A Place to be Curious

Roger Berkowitz

In the wake of the October 7th massacre of Israelis, and in the wake of the at times wanton destruction of Palestinian lives in Gaza, advocates for both sides pick the facts and the narratives that serve their cause. I have heard impassioned presentations of proof that the media favors Israelis and just as impassioned proof that it favors the Palestinians. Events and facts and statements are twisted and tortured to make one’s case. That is what advocates do. But it is not what students and professors in colleges and universities are supposed to do. For Stephen Carter, academic institutions privilege curiosity over certainty: “The university classroom is the place to press students to look for more.” 

Carter argues that we have ceased to see universities as laboratories for curiosity and instead imagine them as finishing schools designed to prepare students for successful careers. He argues that we need to return to the university driven by curiosity. To do that, Carter writes, we must think more clearly about what is the meaning of academic freedom and free speech:

The lineage of academic freedom can be traced back at least to the 15th century, but historians tell us that the modern conception comes largely from the German universities of the 19th century. As the physicist and philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz put the point in 1869, scholars must be “more fearless of the consequences of the whole truth than any other people.” In a world where so many “other people” are on the lookout for wrongthink, the ability to pursue truth becomes more precious still.

A 1938 essay in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science described academic freedom as the professor’s “special need of elbowroom in his work”; with apologies to Virginia Woolf, we might call it the need for elbowroom of one’s own. The image is one of adequate space to do your work, secure in the knowledge that nobody is looking over your shoulder to enforce ideological conformity. For the university to do its job of inculcating curiosity, academic freedom should be a near-absolute, within the classroom as well as without. College administrators who believe otherwise shouldn’t be college administrators.

In her fine book “Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry,” Barbara M. Benedict shows how this quality that we nowadays consider a virtue was in the past often regarded as a dangerous disruption of the social order. The view on campus today is often much the same, with scholarly work guided along particular ideological paths, and with those who transgress often marked down as unpersons. What the essayist and literary critic George Steiner derided half a century ago as a “nostalgia for the absolute” is these days everyday academic life.
What made the congressional hearing so sad was not merely the accusatory quality of the committee’s questions, or even the evasive quality of the presidents’ answers. It was that the presidents were being asked to interpret their own rules on campus speech — and couldn’t.

They’re not alone. Existing campus speech rules have led to all sorts of horror stories. Many are true. Because the regulations tend to be standardless — often, deciding what’s hateful based on the response of the listener, a so-called “heckler’s veto” — they give no fair warning of what’s forbidden, leading to such absurdities as stopping a student from passing out copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day; or investigating a professor for the sin of stopping to watch a “Back the Blue” rally; or rebuking an untenured lecturer who in a discussion about race showed a documentary that included graphic images of lynching, and read aloud from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Evidently the film, like the letter, included what we’re now supposed to call the N-word. (Full disclosure: I’ve used the word often in my books — fiction and nonfiction alike — and, seemingly only yesterday, I used it in the pages of The Times.)

But even were the rules crystal clear, they’d have both students and faculty looking over their shoulders, wondering which of their ideas might bring forth not disagreement — the mother’s milk of academic life — but condemnation from their fellows and, most dreaded of all, investigation. The inculcation of fear as part of daily work on campus is very McCarthyist; more McCarthyist, even, than hauling college presidents before Congress to try to force them to place even more speech off limits. Because having to look over your shoulder is something you contend with every day.

Many investigations and rules are justified on the grounds of ensuring that students feel safe. But I’m not at all sure the college classroom should be a place of comfort. It should be a place, rather, where students regularly face the challenge of difficult questions, as their professors help prepare them for the life of the mind. The more successful the teaching, the more students will carry their taste for the give-and-take of argument out of the classroom and into the larger world.