UD‘s old acquaintance, (see this post) Joseph Epstein, Man of the Hour, has endured insults from all over the world in the aftermath of his … ill-considered column about Jill Biden. But knowing Epstein (whose real name is Myron, as I recall), UD figures this well-meaning piece by a couple of Northwestern University law professors has got to be the worst of the worst. The authors argue that while Epstein’s column stank six ways from Sunday, NU acted badly in response by scrubbing him from its website. It’s a free speech issue, after all.
They’re probably right. But in characterizing Epstein’s status at NU, they (inadvertently?) say things guaranteed to wound him.
Epstein, in UD‘s day as an NU undergrad, taught writing and literature at the university (I never took any of his courses) even though his highest degree was only a BA. I guess the idea was that Epstein was a well-known, well-connected author (books of popular interest, essays, fiction) who lived in Chicago (grew up there), had things to say about art, wanted to teach, and could benefit NU students both intellectually and practically. He was, if you like, our Saul Bellow (U Chicago got the real Bellow) – both men were writers and intellectuals who only had BAs (Bellow did a little grad work at the U of Wisconsin), but both were worth having on your faculty (Ravelstein describes classes Allan Bloom and Bellow taught together at the U of C) because they were noted figures. Somewhat noted, and mainly in conservative circles, in the case of Epstein. (FWIW: A mutual friend of Bellow and Epstein, Edward Shills, also had only a BA. By the time Bellow wrote Ravelstein, he and Shills were enemies, and Shills got one of Bellow’s patented fatal character sketches in that novel.)
Although in strict hierarchical terms Epstein was rather a nobody at NU, he thought of himself, from my observation of him, as superior to what he regarded as cookie cutter politically correct tenured English PhDs. They were timid, dry as dust scholars; he was a red-blooded freelancer who launched himself into the real world and came back and wrote about it and got reviewed in the New York Times, etc. etc. They produced the constipated prose of pretentious ideologues; he wrote clear, strong, true, and real words.
He couldn’t stand the department; he looked down on it. (The department, from what I recall, couldn’t stand him back.) All through those years, as he edited The American Scholar and sat on NEH review committees (Republican administrations were heady days for Epstein), he thought of himself, I’m pretty sure, as simply dropping in on NU a few days a week, when he wasn’t hobnobbing in Washington, to share his thoughts about literature with a small, carefully selected group of English majors. (The money can’t have been much, but for a freelancer I suppose it was a welcome little stipend.)
Despite his lofty sense of himself, however, in the clear light of university hierarchy he was merely an adjunct lecturer, subject to review and renewal every year. Far from bothering Epstein, I’m guessing he read this status as his preference, a way of avoiding faculty meetings and administrative chores, and a way of maintaining personal freedom.
But there’s no controlling the way other people describe his situation at NU. Here are the two law professors:
Epstein never held a professorial rank at Northwestern, but academic freedom equally protects lecturers, adjuncts, and other faculty members. A sad fact about modern higher education is the very large population of professional scholars without tenure, many of whom, like Epstein, teach for decades with lower pay and less job security. In a different economic environment, many of them would be tenure-track professors. Their precarious status is a reason for insisting even more strongly on that protection.
Of course they are quite right about the economic insecurity of adjuncts; but Epstein never thought of himself as a professional scholar seeking tenure, etc. The idea in fact repelled him. His ego rested on an entirely other self-perception, one that entailed a transcendence of the whole pathetic academic game. How horrible, in his latter days, to be made a poster boy for adjuncts!
December 17th, 2020 at 5:56PM
I’ve always understood academic freedom as an enumerated and limited privilege. That is, the academician has the freedom to investigate an area of study, whether that be the protocol of an experiment, the correction of an estimator for heteroskedasticity in the residuals, or the nature of symbolism in a poem. The academician is still under the obligation to teach the controversies in class, even where that means acknowledging his or her own work might be subject to dispute (let alone might be found wrong.)
That freedom does not grant any special privilege to sound off on anything. There’s a passage in Arthur Hailey’s Overload about somebody using her standing as a scientist to make an unscientific appeal. Outside the lab or workshop, it’s an abuse of power to use whatever credentials the scholar has (from the terminal degree all the way to a Nobel) as granting Special Expertise on anything of general interest. Thus any doctrine of academic freedom does not apply to Mr Epstein; he is as free as any of us to spout off, and we are as free as anyone to call out The Wall Street Journal for letting him spout off.
Note: I would treat the atomic scientists the same way, particularly if they tweak their clock on the basis of anything other than the size of nuclear arsenals. They, too, have the same freedom to spout off, but their academic freedom is limited to protocols for splitting atoms or colliding particles: everywhere else, they’re simply educated laymen.
December 17th, 2020 at 10:18PM
Stephen: Yes – if you want to sound off on something unrelated to your university teaching/research, then it will have to be free speech rather than academic freedom that protects you. The question remains whether a university to which Epstein has a formal link (lecturer emeritus) has a right to take any interest at all in his extra-university rants. I think the law profs are worried about the precedent NU altogether cancelling him sets in regard to current, vulnerable non-tenure track instructors who might do something of the sort Epstein did.
December 18th, 2020 at 8:24AM
I worry about those of us in the academy accepting too narrow a definition of academic freedom. For one thing, the academic freedom/free speech distinction does not apply to private institutions, which are under no obligation to honor the First Amendment rights of their faculty, as religious colleges demonstrate on a fairly regular basis.
Second, I am uncomfortable with university administrators and state legislators policing the boundaries of academic disciplines and academic expertise. The idea that the scientists who set the “Doomsday Clock” should be told, in effect, to shut up and split the atom is, in my view, clearly antithetical to the notion of academic freedom. Scholars should be allowed to participate in political debates surrounding (or even somewhat peripheral to) their area of expertise without fear of offending some provost or some majority leader of the state assembly.
The whole idea of academic freedom is to allow scholars to test, push, and expand boundaries. Scholarship–all scholarship–is political to some degree because researchers’ findings cannot be separated from their ethical, practical, and policy implications. A narrow reading of academic freedom, therefore, stifles creativity and limits the ability of subject-matter experts to participate in important national conversations.
Finally, I strongly disagree with the notion that scholars are obligated to “teach the controversies” in class, because there is no possible way that enforcement of such a standard will not be abused. No biologist, to use the obvious example, should be required to waste class time on so-called intelligent design theory. No historian should be expected to pay tribute to Lost Cause theories of the Civil War. Sure, any good professor will teach the legitimate academic controversies within her field, but this decision should be made as a matter of conscience and not mandate.
Epstein is an embarrassment and his WSJ column is the sexist braying of an elitist has-been, but if his treatment helps to open up a conversation about the academic freedom rights of adjunct and temporary faculty, then he will, ironically, have served the cause of people whose status is almost always the very opposite of elite.
December 18th, 2020 at 8:56AM
TAFKAU: I find this excerpt from Cary Nelson’s IHE piece on academic freedom useful:
4. Academic freedom gives both students and faculty the right to express their views — in speech, writing, and through electronic communication, both on and off campus — without fear of sanction, unless the manner of expression substantially impairs the rights of others or, in the case of faculty members, those views demonstrate that they are professionally ignorant, incompetent, or dishonest with regard to their discipline or fields of expertise.
Of course the problem with using Epstein as an example of anything much here is obvious – He is a generalist; he is no kind of scholar; he represents no field; he has no expertise; he does not write refereed anything. One of the abundant ironies of his absurd positions is that Epstein himself represents the “breakdown” of academic institutions, being one of those uncategorizable, uncertified (BA only) gadflies that only the modern degenerate university would hire.
How did he even get his gig at NU? I’m guessing Saul Bellow talked to some high-ranking buddies on campus. How, given the revulsion he generated at NU, did he keep his gig? Well, there were always efforts to get rid of him, but again I’m thinking his well-placed buddies kept him there — which, if true, is once again anathema to the high intellectual standards he’s always on about. I hope my posts about Kramer, Silber, Diamandopoulos, and the rest of his buddies make clear that Epstein represented a far more obvious and dangerous corruption of academic standards than any ed school degree holder.
But of course I agree that even absurdities like Epstein deserve to retain the rank and protections their university has given them. Had he written or said, like Trump’s attorney in regard to Chris Krebs, that Jill Biden should be “taken out at dawn and shot,” I think NU would have been within its rights to sever ties with him.
December 20th, 2020 at 2:04PM
That’s an instructive set of responses. I see two themes, one dealing with the university as interacting with the world, the other as internal to the scholarship and teaching.
First, a university trades on its reputation. Thus, having researchers participating in public affairs in any number of ways can enhance its reputation: it got so silly at my past employer that there were small pieces of merit points available for TV appearances, newspaper interviews, or op-ed. Mostly moot, as there wasn’t any merit money. On the other hand, that participation can come at the expense of its reputation, depending, for instance, on how you view Chicago’s econ or Brown’s semiotics or, for that matter, the Kennedy School or Hoover. It might be that Mr Epstein is spouting off in a public way that Northwestern poobahs think reflects poorly on the rest of their enterprise. Perhaps they’re still irritated by that engineering professor who had a private beef with the Shoah …
That’s all moot for the adjunct employees who don’t lose their rights as citizens simply because they’re on a uni’s payroll. (I think we’re all in accord on that score.) And yes, it’s often the regents or legislators that abuse their power. Wisconsin’s “sifting and winnowing” is a response by the regents there to a state legislature that wanted notorious socialist Richard T. Ely out of the political economy department. (Ely had some other writings that don’t pass current muster; it’s only the protection of uni employees against legislatures that I’m addressing here.) On the other hand, we have the special creation brouhaha thanks to school boards mandating that it be taught. The state giveth, the state taketh away. A school teacher has the right to question that mandate in a letter to the editor or any other forum, no?
Second, inside the university, when I wrote “teach the controversies” I accept the “legitimate academic controversies” stipulation. That’s not to say I didn’t have some questions to pose to anyone who brought up the labor theory of value, and I suspect any good professor of introductory biology would have similar sorts of questions to raise should a student introduce special creation, it being better to help students find their way than to hector and scold them. But it’s the stuff you’re not anticipating that will surprise you.