Thread: My friend @Popehat asked me a good question earlier today. If a writer is smart and good, are there any views that would justify his termination from a publication like The Atlantic. My answer was that so long as the writer remains “smart and good,” then no. /1
This requires more explanation. I look at magazines and journals very much like I look at colleges and universities. I compare the intellectual freedom of pundits to the academic freedom of professors. /2
At explicitly mission-focused institutions like, say, a Christian college, academic freedom is represented by the freedom to express views within the (at the best institutions) broad boundaries of the specific intellectual and spiritual tradition. /3
For an analog, think of National Review. We have tremendous liberty to express our views within the broad conservative intellectual tradition. But if I want to leave the conservative tradition, I should work elsewhere, and NR would be wise to ask me to leave. /4
Within the mainstream academy, however, the tradition is very different. Once you meet the intellectual and ethical threshold for hiring, your freedom is considerably greater. There is no “view” that is cause for firing. /5
For example, when I was president of FIRE, I worked many, many hours defending the academic freedom of Ward Churchill, the prof who called the 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns” — comparing innocent victims to a heinous Nazi architect of the Holocaust. /6
This is a vital exercise because it is critical that our culture contain intellectual spaces where smart people can write/think not without fear of criticism and vitriol but without fear of termination. If their skin is thick enough, they can do the work. /7
But it’s _hard_ to operate a truly free intellectual enterprise. It requires actual, true tolerance — meaning tolerating ideas and people you actually despise — and it means defending the rights of others you’d like to exercise yourself. /8
Ideally, we would have a robust intellectual environment where there are ideological institutions on the right and left, but there are also institutions dedicated to creating the kind of spaces that mainstream universities are supposed to create — centers of free inquiry. /9
But in our extremely polarized times, centers of free inquiry are truly hard to find. Instead, we have counterfeits — or (like I think happened at The Atlantic) institutions that wanted to give it a shot but couldn’t take the heat. /10
So, here we are. We’ve got media on the right, like NR, media on the left, like Mother Jones, and more media on the left that’s long been left-leaning but not specifically ideological. Now it is. It’s gone the way of the academy. The polarization is nearly complete. /end
