Criticism and Free Expression in the University

“The End of the University and the Future of Criticism”: Part II

What follows is a selection from the audience Q&A of the panel “Can Criticism Survive Inside the University?”—the first panel of our conference “The End of the University and the Future of Criticism,” which took place April 3rd. You can read the opening statements of this panel here.

The following exchange occurred in response to a question about the challenges faced by professors who care about open inquiry and criticism given recent political attacks on free expression. When ICE agents are detaining students for protesting on campus and writing op-eds about the genocide in Gaza, how does that recontextualize the work and obligations of academics as teachers, administrators and members of the university community?

Michael Clune: Academic freedom as related to free speech is a core value, constitutionally as well as for the university. So I have a couple thoughts on this: one is we should really be—as people are—protesting when people are being deported or penalized for the expression of their views. And I would guess, given my familiarity with other academic audiences, that that’s not a controversial thing to say in this room.

There was a great article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Geoff Shullenberger, that pointed out that free speech has no natural constituency. A few years ago, the left was not a fan of free speech. Now the right is not a fan of free speech. It’s not really something that is popular or has historically been popular at any time. It always requires defense. And so, in order to make our defense of students and faculty members’ expression of their views more compelling than it currently is, there’s also a question is about how we make the case that we are really committed to academic freedom and free speech in the face of public perceptions to the contrary.

The most written-about poll in academia over the past, I think, fifty years was the famous Gallup poll from last July that showed the absolute collapse of confidence in higher ed. The number one reason for this was the perception that higher ed has been politicized, that higher ed has essentially become a sort of R&D wing of the Democratic Party. That perception is ubiquitous. It’s the number one thing people say in these much-discussed surveys about why people are hostile to higher education. It’s not higher tuition. The New York Times recently wrote about this: that higher education has lost its moral authority, which I think is true. So, one, we totally need to defend anyone who is being penalized for the expression of any views whatsoever in the university—students or just members of the public. And secondly, I think we need to do a better job of really returning to core academic values and to really communicate and practice a move away from the identification with partisan politics, which, to be honest, gives a huge political incentive for politicians to attack us. As I wrote in the Chronicle last year, if Trump attacks Harvard’s endowment down to zero, most Americans would stand up and cheer. That’s a huge vulnerability, and I think we need to change that.

Jesse McCarthy: I just want to jump in on that, though, to say that there’s a question about the “we” there. Because we don’t all have equal power in this equation. We don’t all have, as far as I’m concerned, therefore, equal responsibility at our universities. I did preemptively raise this because I think it is a legitimate issue, as you’re saying, that there have been critiques and perceptions of our profession of the academy more broadly that have to do with its often unfortunate entrenchments in what we call the culture wars.

On the other hand, allowing that to serve as the predicate for inviting the state to violate your academic freedom and the academic freedom of your faculty and of your students is the end of the university. It is a violation of its most basic and fundamental integrity. And it means that in some sense the university no longer exists because either it is that or it’s this other thing that Merve was describing, this kind of conglomerate of private enterprises. And that has to come from the top. It really does. There are many faculty who have stood up and said this is unacceptable, on all kinds of campuses. There are many students who have done an extraordinary job to stand up and say this on principle. We’re talking about the principle of whether or not you can violate people’s basic constitutional freedoms, which I will remind us all, although I know I don't need to do it here, are, per the very understanding of the Constitution, in particular from our conservative colleagues and friends who are not much heard from these days on this issue, given to us by our creator and not by government and therefore cannot be taken away by government. Go read what Madison has to say about the protections that the Constitution confers on noncitizens, specifically—Madison! When you’re not standing up for that, as, for instance, the leadership of my university are not yet publicly doing, that’s a very grave issue, I would say even fatal to the integrity of what a university in a free country is.¹ The good news is that we know it can be done. President Christopher Eisgruber of Princeton, to his credit, has publicly stood up to the administration on the question of interference, as has the president of Wesleyan, Michael Roth. But let’s be clear: If you’re not going to draw the line anywhere, then you don’t actually have an institution worth defending.

One thing I will say is that the thing that we do, this thing we call literary criticism, has always been embattled and always will be embattled in a society that is fundamentally wedded to values that are opposed to it. And that’s always been true. It always will be true. We get along in some sense with society; we find ways to work within institutions. But this is a society that is deeply, deeply antagonistic to the arts—always has been. We don’t treat our artists well in this country; we don’t treat our writers well in this country. We’re interested in business; we’re interested in the practical. We can go back to Emerson—I mean, this is well known, I don't need to rehearse this. But my point is that it’s natural and normal for us to be in a kind of oppositional stance. We always have been. We always will be. But it’s astonishing that the universities can’t seem to understand that the thing that we’re trying to protect and defend is what they are. And if they lose that, if they lose the soul of what they are, they deserve their fate—they deserve to perish. And we will continue—you know, the arts never end, literary criticism never ends, political opposition to power never ends. But institutions can be hollowed out and become corroded to the point where they’re no longer recognizable. And people will defect from them and should defect from them because they’re not worthy of the support that they are claiming, if they are reduced to a kind of Potemkin-village façade.

Sophie Pinkham: I think the idea that the university should respond to this by proving they really do care about free speech is to fall into a trap, because this is obviously not about free speech. It’s hard to imagine a more aggressive and violent attack on free speech than what we’re seeing right now with these abductions. And I think that the answer lies, in large part, in solidarity within the university, and trying to find a way to get solidarity from the university administrations that so far have been often at odds with faculty, and especially with humanities faculty.

As someone who has spent most of my career thinking about Russia and the Soviet Union, attacks on universities by authoritarian or would-be authoritarian leaders and attacks on vulnerable students who speak out, attacks on dissenters—these are not confined to the American context of free speech or the culture wars, this is just typical. This is what they all do. They all come to universities. The universities are always historically to some extent spaces of dissent, spaces of skepticism. It’s just logical to come for them. And I would say that the answer is to try first of all to take advantage of the fact that a lot of these universities are extremely wealthy. They have the economic resources to stand up for themselves. And the path forward clearly is to try to rally these resources in defense of the university.

Michael Clune: I think you misunderstood what I was saying. My argument is not that we should try to convince the government that we care about free speech, but that it’s an interesting and important and urgent question to think about what incentives drive university administrators to completely cave to these demands from politicians and the public. And this is something that I think every part of the university has to think about. Right now it’s pitting the scientists against the humanities. The scientists are saying the humanities have become these ultra-politicized spaces. You saw that in Columbia: We’re not them. We’re not like the humanities. The administrators are going along with that. Public opinion in America—and this is very different than the Soviet context—is an almost irresistible force. And you're quite right, Jesse, that there’s been opposition previously. But the fact is the data has shown clearly that until about ten years ago, universities enjoyed fairly robust public support. This is not an ancient problem; this is a problem of the last ten years. And that’s a serious problem because it does incentivize exactly the assaults on the university that we’re seeing. And I anticipate that Princeton’s going to cave too, if you’ve seen the latest news, although I also appreciated what the president of Princeton said. It’s why they’re all caving, why very few people in the Democratic Party are making this an issue they want to stand behind. We’ve lost the public’s support because we’ve become identified with a certain brand of partisan politics. And that’s a reality that we need to think about as we think about how to more effectively make the case for basic principles like free speech.

Merve Emre: There are two different issues here, actually. One is, I think, an issue that affects all professions, which is that all professions are externally oriented, including ours. Every profession needs an ideology in order to convince the public of the profession’s necessity. I take the applause in response to Jesse’s comments to indicate that he has articulated a really compelling ideology, a moral ideology, for what it is that we do. Michael, I take your response to be that that ideology actually isn’t appealing to the majority of people who aren’t in this room. One thing that we might want to think about as a professoriate, whether it's the professoriate of the humanities or the university more broadly, is: How do we present ourselves and what we do as a public good to people who aren’t buying what we've been selling for the past twenty, thirty, forty years?

But the second issue is about the structure of the university, or of different universities, and I think it's a slightly different issue from the first. I’m lucky enough to be at a university where the president has been speaking out very actively, very vocally, against the authoritarian actions of the Trump administration. But what my friends at Columbia are always telling me is that the total amount of money that Wesleyan gets in government grants is equal to the amount of money that one lab at Columbia gets in government grants. Wesleyan doesn’t mean anything to MAGA; there’s no point going after it. There are certain places where the leadership can afford to speak out because government interference doesn’t pose the same kind of existential threat. Ironically, these are the same places that historically have privileged the humanities, so perhaps there’s a lesson in that. More of those leaders need to band together to support one another collectively against the administration’s encroachments. But again, that is a different issue from the question of how we present what we do as a public good so that even people who don’t understand what we are reading, or don’t have access to the scholarship that we are publishing, believe that what we do is important.

Now, for me, the most appealing argument for what we do as a public good is that we transmit and preserve works that have no other means of transmission or circulation in mass culture. The reason I think it’s a failure of our moral obligation as teachers and as professors to teach a class on Taylor Swift—to get back to something Jesse said [link back to first part]—is because Taylor Swift has many other mechanisms of transmission in mass culture. Milton does not. Chaucer does not. You need a highly specialized set of skills and a deep knowledge base in order to teach people how to receive those works such that they gain both pleasure and knowledge from them. I believe this could be the public good that humanists could articulate and embrace as our anchoring ideology: we are the guardians—I was about to say crypt keepers but that’s not right. Keepers of the crypt, raiders of the lost ark, whatever. [Laughter]

Jesse McCarthy: I feel obliged to say this to defend my colleague: in the Taylor Swift course, although that’s what it’s called, students spend most of their time reading works of lyric poetry by Wordsworth, and Coleridge and essays by Du Bois. But it’s important to say because it does get caricatured in the media. We get a lot of media attention from the New Yorker, but when you really dig down—I want to say this to all of us—we actually do a very good job, guys. I’m serious. Merve has created this whole institute. People are finding ways to teach under difficult political circumstances, under difficult cultural circumstances. With the media culture we have, the attention deficits and so on and so forth, we are still finding ways to transmit the canon, to do that work of transmission, to teach aesthetic judgment. It’s being done, through a lot of work and a lot of creativity.

1. On April 14, 2025, after receiving a letter from the Trump administration demanding sweeping and intrusive access and discretionary oversight of core components of academic administration, Harvard’s president Alan Garber responded by refusing to make any further concessions or negotiations with the government. In a letter addressed to the Harvard community president Garber stated: “The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”