WILLIAM AYERS AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM

• First, a word about Ayers.  From his Weather Underground days, he was a domestic terrorist.  Currently, he is an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Amazingly, an online petition signed by more than 3,000 educators argues:  “The attacks on and the character assassination of Ayers threaten the university as a place of open inquiry and debate, and threaten schools as places of compassion, imagination, curiosity and free thought.”  When a public university invites a domestic terrorist who has never expressed even the slightest regret for his violent actions and, who after 9/11, contended that he and his collaborators “did not do enough,” that is not academic freedom.  Further, as Naomi Schaefer Riley observes, Ayers favors “individual schools built around specific political themes,” which “push students to ‘confront issues of inequality, war, and violence.’  He believes teacher education programs should serve as ‘sites of resistance’ to an oppressive system.”  A public university is under no obligation to bring a man with those views to campus.  How does an address or lecture by a man like William Ayers enhance the exploration of knowledge and learning?  It does not!  Public universities are accountable to the public, which pays the salaries, supports the programs and underwrites the entire system.

• Second, the controversy surrounding William Ayers is a metaphor for the state of the modern university.  Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, suggests persuasively that “whether it is education studies, women’s studies or black studies, the entire premise of the discipline is a political agenda.”  For that reason, he contends, “[Ayers’s whole purpose] is not to make refined minds think more sharply, but to turn teachers into preparers of young radicals.”  In 1915, the American Association of University Professors argued that “Academic freedom can be asserted only by ‘those who carry on their work in the temper of the scientific inquirer’ and never by those who would use it for ‘uncritical intemperate partisanship.’”  But in this climate of ideology and political agendas on the campuses of our major universities, we will never see that understanding of academic freedom again.  The typical modern university is not a battleground between a religious worldview and a naturalist one.  It is a battleground between a modern vs. a postmodern one:  For decades, humanism was the dominant worldview in most colleges and universities.  It pervaded the discipline of science and informed the general approach to the humanities throughout western civilization.  It gives the impression of being objective, unbiased and modern.  Because modern scholarship has been so closely associated with humanism’s tenets, to disagree with it is to appear backward and naive.  The grip of humanism is powerful but it is filled with fatal flaws.  Today, however, in the typical college or university, Postmodernism is competing with humanism.  Where humanism has generally argued that truth is knowable and certain, obtainable through the scientific method, Postmodernism steps away from humanism’s claim and argues that truth in any absolute or certain sense is not attainable.  For that reason toleration of all beliefs, worldviews and systems is the reigning tenet of Postmodernism.  Because both seek human autonomy with no accountability, the relativism and the pluralism of Postmodernism mesh perfectly with the antisupernaturalism of humanism.  The difference between the two is how each views the possibility of attaining absolute truth.  William Ayers and the debate over academic freedom is not about the pursuit of truth; it is about the chief ethic of toleration, which has replaced truth in the modern university.

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