UNFETTERED EXPRESSION: FREEDOM IN AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE by Peggie J. Hollingsworth (Editor). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000. 192 pp. Cloth $27.95 ISBN 0-472-11179-5.

Reviewed by Philippa Strum, Department of Political Science, City University of New York-Brooklyn College; Law School, Wayne State University. Email: pstrum@mindspring.com

UNFETTERED EXPRESSION is a compilation of lectures about academic freedom that were presented at the University of Michigan between 1991 and 1999. The somewhat awkwardly named annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom was established by the University's Senate Assembly to honor three University of Michigan professors who refused to answer questions posed to them in 1954 by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The University fired two of the professors, although one of them was tenured. The University suspended the third professor. The University never apologized to them.

Among the lecturers whose presentation are included in the current collection are academics scholars such as Lee C. Bollinger, Robert M. O'Neil, Catharine R. Stimpson, and David A. Hollinger, along with Roger W. Wilkins, journalist Eugene L. Roberts, Jr., and others better known outside academia. All of the lecture-essays are impressive, as might be expected from such a distinguished ensemble. As with any collection, a few essays stand out. One essay has the potential for use by undergraduates.

As federal district judge Avern Cohn points out in "A Federal Trial Judge Looks at Academic Freedom," the Supreme Court did not even mention academic freedom until 1952. Cohn does not say so, but William O. Douglas used the phrase in his dissenting opinion in ADLER v. BOARD OF EDUCATION (1952: 508). In ADLER, The Court upheld, 6-3, a group of New York statutes prohibiting advocates of violent overthrow of the government from teaching in the public schools. The parameters of the freedom have been debated in the courts ever since, most recently in the context of campus speech codes.

The speech code issue has been the primary instrument for bringing the larger societal culture war onto the nation's campuses. Universities have been attacked, on the one hand, for not being the kind of place where all students can learn in a friendly environment and, on the other, as bastions of political correctness. The debate has illuminated the limits of law. Law and legal institutions did not protect universities from the McCarthyite version of political correctness in the 1950s, but the courts did subsequently develop a substantial body of case law to back up the nascent notion of academic freedom. Judicial rulings across the nation have struck down campus speech codes, but the courts have scarcely ended the volatile discussion about the legitimacy and dangers of restrictions on speech.

Catharine Stimpson's "Dirty Minds, Dirty Bodies, Clean Speech" is particularly useful as an exploration of the wrenching

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nature of the debate and its pitting of the First Amendment's crucial democratic concept of freedom of expression against the great harm that can be done by hate speech. Stimpson tells the story of how sexism held up her drive toward tenure as a way of demonstrating how racist and sexist speech can cause not only psychological but economic harm. She then describes her ambivalence about attempts to limit speech. She summarizes the reading she did in her attempts to resolve it, and she suggests that the balance must come out in favor of permitting even hurtful speech.

Most of the essays in the book, Stimpson's included, are addressed to an audience which has thought about academic freedom, and they utilize language and references that might prove troublesome for students. Almost all rehearse the history of or arguments about speech and academic freedom in ways that will be familiar to members of this list, or at least those of us who teach constitutional law and civil liberties - which is not to imply that they do not do so intelligently. Bollinger, for example, expresses a thought particularly well when he traces "the impulse to intolerance" to "the wish to believe" (p. 35). Walter Metzger provides a useful exegesis on the ways in which the "hostile environment" standard is a threat to academic freedom. All the essayists are in agreement about the importance of academic freedom, which is no doubt a prerequisite for being invited to present a lecture in the series

However, the way they approach the subject makes two of the other contributions particularly interesting. Eugene Roberts laments that "[F]reedom of speech. . . has been transmogrified again and again into freedom FROM speech" (p. 152). That does not result in freedom for anyone, he argues, and his dramatic recounting of the use of speech by suffragists in Woodrow Wilson's Washington becomes a case study of how necessary free speech has been to American social movements. His other example is the dynamism of the black press in the South during the first half of the twentieth century. This is the essay that would be extraordinarily helpful for undergraduates trying to understand why both U. S. law and many members of disadvantaged groups insist on the need for unfettered speech, even when it is hurtful.

The essay that members of this list may find most intriguing is historian David A. Hollinger's "Money and Academic Freedom a Half-Century after McCarythism: Universities amid the Force Field of Capital." The federal judiciary's current interpretation of the First Amendment and our growing awareness of the importance of academic freedom have minimized governmental threats to the freedom, Hollinger argues, but it is seriously endangered by academia's growing dependence on private money. Hollinger acknowledges the long-standing nature of that dependence. What he finds troubling about it today is the way the demands of the business world are resulting in increasing disparities in academic salaries, with the worth of professors within universities being established by those outside of academe.

Hollinger points to the differential in salaries commanded by faculty members in law, economics, business, and biotechnology. It is those who are best able to make money outside the university, he notes, who are given the most money inside it, and who have the closest ties to outside employers. Hollinger is all in favor of professors making money, but he regrets the way this relationship skews salary allocations among disciplines and, more

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importantly, permits outside forces to have a sizeable impact on research. He invokes Edward Said, who has defined academic freedom as "`an invitation to give up on' the identities that claim us outside the academy" (p. 181). The nature of the academic endeavor can be seriously skewed when it is financial interest rather than intellectual curiosity that decides which truth we will seek and what kind of research we will pursue. It is a concern that is likely to growa and to affect the supposedly "unfettered" nature of our enterprise. Academic freedom is an under-studied topic, and this volume is a welcome and thought-provoking addition to the literature on the subject.

CASE REFERENCE:

ADLER v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 342 U.S. 485 (1952).

Copyright 2000 by the author, Philippa Strum.