it's an abuse of authority to use political criteria to judge candidates for academic jobs (or jobs as welders), but I'm not sure that this is really a matter of academic freedom.

Were Thio Li-ann actually a candidate for a job where I work, I'm pretty sure I know what would happen when the search committee began discussing her application. Everyone would studiously avoid her extracurricular politics. Everyone would agree she's academically brilliant. The discussion would quickly settle on the severe underenrollment of the classes she was set to teach at NYU. The committee would wonder if she'd chronically suffer similar underenrollment here. In any ordinary case that might be a legitimate concern, but of course in this case, for at least some committee members, it would just be a proxy for their disapproval of her politics. Given that the underenrollment at NYU was caused by her politics, the committee would start to wonder whether its concern with it was legit. We'd kick the question to our HR director, who'd then tell us not to say another word until she got off the phone with the state attorney general's office. (We're as lawsuit-averse as anyone.) I'm not sure what advice we'd get from the AG. Be interesting to know.

"...it is clear that hiring departments have a right to evaluate whether a candidate's academic or pedagogical views are out of the mainstream in a given discipline."

What constitutes "the mainstream"? Whose mainstream? The viewpoint of the majority of academics in a particular field? Even if the majority of actual practitioners in a field lie someplace very different along the spectrum?

As an attorney, I'm thinking of John Yoo: the legal academy finds anyone who would give particular kinds of legal advice to political figures they dislike as "outside the mainstream." But the legal academy is far less influential in the actual practice of law than they think they are, and out here in the real world, lawyers are supposed to present their clients with what the law actually is, not what academia would normatively like it to be, what the potential legal consequences of different actions might be, and what the legal arguments could be in turn to respond to those consequences. To fail to present such candid and thorough research would itself be a violation of an attorney's professional ethical duty of competent representation, and to fail to make every good-faith argument one could were there consequences would violate an attorney's duty to be a zealous advocate for their client.

What so much of the legal academy says was "out of the mainstream" about John Yoo amounts to saying he should have either resigned from his job at DOJ, or behaved in an unethical manner that would itself have justified professional discipline by the bar.

Often, of course, what is considered "mainstream" in academia is very out-of-the-mainstream from the standpoint of the overall society. What precisely is the benefit to society in funding islands of conformity, within which the local belief patterns must be perpetuated without challenge?

Good grief. My point is simply that hiring departments constantly make the following kinds of judgments:
- Is Candidate X's research topic regarded as important within the discipline?
- Are Candidate X's research methods consistent with accepted practices in the discipline?
- Etc.
I'm not sure how replacing such criteria with the "mainstream" values of the "overall society" would benefit academic freedom.

Here's a blurb from Wikipedia about Lynn Margulis.

"Lynn Margulis attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, and received her Ph.D. in 1963 from UC Berkeley. In 1966, as a young faculty member at Boston University, she wrote a theoretical paper entitled The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells.[2] The paper however was "rejected by about fifteen scientific journals," Margulis recalled.[3] It was finally accepted by The Journal of Theoretical Biology and is considered today a landmark in modern endosymbiotic theory.... The paper was initially heavily rejected, as symbiosis theories had been dismissed by mainstream biology at the time. Weathering constant criticism of her ideas for decades, Margulis is famous for her tenacity in pushing her theory forward, despite the opposition she faced at the time."

Doesn't the advancement of science require that ideas outside the mainstream be considered?

I'm not saying that ideas outside of the mainstream shouldn't be considered. I'm just saying that it is legitimate for departments, when considering the interests of the institution, the discipline, and the students, to consider disciplinary norms. Again, I'm not sure that I see what the alternative is.

PeterS...not really what I'm saying. My point is, if conformity is to be inculcated, why should it be conformity to the values current in academia rather than conformity to the values current in the larger society? My preference would be that conformity not be inculcated at all.

As Laura points out, the advancement of science often happens when topics that were previously outside the mainstream of the field are addressed and/or topics are addressed using previously-unused methods.

David,

I agree that conformity should not be the goal and that advances often come from people thinking outside of the box. Indeed there could be an argument that hiring/promoting institutions should seek out candidates who are *out* of the disciplinary mainstream. My point is simply that disciplinary standards are always relevant to such decisions—whether one chooses to embrace them or repudiate them. Such standards define the landscape of scholarship and it is hard to imagine a hiring or promotion process that would be totally indifferent to them.

PeterS..."Such standards define the landscape of scholarship and it is hard to imagine a hiring or promotion process that would be totally indifferent to them."

Probably true. In business, outside-the-mainstream innovation generally happens in one of two ways:

--a small group of individuals invest their own money & time, attract risk capital, and start a new business
--someone within an existing company is persuasive and charismatic enough to get his own internal venture established, with obvious positive or negative consequences for his career depending on the success or failure of the venture

It's not clear what the academic equivalents of these paths might be, especially outside of the hard sciences...in the sciences, at least, sufficiently convincing hard evidence may convince those in the mainstream to alter their opinions..but in fields that are less objective, the mainstream will probably flow on however it likes.