This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, October 16, 2004

NOW SEE, HERE AGAIN...


...UD wants to make the point (as she did in her post of 5/14/04, about the German professor Michael Wolffsohn) that academic freedom of speech represents the core value of the university, if the university is to survive as a place apart, devoted to the truth. So now in France you've got Bruno Gollnisch, a professor of Japanese language and culture at the University of Lyon and a far-right politician who doesn't like Jews, and he's made a lot of Holocaust-denial remarks.

...Like, you know, the Germans didn't really kill the Jews, or yes they did but only a few and not with gas and people who criticize people like Gollnisch are Jews blah blah. When UD was an undergraduate at Northwestern, there was a professor in the engineering department who said the same stuff -- actually, he said much worse stuff -- and NU handled it the way American academic institutions usually handle - should handle - these things. It didn't do anything. The professor was tenured, and he had free speech rights. Decades later, he seems to have failed to spark a fascist revolution. His speech certainly offended and hurt a lot of people, but it wasn't actionable.

Speech of this sort is quite actionable in Germany, and in France, and Gollnisch is in big trouble. The Justice Minister has started an inquiry against him, and he could lose his job and go to jail.

The president of his university wants Gollnisch out because of the "grave attack he has made on the honor and credibility of the university." [UD's translation.] But even with a high-profile nutcake politician on its faculty, Lyon isn't really harmed by Gollnisch. Embarrassed, certainly; but making a major national fuss about the man only elevates him, lends him a power he doesn't really have. Let him rave, UD says, and if students want to picket his classes or walk out of them, fine. But a university shouldn't run to the French Minister of Justice and order him to make the bad man go away.