Academic freedom and the Socratic ideal

NICOS E. DEVLETOGLOU

Some two and a half millennia ago, the charge that 'there is a pestilential busybody called Socrates who fills people's heads with wrong ideas' (Plato, Defence, 23d), shocked the learned and led to the classic epilogue in Socrates' apologia. 'Now it is time we were going, I to die and you to live. But which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God'. Man's everlasting romance with intellectual freedom had well begun.

Ever since, of course, the state of mind of Socrates' accusers has remained convicted, by truth itself, of depravity and wickedness. Since that time, too, the human race as a whole has felt the need to understand Socratic teaching and draw from it all the joy and emotion, all the wonder and wisdom that it contains. Academic freedom, graced in its conception with that superb touch of Greek tragedy. remains to this date an essen- tial element of every open mind. No literate man is likely to forget how, chained to the floor of his cell, Socrates drank the hemlock with a consoling word for his executioner, covered himself with a blanket and solemnly allowed his body to perish in agony in his monumental defiance of ignorance and anarchy among men. Academic freedom is thus a state of mind. It is an orientation and a dedication charac- terised by rigour, discipline and integrity. As an embodiment of the Socratic ideal, academic freedom is logically based upon detached professional scholarship. This prin- ciple has characterised the independent operation of the academic process for genera- tions. Unfortunately, this is no more. A great era is on the verge of vanishing as suddenly as the folly of the present has triumphed. Led by 'intellectuals' of our time—best de- scribed as those among us who speak with general authority on matters about which they lack professional or scholarly com- petence—academic freedom has come to mean something else.

The rise of the modern 'intellectual' in contemporary academia, along with the pro- fessionalised incompetence he has brought with him, has contributed to the curious con- temporary suggestion that academic freedom means freedom for our colleges and univer- sities, as 'democracies', to determine their destinies unilaterally. The consequences of this phenomenon are twofold. First, the learning process tends toward a free-for-all where one man's opinion (whether ignorant or learned) is as good as that of another. As a result, the notion of an inherited body of knowledge and technique which is authorita- tively transmitted from one generation to another has been losing favour. The process is apparently 'undemocratic'. Second, in response to the outrage felt by the rest of the world to the collapse of the Socratic ideal inside the academe, the new 'principals' of our milieu are everywhere invoking the gods in defence of academic freedom against outside intervention. Hence, the widespread pretence that the law of the land is good enough for the rest of society—but not good enough for the recently 'intellectualised' academia and those (still relatively few) within it who have personally made the de- struction of academic freedom daily routine.

In what follows I hope to contrast the wisdom of the past with the folly of the present, and thus suggest where the promise of the future may lie.

If you expect to stop denunciation of your wrong way of life by putting people to death, there is something amiss with your reason- ing' (Ibid., 39e). Before the court so had Socrates warned the Athenians. 'The best and easiest way is not to stop the mouths of others', he concluded in his defence of academic freedom and the intellectual excel- lence which flows from it, 'but to make your- selves as good men as you can. This is my last message to you who voted for my con- demnation' (Ibid., 39e). But the Athenians were neither in a position nor in a mood to understand. Exhausted by their indecisive Peloponnesian War, confused by most of the existing forms and values of life, apprehen- sive over their prospects of physical survival in the face of the ever-rising might of their Spartan militarist foes, they lived empty lives in awe of routinised daily worries and the superficial splendour of that unreal world which Socrates had struggled to transform. Primarily concerned with the unedifying, they remained submerged in cosy ignorance and slavish respect for the lesser things in life. Civilisation was about to collapse then, too, under so heavy a weight of human mediocrity.

The analogy with our own troubled days needs no special emphasis or elucidation. It is both apparent and instructive, particularly to those of us today in an embattled and increasingly lawless academia. And yet, as any academic would agree, both in his entire life and in his moment of death, Socrates had never considered wavering in his com- mitment to the supremacy of law over all men comprising the state. His distressed friends had implored him to escape the night before his execution (considering him to be the 'anointed' among men and consequently above the law of the land). Heralding the great Christian paradigm five centuries later, however, Socrates calmly refused to look upon the law as being good enough for the rest of Athens, but not good enough for his eugenic kind.

Drawing its inspiration from such solid foundations, the philosophy of academic freedom in the West had gained momentum during the Renaissance period reaching its maturity in the Age of Reason. And for tens of centuries the principle of academic free- dom remained its same, splendid, ancient self —enmeshed with the idea of institutional autonomy which arose in the corporate seats ,of learning in Europe during the Middle Ages. Seldom confused with conspiratorial violence, physical terror and rampant anarchy, the resulting right to academic heresy was consistently cultivated over the centuries both on an individual and a collec- tive basis. Galileo's discoveries may have beets allowed a hearing in a hostile world because they were put forward as 'hypo- theses', not as 'truths'. It may even be true, as Hobbes thought, that the only reason why arithmetic developed was that no one saw a political advantage in any particular number system. But this is not what really. mattered. Fundamental was the truth that the Socratic ideal of the just pursuit of knowledge was preserved intact through the ages—at any rate in the minds of thinking people. Under its aegis, . man's desire for both individual and collective academic freedom ultimately became an integral property of Western civilisation. In fact, it so came to be that even the production and passing off to the East of a competent social scientist as a messiah (the phenomenon of Marxism), flowed from the intellectual freedom which Socrates helped to cultivate in the West.

In this way, the Socratic ideal reached right down the centuries all members of the academic community, assembled in colleges and universities, as effective freedom to per. form their function as teachers and students (hardly a meaningful distinction in the Hellenic tradition), in terms of study, opn. ion, discussion, expression, research, speech and writing. To Socrates the respective rola of student and professor were scarcely da. tinguishable. This followed from his drama. tisation of the extent of man's ignorance. He expressed great delight in his own perman. ent 'student' status, so much so that the term student of came to mean expert in matters of human knowledge and experience. 'It a only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of', Socrates cautioned the Athenians, as they were about to pass the death sentence on _him, and thus imbue the rest of the world with the passionate desire for perpetuating his ideal, 'but you think that you know something which you do not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate, it seems that I am wiser than you are to this small extent —that I do not think that I know what I do not know' (Ibid., 21c).

Academic freedom, embodying the free. dom to teach and the freedom to learn (the two complementary forces embedded in the Socratic ideal), can therefore be summed up as follows. Both individually and collectively, it is the right of duly qualified persons whether in their capacity as teachers or students, to discover and disseminate the truth as they see it in their respective fields of competence, guided solely by the pose( and authority of reason. The Socratic ideal thus directly inspired both the purity and the complete detachment which has characterised scholarship in our institutions of higher learning. This emphasis on autonomy (in the sense of total freedom from the distortive effects of any form of intellectual discipline imposed by ways other than those of purely rational analysis), led to the time-honoured recognition that academic freedom will flour- ish not so much because of formal protec- tion, but because it remains an inherent prd- perty of the mental attitude that informs the free process of teaching/learning and (e- search. This, in turn, generated the identih• cation of academic freedom with an acadennc process in which scholars, individually and as a whole, pursue the truth independently. free of disruptive biases of an imperfect world in action.

In this context, and until recently. the Socratic ideal played a decisive role in re. serving professional scholarship in the West. It prevented the academic milieu from evoli' ing, or rather transforming itself, into aP°1* iticised (i.e. de-academised) action-environ- ment. A traditional consensus developoi which held that academic freedom would It disastrously damaged by any diversion 4 its emphasis from the essential task of lean. ing, discovering and criticising. The San`'' ideal became so entrenched in our Wester heritage that academia could not so nnot as be conceived of as an agency of action change society. If it should become em- battled on behalf of any cause—however 'just' that cause—the presumption was that the academic process would run the grave risk of losing its relative autonomy. It would both jeopardise its independence and objec- tivity, and surrender its unique access to the coveted world of rational discourse and intel- lectual aloofness. Although at no time, there- fore. did the Socratic ideal imply an exclu- sion of academia from study, fieldwork or experimentation with the concrete problems of man in society, it did certainly contribute to the Western academician's persistent reti- cence in attempting to reform or revolution- ise society by involving academia as such in the social imbroglio. Men everywhere have always recognised that institutions devoted to the process of learning have no compara- tive advantage in the direction of applying social reform. Recognition of the profound differences which exist between the skills of the participant in the politico-socio-economic struggle necessary to achieve dramatic changes in society and the academic talent for detached and scholarly professionalism proved critical in preserving the academic nature of academia over the centuries.

To what extent is this true today? The answer is best sought in the contrast offered by the present state of our colleges and uni- versities. For more than one thousand years, it was unthinkable that the everyday opera- tion of our centres of learning should be directed by the exercise of physical force or armed might. This era, however, has dis- appeared. Even a fleeting glance at the news- papers of the world today will confirm that almost universal submission of intellectual power to physical force in academia. Though still practised by a minority, the ways of the unjust or the unlawful are today an acknowledged and accepted fact in our midst. The very essence of universitas !itera- tion has become anachronistic in the face of the new central notions rapidly emerging and making up the modern universitas ad ab- surdum. Mainly in the name of this new ethic of 'democratisation', violence, terror and anarchy are in the process of defining the central avenue leading to change.

What can this mean? The answer is simple. The Socratic ideal has been massively assaulted and the academe has been politic- ised as a result. One hundred years ago, President Noah Porter of Yale University was writing: 'Let any reflecting man think for a moment of the trickery of business, the jobbing of politicians, the slang of newspapers, the vul- garity of fashion, the sensationalism of Popular books, the shallowness and cant that dishonour pulpit and defile worship, and he may reasonably rejoice that there is one community which for a considerable period takes in its keeping many of the most sus- ceptible and promising of our youth, to im- part to them better tastes, higher aims, and, above all, to teach them to despise all sorts of intellectual and moral shams'. Today, when the Socratic ideal is dying a violent death in the hands of the new bar- barians and the Great Academic Depression of the 1970s is gathering momentum, can there be much doubt that many of our citadels of learning have already fallen? Again the answer is plain. The trickery of business, the jobbing of politicians, the slang of newspapers, the vulgarity of fashion, the sensationalism of popular books, the shallow- ness and cant that dishonour pulpit and defile worship--they are now ours to keep In modern academia, too. For there is

Berkeley and Cambridge, and there is Har- vard and the London School or the Sorbonne.

Ours too, are even the devastating ways of war. For there is Cornell. From one corner of the world to another, the Socratic ideal and its fundamental abhorrence of armed vio- lence and wanton lawlessness in society in general (and naturally in the realm of pure thought and intellectual excellence in par- ticular), have been superseded by a new version of academic freedom: personal free- dom to prostitute academic freedom. Free- dom to go to school, as it were, packing in our bags the state of mind of the warrior and the politically cunning instead of the splendid curiosity of the scholar. The irrele- vance of the saying 'No good student goes to work without his pen and pencil in hand' has never before been more evident. It would seem that just as the authority of scholarship and professionalism was sen- tenced to death by the Athenian majority who voted to annihilate Socrates over two and a half millennia ago—so it is again today. To be sure, history repeats itself.

There is, however, an important new departure. As already suggested, contempor- ary academia has begun to compete in partisan and biased ways with standard political groups in the rest of society. As a result, _an increasing number of its members inevitably feel discriminated against, as they happen to fall on this or that side of our universities' newly acquired propensity to endorse varying political issues. This tend- ency has been heavily accelerated by the major shift that has taken place in the dis- tribution of power. Those who are better endowed in the ways of political intrigue and manipulative technique have moved rapidly into position of effective leadership. For generations academic excellence per se commanded respect and power through the deference that the pure academician had enjoyed. But this is no longer true. Already, the process of higher learning has become so deeply politicised that its character is increas- ingly determined by those least conversant with the theory and practice of the Socratic ideal in its relation to academic freedom. A dual ability to appeal to the masses and to 'confront' with a view to changing society at large has emerged as the budding 'academ- ician's' critical minimum requirement both for survival and ultimate success. The chal- lenge is an inherently political one. It is, therefore, non-academic. Of this there can be no doubt. The academe has chosen for itself a total front in which to excel: not only does it physically fight the 'establish- ment', but also all the means this latter uses to maintain itself. The deviation from the Socratic ideal is consequently complete. Under the banner of this new vision of academic freedom, riots not reason, the gun not the pen, political not intellectual excel- lence are with us to stay. The change is beginning to show everywhere. Not even our 'pure studies' have been spared in the overhaul. They can now be either black or white in parts of America.

Carried to its natural conclusion, this new wave of 'freedom' in the academe has been sufficiently exploited to help popularise the most novel of 'liberal' ethics—that of indis- criminate tolerance. More and more rules and requirements are becoming ridiculed and thus practically (if not formally) abolished. This free-for-all mentality, by now enthu- siastically cultivated, further increases the attractiveness of the academic activist to the masses of the young—at the expense of the supposedly dull, unimaginative, over-dis- ciplined, academic academician of the Soc-

ratic variety. Perhaps the most convincing evidence of the success of those 'intellectuals' within (though also those without) academia, who first recognised and also helped to popu- larise this new ethic of 'tolerance', is the unwillingness we observe everywhere in the

academic community to respect the law of the land (and accordingly consider itself sub- ject to it). Adequately politicised. academia has predictably allowed the politically orien- ted to rule it, especially those who know they stand to reap advantages from the turmoil they are everywhere encouraging. Hence, the almost rhythmic monotony in which we ob- serve the continual feeding of violence and terror with more appeasement and conces- sion. Thanks, in addition, to the retiring nature which has always characterised the average academic (complemented by the nat- ural ineptitude of the sane in academia in the ways and means of this wildly intensified process of conniving, contriving and co- ercing), the submission of the Socratic ideal to raw politicised might has been allowed to spread from one university to another.

It is as if the law of the land, contrary to all received principles of justice, must now be fought or disregarded on the sophistic grounds (which Socrates long ago proved to be made of straw) that it first creates temp- tation and then punishes it. In sum, to adjust somewhat an earlier phrase, the anointed few in academia today feel they have discovered an 'established' right to belittle the law of the land as being good enough for the rest of society and those (wretches?) who com- prise it—but certainly not good enough for their own kind. So. at last, academia is today managing to look truly other-worldly. Driven to the defence of the fantastic (academic?) freedom to be ignorant, and having thus de- filed an ideal that underlay much of the splendour ,which has come to be known as the Western World, it is now beginning to understand academic freedom to afford per- sonal freedom to destroy academic freedom. Hence, too, the origin of the widespread myth that student or faculty anarchy, whenever and wherever it erupts, is not subject to the rule of law—the greatest of man's institu- tions, laboriously developed over hundreds of generations of intelligent human life.

Both historical experience, of course, and elementary 'punishment-reward' theory, sug- gest that any attempt to combat violence and terror with appeasement and concession is not one whit different from trying to lessen the excess demand for, say, apples by reducing their prices. As I have argued else- where, we should no longer have to go on exposing the world's well-known Hitlerite traumas to show that direction of policy or response is always vital in determining whether or not the whole interaction between forces which 'offend' and those who 're- spond' is self-correcting or destructively ex- plosive ('The Berkeley Syndrome,' En- counter, August 1969). So simple and valid a set of propositions, one would think, should be unequivocally accepted by any literate person. And yet, the consequent truth that man (as opposed to God and beasts) can live rationally and free only under an effective rule of law is apparently 'meaningless in modern academia. Why? This once, the answer is not easy. But it has one virtue. It can be summed up in one word. Insanity. Perhaps the only comforting thought is that it may be that something of a freak in history (comparable, say, with the dancing mania of 1374) has suddenly mushroomed. Never before has emancipation from the folly of the present rested more heavily on the need to re-discover the wisdom of the past.