Prominent legal and political theorists, including Jeremy Waldron, Cass Sunstein and John Tasioulas, have called Finnis a ‘legal giant’, invoked his right to academic freedom, and insisted that the best thing for students to do is engage with his views. ‘It’s only respectful, and they may even learn something,’ Tasioulas said.--Sophie Smith (january 2019) 'academic freedom' in LRB.
We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation. If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties, the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed.--Judith Butler (et al!) May 2018, [HT Leiterreports.]
President Charles de Gaulle is reputed to have said you don't arrest Voltaire.' It's a revealing anecdote about onetime French elite attitudes toward intellectuals -- Sartre was to be arrested for civil disobedience-- and, more important, the (unequal) rule of law. There is a more subtle point lurking here: Voltaire had, in fact, been imprisoned in his life (when he satirized the regent)--he took the name 'Voltaire' after his release from the Bastille. He also experienced exile. But over time he became useful to various political authorities and he found being close to power not altogether uncongenial.
I was reminded of the anecdote in reflecting on the curious spectacle of academics stressing the purported greatness of disciplinary and professional colleagues in the midst of controversy. I don't mean to be naive; of course the institutional standing and prestige of Professors Finnis and Ronell have clearly played a role in the public interest in their actions and views as well as the university responses to them. And, we see the same currency of prestige, even modest celebrity, at work in those other academics coming to their defense.
For those of us who participate in the prestige hierarchies (recall) of academia this raises uncomfortable questions. This is so, I think, regardless of one's views on the merits of each situation.* When I see the articulation of and doubling down on such prestige, I ask myself, perhaps narcissisticly, is this what would be expected from me in such circumstances? Is that the price one pays to enter into 'elite' echelons of professions, even -- in the case of some law professors -- political society?
Even if the intentions behind signals of solidarity may be unequivocally high minded, such closing of ranks with an appeal to prestige and greatness also invites others to perceive these, perhaps even involuntarily, as in some sense self-vindicating; as worth rallying to. In the context of public controversy, appeals to greatness rely on the equivocation between institutional status and intellectual worth such that they can justify a kind of (dazzling) state of exception for those that inhabit the role.**
What this shows, I fear, is that rather than being elevated by the credit economy of academia, we end up polluted by it.
*For the record: much as I admire Butler and Derrida, I fully agreed with Brian Leiter's analysis of the Ronnell case. On student-led activism against (members of) their own institutions I seem to be more inclined to treat those as instructive; as moments to revisit and question our norms and practices. This is a consequence of my otherwise risk-averse and revolution abhorring (skeptical) liberalism, which understands the role of education, in part, as a place for students to learn how to protest and be citizen-activists and, in part, as a place where the moral compass and inquisitiveness of students forces otherwise complacent educators (like me) to question our pieties. The role of a liberal education is, in part, to generate (possible) fruitful and moral adaptations in our culture (given that the status quo is manifestly imperfect). I believe this even if I generally do not share the first order commitments or ideologies of student activists.
**I wanted to stop there. But note a peculiarity. In his tweet (endorsed by Prof. Sunstein "I complete agree"), professor Waldron used the word 'uncongenial' to describe the views of professor Finnis "on many things-torture, assisted suicide, sexuality." This word is connected to roots of 'genial' (as in friendly) and 'genius'. And, so, paradoxically, we have circumstances in which one can possess intellectual greatness despite having views that are in some sense worth rejecting (not genius) about matters of life and death.
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