Meritocracy, Citizenship and Education: New Labours Legacy Book

Downs's book treats free speech controversies on campus (up to its publication in 2005) in a way that balances theory and practice. The first section of the book addresses what he calls "The Return of the Proprietary University" and "The Rise of Ideologies against Free Speech and Liberty" - in this way breaking down the threat to free speech on campus into a problem with institutions and a problem with ideas.

Downs seems to describe the "proprietary university" in terms of two different contrasts. First is the contrast between the modern research university (as defined by the American Association of University Professors' 1915 Declaration of Principles) and "the older institutions [that] existed to preserve the values - often religious in nature - of their founders and trustees. Such 'proprietary institutions' were devoted 'not to advance knowledge by the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators, but rather to subsidize the promotion of opinions held by the persons, usually not of the scholar's calling, who provide the funds for their maintenance.' The older proprietary university was concerned with preserving a certain vision of the world, not with critical inquiry." This contrast assumes that the research university - and not the traditional liberal arts college - is the natural home for the search for truth (a word that Downs, encouragingly, uses early and often in this book). Such a conclusion, however, is belied by the fact that Downs has chosen case studies of campus repression of free speech and individual liberty from four major research universities. (One can also note that the major free speech and individual rights controversies today are at major research institutions like Yale, University of Missouri, Columbia, Duke, etc.)

It could be that Downs is correct, and that the objection raised above simply points toward a sampling bias in which controversies at larger institutions are more widely publicized and documented, and therefore more instructive as case studies. It could also be that such institutions are more likely to generate highly publicized inquisitions of faculty and students as a result of the enormous endowment wealth that permits them to hire efficient bureaucrats who see the holding of inquisitions as their purpose, and who seek to maximize their outputs. In any event, this reviewer agrees with Downs to the extent that there is a distinction between those who view the college or university as the home for the search for truth, and those who reject the notion of truth that exists outside the subjective self.

The second distinction to which Downs points is that between the university as an institution outside of or above politics, and the university as an institution which must necessarily be embedded within political life. He points out how University of California president Robert Sproul banned political activity on campus during the 1930s in order "however naively, to protect [free speech and inquiry] in the university context from outside forces." Though Downs is sympathetic with the notion of the university as a kind of "safe space" for free inquiry, he recognizes the necessity for truth to be tested in conflict, and for friends of the inquiry for truth to defend the principles of free speech and inquiry.

The latter chapter situates a few brief case studies of campus repression and persecution of ostensible speech crimes within a broader context of new trends in political theory going back to the New Left of the 1960s. Replacing "canonical" figures like John Locke were political, social, or legal theorists like Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, Herbert Marcuse, Catherine MacKinnon, who argued in terms of oppression and liberation, and who turned the scholarly activities of research and teaching away from Enlightenment modes of argumentation and toward categories of oppressor and oppressed. The Enlightenment notion of a gradual acquisition of knowledge and a progressive approach toward justice was, to these theorists, an imposition of Western modes of thought on oppressed groups. Such views became fashionable in academic departments in the 1970s and 1980s, and began to be imposed on universities through student complaints and university policies.

The main substance of the book is four case studies - one regarding a sexual misconduct policy at Columbia (in 2000), resolved ambiguously; one regarding an anti-free speech movement at Berkeley in the late 1990s, resolved somewhat negatively; one regarding a speech code under which a student was prosecuted for the infamous "water buffalo" remark, resolved favorably; one regarding a free speech controversy at (Downs's home institution) the University of Wisconsin, resolved favorably. Downs's important conclusion regarding the favorable resolutions is that they both required committed and principled leaders, and they both needed to be institutionalized (the former largely through the leadership of Alan Kors and the creation of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the latter largely the result of Downs himself and the creation of the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights). In this conclusion, Downs reminds us that ideas and politics matter. This is a worthy contribution.