The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
Foreword: This essay was written late Sunday afternoon on 5/5/24. I never write anything on a Sunday afternoon or evening. Usually I take a Sunday afternoon nap, and read the Sunday paper, except that now the Sunday paper comes on Saturday but calls itself the Sunday paper (which it isn’t, and that irks me.) Anyway, today I took all afternoon to finish the May 6 New Yorker, which included, among its many other worthy stories an outstanding article by Louis Menand. For 23 years he has been a staff writer for the magazine on political and social issues. He also is a scholar-in-residence at the NYU School of Law. I was so inspired by what he wrote that I immediately resolved to respond to it.
His article was entitled TOWER IN FLAMES, with the subtitle What kind of right is academic freedom? If you subscribe to The New Yorker, please read Menand’s piece ASAP. If you don’t, you can go to the library or borrow a neighbor’s copy or find it on-line if The New Yorker will allow you to read it, which it probably won’t. Mr. Menand’s legal masterpiece explains what is the crux of the collegiate demonstrations. These are ancillary thoughts that his stimulating essay prompted in me.
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The demonstrations on dozens of American college campuses in the spring of 2024 technically are not issues of free speech. Instead they are provoked by conflicts over academic freedom. It is an important distinction that may be little understood by nearly everyone except those affiliated with higher education, and only by a minority of them, especially the students.
The Constitution guarantees everyone free speech under certain conditions, but academic freedom is quite a different matter. It is the concept that anyone can take any position without fear of being attacked by other academics who also value their academic freedom o debate one another.
Universities and colleges are similar to many other institutions, but they are unique in one respect: their administrations, faculties, and students cherish and promote the notion of academic freedom. Hardly anyone else gives a passing thought to academic freedom, unless there are attempts to curtail it by government officials, judges, anybody associated with colleges, or religious fanatics.
According to Louis Menand (and if he said it, I have no doubt it is true), the concept of academic freedom began in Germany, but only as late as the nineteenth century. It migrated to the USA via German academic influences.
Most universities or colleges anywhere in the world were founded by religious or quasi-religious institutions, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Daoist. The religious connection with public higher education lasted into the early nineteenth century in most places in the world.
From the Renaissance on, however, and especially with the rise of scientific thinking, the original impetus of religion with all forms of education began to diminish in many localities in both the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. As a movement, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment caused many of the most outstanding centers of higher learning to abandon their primary emphasis on religion and to utilize new discoveries from science and other secular disciplines as the leading features of their curricula.
In the United States, most colleges east of the Appalachians were founded by Christian denominations, as were others west of the Appalachians. The Ivy League schools are the best example of that trend. But as the eighteenth century rolled on, more and more public universities were established on secular principles.
Because religion had perhaps been a pre-eminent factor in human society up until the past century or so, numerous private universities and colleges retained faculties of divinity or divinity schools, despite the secular shift in emphasis came. Secularity has grown ever since. Many private religious colleges still exist, particularly in the United States, and there is no reason for anyone to oppose them. But official public ties to religion in public universities have disappeared.
The effect of the Enlightenment on higher education, and even on elementary and secondary education, cannot be overemphasized. Children and teenagers in public schools all over the world no longer are solely or even tangentially instructed in religious teachings, and most of us are very grateful for that. Only in the most conservative of private yeshivas or madrassas or other such schools is religion any longer the single discipline in the curriculum.
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In the Americas, a preponderance of religious schools in both lower and higher education continued much longer than in Europe. That occurred because nation-states evolved much later in the Americas than in Europe, Asia, or Africa. All the states of the Americas became heavily populated only from the late eighteenth century forward. Furthermore, many of the colonies that emerged in the Western Hemisphere were founded by particular kinds of Christians: Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Calvinists, Quakers, and the like. In the Old World such groups became less ideologically driven than in the New World, if only because New World universities were much newer.
The result is that American religious universities and colleges maintained their strong “denominational” leanings far longer than on other continents. The Americas became heavily populated only from the eighteenth century forward. Most institutions of higher learning in the Eastern Hemisphere gave up strong religious connections between the time of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and conceived of themselves as being secular centers of higher education more than propagators of a particular religion or religious persuasion.
October 7 and the subsequent War in Gaza is the focus for the student demonstrations currently being addressed at universities in North America, Europe, Israel, and other parts of the Middle East. Unlike the previous wars in Viet Nam, Israel, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the warfare occurring in Gaza causes both secular and religious students to rise up in confrontations with those on “the other side.”
Further to complicate matters, each “side” has two sides, one secular and one religious. There are secular American Jewish and other secular Palestinian and American students who favor or oppose the Israeli/Hamas conflict on purely secular grounds. There also are religious Jewish, Christian, and Muslim students who favor or decry the war for religious reasons. Is it any wonder that too many of the students seem to be talking past one another rather than listening to one another? Academic freedom thrives on calm, reasoned secular discussion. It evaporates in heated religious discussion. The spring semester cannot end soon enough at all of these schools! Send the students home and let them cool off, for heaven’s sake!
No one can doubt that there are ethical justifications for what everyone is trying to say in these demonstrations. But that is not really what distresses the administrations of the conflicted universities and colleges. An abuse of academic freedom is the issue that is really causing the ruckus.
Liberal education is the ideal intention for all higher education. Unfortunately, that is not the case in far too many of these placard-waving disputes. If students are going to demonstrate their passions for certain controversial subjects. On behalf of liberal education and academic freedom, they should do it only with peaceful words peaceably spoken. Using bullhorns, shouting matches, tent encampments, or physical violence does not represent academic freedom. Too many of the student demonstrators are as visibly misguided as Hamas on October 7, 2023, or the Netanyahu war cabinet ever since.
Disagreeing agreeably ought to be the intention of every educated person who disagrees with anybody about anything. College students are young, but they are old enough to realize that some of their demonstrations over the Israeli-Hamas War have gone beyond the bounds of civil disagreement.
Having been closely associated with religion for all of his 85 years, this writer long ago concluded that secular people are often more civil and more reasonable when disputes arise over anything, but especially over issues which may have religious undertones or overtones. Religious people sometimes become too “religious” in their thinking, when secularity should equally influence their thought processes.
In addition, “conservative religionists” of any religion can become the most offensive – and offended – of disputants in social/political/religious brouhahas. Religion has been one of the most important factors in the advancement of human civilization, but it also can veer beyond acceptable boundaries, engulfing both religionists and secularists with it.
Summer is coming. May cooler heads and warmer hearts accompany the hotter weather. And may academic freedom return to the campuses.
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.