Academic freedom and blogs

Earlier this month, Indiana University professor Eric Rasmusen got into some hot water with with his blog. He wrote a post asserting that homosexuals should not be put in positions of moral leadership over children because, “I think they are attracted to people under age 18 more than heterosexual males are…” Needless to say, this prompted some hostile reactions, which trickled up to Rasmusen’s dean in the business school. There was then a discussion between Rasmusen and his dean about whether the blog should be moved off IU’s server. Rasmusen volunteered to move it himself, and did so until his dean informed him that the blog did not violate policy, at which point Rasmusen moved back. During this brouhaha, there was some debate in the blogosphere about the relative merits of online academic freedom. But with the dean’s decision, things were dying down. Today, however, IU Chancellor Sharon Brehm upped the ante by arguing that the university needs to revisit it’s policy of supporting blogs. Press reports are here and here. Rasmusen reprints the entirety of Brehm’s comments (and his response) on his blog. Here’s an excerpt of the chancellor’s comments:

The postings on this website have created the difficult challenge of affirming the right to speak, even when we deplore the speech itself. As hard as this is, it is the only way to maintain our liberty. It’s easy to defend freedom of speech when we agree with or don’t care about the speech itself. Only when the speech offends us, do we realize the strength and courage of those who wrote the first amendment and all those after them who have affirmed and upheld it. In exercising my freedom to speak against Professor Rasmusen’s statements, I also provide the opportunity for others to agree or disagree with my views. There is, however, another more general issue that President Daleke [President of the Bloomington Faculty Council] and I have discussed at some length. We agree that it would be useful to ask the UFC [University Faculty Council] to review the current policies, practices, guidelines, costs, and benefits of “Mypage,” the UITS service for personal Web pages. It seems to us that, as a community of scholars and students, it is crucial to think through the role of these personal web pages in our communal and intellectual life. I’d like to close with a quote that I found while working on this statement for this meeting: “But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.

My thoughts on this are pretty simple: If Brehm really read what she said — and what Mill said — then there is no need for a review. The “role of these personal web pages in our communal and intellectual life” is to promote the free and full expression of ideas by professors and students alike. As Mill himself would point out, the cure for promulgated ideas that are believed to be offensive or wrong is more speech, not less. Brehm exercised that right and encouraged others to do the same — in, among other formats, on blogs. What need there is for a review beyond that is truly beyond me. [Wait, wait, you forgot the ritual denunciation of Rasmusen’s views on homosexuality.–ed. That’s completely irrelevant to this question. As an aside, however, it’s worth highlighting a fact that Louis Menand pointed out in The Metaphysical Club. One of the triggering events for the emergence of academic freedom was when a Stanford University professor was fired for making a speech that contradicted co-founder Jane Stanford’s views on the matter. The professor made a eugenicist argument against Asian immigration.]