IN 1993 THE SOCIOLOGIST AND critic Edward Shils wrote an essay entitled “Do We Still Need Academic Freedom?” Shils’s answer: No, we don’t–at least not in its current incarnation. The good professor passed away in 1995, but if he were still with us, he might have found in last Tuesday’s Washington Post additional evidence to support his thesis.
That morning, the Metro section gave prominent billing to a story headlined “Phi Beta Kappa Rejects GMU.” Phi Beta Kappa is the United States’s oldest, largest, and most venerable academic honor society. GMU is George Mason University, a public school in suburban Virginia, which, while large (it has 27,000 students), is not old. It became a four-year university in 1972.
Since then it has grown in size and in prestige. And in the fall of 2003, for the second time, its faculty applied to establish a chapter of the honor society on their campus. George Mason passed an initial test, then submitted a 177-page “detailed report” on October 1, 2004. Which is when, according to the Post, Phi Beta Kappa “promptly rejected” the application, “citing concerns about academic freedom.” Specifically: Phi Beta Kappa was concerned that George Mason president Alan G. Merten had backed out of an agreement to pay filmmaker Michael Moore $35,000 to speak on campus.
Moore, famous auteur of the anti-Bush rant Fahrenheit 9/11, spent most of last fall barnstorming colleges in a 60-city, 20-state “Slacker Uprising Tour.” The goal was to rouse young voters out of their historical complacency, thus ensuring a Kerry victory on November 2. As politics, the tour was a big, fat failure. But as economics–the economics of Moore’s pocketbook, in particular–it was a bewildering success. The tour must have recouped its $500,000 budget within weeks. Moore drew huge crowds: 3,000 at Michigan State, 7,500 at “The Pit” in Albuquerque, 9,000 at the University of Arizona. And he drew huge fees: An appearance at Utah Valley State College brought in $50,500, or $500 more than the student government’s annual budget. Moore didn’t appear at the University of Nebraska Lincoln because his $40,000 request (plus an undisclosed “security fee”) probably would have bankrupted the school’s University Program Council.
By those standards, George Mason was to have gotten off easy: Moore’s asking price was a measly $35,000. But after Republican legislators in the Virginia statehouse got wind of the arrangement and questioned whether financing an appearance by Moore at a public university several days before a national election was an appropriate use of state funds, Mason’s president decided the $35,000 wasn’t worth it.
So George Mason students were denied the opportunity to listen to Moore preach his “slacker creed,” which goes: “Sleep ’til noon, drink beer, vote Kerry November 2.” They were denied the chance to win bags of Tostitos tortilla chips, boxes of Ramen noodles, and pairs of Hanes briefs, all of which Moore regularly distributed to students on his tour in exchange for pledges to vote. They weren’t even able to watch Moore reclining in a chair onstage as deleted scenes from Fahrenheit 9/11 played onscreen.
What George Mason students got instead was a controversy. On October1, the day President Merten’s decision was reported in the Washington Post, the general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, Roger Bowen, sent a letter to George Mason defending Moore–a college dropout–and extending the “principles of academic freedom” to outside speakers with no academic affiliation. Here is what Bowen wrote:
Merten’s decision, and Roger Bowen’s response to it, became national news. Soon Phi Beta Kappa sent its own letter to George Mason asking about Moore. A flurry of correspondence ensued. On November 11, Marion Deshmukh, the art history professor in charge of GMU’s application, received a final rejection from Phi Beta Kappa. “They didn’t mention Michael Moore by name,” Deshmukh said in her office the other day. “But my sense is that it was the coup de grâce.”
To Michael Moore, the hullabaloo over his speaking fees was about free speech. He accused Republican legislators of conspiring against him. He told the Washington Post that he would show up at George Mason anyway, “in support of free speech and free expression.” He hasn’t.
Which is telling. Because after President Merten rescinded the initial $35,000 offer, he immediately extended another invitation to Moore to speak at a lower price. Peter Stearns, George Mason’s provost, provided me with an email that faculty member Michael McDonald had sent him recently. “As you may recall, as adviser to the GMU College Democrats I worked to bring Michael Moore to George Mason after the initial offer to speak was taken back,” McDonald wrote.
For its part, Phi Beta Kappa won’t comment on the application process. “It’s entirely confidential,” Phi Beta Kappa secretary John Churchill said last week. George Mason personnel, on the other hand, are more than happy to comment. Marion Deshmukh read me a letter she and other George Mason professors who are Phi Beta Kappa members had sent the honor society. “We firmly believe that PBK would be hard pressed to find any faculty members or students who doubt they had and still have academic freedom,” they wrote. Over a month later, Deshmukh received a letter from Phi Beta Kappa stating its decision was final.
Provost Stearns says George Mason will reapply to Phi Beta Kappa in 2006. In the meantime, those in charge of the school’s application might want to reread Shils’s essay. In it, he defines academic freedom as “the freedom to do academic things, to express beliefs which have been arrived at by the prolonged study of nature, human beings, and societies, and of the best works of art, literature, etc., created by human beings, and by the reasoned analysis of the results of those prolonged and intensive studies.” Unfortunately, Shils writes, this definition of academic freedom no longer applies. Academic freedom “has become part of the more general right of the freedom of expression,” he writes. “Expression”–and here Shils anticipates Michael Moore–“is not confined to the expression of reasoned and logically and empirically supported statements; it now pretty much extends to the expression of any desire, any sentiment, any impulse.”
Actually, the Phi Beta Kappa Council that rejected George Mason’s application might want to reread Shils’s essay, too. It won’t be hard for them to find a copy. It was published in the American Scholar–the society’s in-house journal.
Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
