Introduction

March 6, 2012
Updated  Feb. 15, 2013

See article on "battle for the Mike" that illustrates the thrust of this website.

This website can be considered to have begun on that day I saw a flyer at the University of California San Diego library describing a conference on  "Political Civility and Scientific Objectivity"   We don't really care about civility in the sense of being polite, but in the political context, its absence, something I describe as "virulent partisanship"  from the medical definition "extremely infectious, malignant, or poisonous  often leading to the death of the organism," in this case of our very society.

Universities are charged not with amassing knowledge for its own sake, but to provide the setting, the values and the skills to address society's most challenging problems.  Unlike the intentionally adversarial political system,  the academic process defies simple explanation, differing among disciplines and across eras. Military colleges teach the skills of vanquishing a foe and schools of theology teach the perpetuation of the sects beliefs, but these are the exceptions, and useful as a contrast to the liberal arts university.

A few weeks after I started this website, I was visiting the UCSD campus and saw this headline on the college paper about this report, "STUDY: UC EDUCATION IS TOO LEFTIST"  I laughed, thinking that someone had been reading this website.  I knew it was from a right wing think tank, and didn't want to even read it, as they were from the other team.  I read the full report, and wrote this commentary on its insights and exaggerations.

This study, as important as it is, misses the origin of the leftist bias, which is conflict between the early church based colleges in this country and the secular public university.  It is illustrated by a book that could be the first shot in the culture wars that continues in a different form to this very day, "God and Man at Yale" written in 1949 by the founder of the current conservative movement, William F. Buckley.

I am not associated with this university or any other, except in the sense that I help fund it as a taxpayer, but there is something much more important; as a citizen I'm ultimately a beneficiary of what universities achieve. This conference was open to the public, and I accept this invitation not as an individual but as someone who is not part of the set of relationships and exigencies that define every institution.  As such I feel an obligation to evaluate these proceeding as one so unencumbered, to make these observations available to the participants and any other interested parties.  My obligation is also to those students who did not critically respond to the presentations, except one who thanked me for presenting a different view.

It could be that the sponsoring departmental consortium of Science Studies was not inclusive enough to address this larger issue, excluding disciplines such as political science, psychology, anthropology and law.  I have been reaching out to those of these disciplines who are addressing this issue, and will be included in this website.     If the departments included were too limited this also should be noted.  At this point I am attempting to gather the text of some of the key presentations, so my observations will be from notes and some recording taken at the conference, subject to revision upon reading the material presented. .

This was the email about the conference that I sent out:
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This is being sent to a diverse group of friends and associates, who all share some interest in exploring political life.

The event starts Thursday evening, all day Friday the 2nd, and Saturday morning. Here's the title and link for more information and registration, which is free and open to the public.

Political Civility and Scientific Objectivity:

This promises to be interesting, even if they fail in advancing their goal of increasing scientific objectivity. How the speakers address this issue, whether it is tainted by the purported liberal bias that Senator Santorum claims is the goal of liberal arts college education, will be interesting in itself.  Will there be a tacit assumption that scientific distortion is the sole province of conservatives, or will there be meaningful examples of such bias from the left in spite of the liberal orientation of state liberal arts institutions.

This is a multidisciplinary presentation, something that augurs well for reaching the ideal of Edmund O. Wilson's concept of "Concilience," transcending the limits of academic disciplines to achieve a higher level of understanding. All of us who decry the decline of political discourse should consider attending this presentation, and getting more familiar with this stellar institution right in our back yard.
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This website is a work in progress as I connect with the academic participants and others who are interested.  The comment section is open.  Due to limits on this blogspot formant, on the right side clicking on each month opens a list of different articles not necessarily in chronological order.

Essays on individual subjects related to this are found on the right column.

Howard Zinn's Mistake

Here's the link of a dialogue, actually an argument between two of the pre-eminant historians of the Viet Nam era, Howard Zinn and John King Fairbank.  The event was a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) December 28, 1969 during the peak of the anti Viet Nam war movement, when Fairbanks wrested the microphone from Howard Zinn who would not discontinue his argument for a resolution against the war.

Zinn was a different kind of an academic historian, of working class roots, having served in the Second World War in a particular position that illustrated the monstrous actions that could be taken by the good guys, his own country, something he spent his entire career exploring.  John K  Fairbank,  Zinn's adversary and the President of the academic group is a name I just came across reading his book, "The Great Chinese Revolution." that shows his amazing ability to turn the broad convoluted scope of this empire's long history into an intriguing conversation.  His vibrant humorous personality must have inspired generations of students and opened many doors to exploring his area of study.

I admire Fairbank even more as he expressed then, in what has become known as the "battle of the mike" what I feel is paramount in this day, that however important one's political position, protection of the idea of academic freedom by divorcing it from active political action is paramount.  We reach this conclusion for different reasons as I will describe at the end of this essay

Here's is Fairbank's central argument:

This distinction lies at the heart of the pluralism that gives the AHA its legal freedom from interference, intimidation, or coercion by the government or other political forces. “Politicization” is no joke. It can cut both ways. If we today could use AHA to support a worthy nonprofessional cause, others tomorrow could manipulate it for an evil cause. In other words, academic freedom has a distinct institutional basis that we should not act to destroy. 

Zinn, who was an early activist against racial segregation among other causes conveyed his position in a longer paper (linked above).  It is really an argument for academic activism, dismissing the power of the state to squelch such if it varies from the dominant political values.  In some ways he has won, as todays academics do express values, but in ways so subtle that conflicts such as this do not take place.   From Zinn's response:

What can democracy possibly mean if not that people assembled whenever and wherever they can, for whatever reason, may express their preferences on the important issues of the day? If they may not, democracy is a fraud, because it means that the political leaders have effectively isolated the citizenry by taking up their time in various jobs, while the leaders make the policies, and the citizens, in 99 per cent of their life, remain silent, reserving moments of expression to biennial gestures in the voting booth, comments to friends over lunch, and mutterings to oneself from time to time. 

As a historian he brings in the most recent and emotional example of a passive professoriate:

It’s no wonder that the war goes on, because all those concerned for the sanctity of their “profession” have surrendered their rights as citizens to speak out wherever they are, whatever they are doing, on matters of life and death. If you were at a meeting of historians in Germany in 1936 would you take the same position in the midst of the killing of Jews? If you were at a meeting of historians in Mississippi in the midst of the lynching of blacks, would you also insist you could not speak “as historians”? If you want to invoke prudence and profit, that is one thing. But there is no moral principle in a position that allocates a small portion of our spare time for moral indignation and the largest part of our lives for immoral silence.

Next is a part of his response where I take issue with him.  He makes his point about the reluctance of various professions to challenge political authority:

If all Americans, in all the thousands of assemblies that take place through the year, insist on keeping out of politics because neither war nor racial persecution nor poisonous vapors coming in through the library window, affect them as historians, chiropodists, clerks, or carpenters—then “pluralist” democracy is a facade for oligarchical rule.

Without refuting his argument, he misses the more central value at stake, even transcending Fairbank's concern over political reaction to activism or the continuation of a tragic and immoral war. Among the occupations of the organizations that Zinn describes above, only those constituted of tenured professors have the protected province of articulating positions irrespective of public receptivity.  Historians especially are charged with not only the privilege, but the obligation to transcend the momentary zeitgeist.

 It is for this very reason that both Zinn and Fairbank missed the essential element, that an aggregation of professors who vote as a majority for a given position is actually a diminution of their individual influence.  It is a professor's mandate to express his or her convictions-- whether garnering fame or infamy-- irrespective of what others may think, not only in their classroom but to the public.  This is a unique privilege that is so fragile, so little understood by society, that it must be protected even at the cost of avoiding a unified stand against egregious social harm.

Academic Freedom is an odd concept, as it does not exist in law but rather in traditions that coincide with the growth of enlightenment mentality.  It means that to be a history professor one must be both a Howard Zinn and a John K. Fairbank. And for this to happen there must be no consensus, no official joint resolutions that define what is orthodox in a particular intellectual community.

It is odd that one such as myself who is outside of the academic world can have a fuller appreciation of the institutional protection of academic freedom than many possessing this privilege.
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American Historical Associatoin,  February 20, 2010  Forty Years On: Looking Back at the 1969 Annual Meeting