Kaufman and Krishnamurthy and the role of teach-ins in academic freedom.
Before Rawls’ shadow in political philosophy there was in left-liberalism, Arnold S. Kaufman (1927-1971), who died when his airplane collided with a military jet while traveling (recall this post). While there is no Wikipedia page devoted to him now, Kaufman was rather famous during the 1960s because of his involvement with the student movement at University of Michigan and especially by promoting ‘participatory democracy’ in the context of the Port Huron Statement (as the New York Times noted fifty years later, and The Nation a decade earlier). In fact, he had been regular contributor to Dissent during the last decade of his life. So, for example, an early version of his one book (1968), The Radical Liberal: New Man in American Politics, appeared as a long essay (1966) “A call to Radicalism: Where Shall Liberals Go?” in Dissent. [HT Kevin Mattson.]
Despite his fame in his own era, Kaufman has left almost no trace in the Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy, except that once he was a participant in the debate of Black Reparations. His actual views — in favor of what he calls ‘compensatory justice’' — are not mentioned. (One can find the argument in July – August 1969 issue of Dissent.)
Then after he moved to UCLA, he became a key defender of his then junior colleague, Angela Davis, against inter alia, Ronald Reagan’s (gubernatorial) administration’s repeated attempts to get her fired because of her membership in the Communist Party. The shape and rhetoric of today’s culture wars are already visible then. The essay Kaufman published on January 3, 1970 in The New Republic in her defense is rather significant to understand his thinking about academic freedom, especially in light of his polemic with Sydney Hook’s more restrictive understanding of it. (Some other time more on it.)
Today, my interest in Kaufman relates to one of Kaufman’s more important intellectual contributions. As regular readers know ((recall here; here; and here), I argue that student protests, as instances of ‘experiments in living,’ may fall under academic freedom. In particular, so understood (with emphasis on experiments) student protests may advance the epistemic mission of the university and, even, society. While the former is salient at all universities, the latter is especially important at universities whose (corporate) mission involves preparing students for citizenship, to contribute to democracy, etc. A key premise of my argument is that during student protests there is quite a bit of learning, not the least through so-called teach-ins.
As it happens Kaufman was central to originating the practice of the teach-in. This was partially modeled on the idea of a sit-in popularized by the civil rights movement. (As Kaufman explicitly notes, “the tactics of the civil rights movement may be useful, especially when, as in the case of the teach-ins, they are creatively modified.” (“A Call to Radicalism,” p. 624.))
The phrase was coined by Marshall Sahlins (who, inter alia, was the mentor and supervisor to David Graeber). I quote from a a footnote on page 32 of a Senate Judiciary report, The anti-Vietnam agitation and the teach-in movement: The problem of Communist infiltration and exploitation, as reported by Marshall Sahlins (2009). The note reads:
During a meeting on the night of March 17 they were batting around alternative ideas […] when Anthropologist Sahlins suddenly interrupted the discussion: ‘I’ve got it. They say we’re neglecting our responsibilities as teachers. Let’s show them how responsible we feel. Instead of teaching out, we’ll teach in – all night.
Kaufman then helped develop it, including speaking at the first “all-night teach-in” on March 24, 1965, at The University of Michigan. There is a lovely essay on this event by Jack Rothman in an old issue of Social Theory and Practice.
Now, as the note suggests, and Sahlins himself also emphasizes in his essay,+ the teach-in originates with young faculty at the University of Michigan. In some ways this makes it easier to show that teach-ins at student protests fall under academic freedom because it is faculty lead, doing what they are paid to do. This makes it easier to suggest that some student protests fall under the mission of the university to advance and educate the truth.
I don’t offer this as a legal argument. After all, during a teach-in faculty may well be teaching outside the classroom and generally outside the formal curriculum. (For example, in the Netherlands, the academic freedom of academics is constrained by their role in the curriculum.) I am rather offering a practical and conceptual argument for thinking that the presence of teach-ins turns student protests into sites of academic freedom.
The significance of the very idea of a teach-in is that it makes explicit that a student protest may be a contribution to widening and developing the intellectual life of a campus. This fact is at the root of the idea that I defend that student protests as ‘experiments in living’ may fall under academic freedom. In the reception of Kaufman the fact that he himself was educated in an environment where Dewey was an important presence makes this focus on experiments in living not ad hoc.
As it happens Kaufman himself thought seriously about the role of teach-ins in wider context. In a “A Call to Radicalism,” he treats student protests where teach-ins take place themselves as a response to administrative “empty rhetoric” about a university’s mission that “generates aspirations among people who take it seriously.” (p. 564; see also p. 568) This anticipates Agnes Callard’s recent observation. In so far as it shapes what is worthy of attention in the classroom and research, student protests clearly advance the academic mission of the university. (As I have noted this has roots in Max Weber’s ideas and is not just the province of radicals.)
Kaufman himself also treats teach-ins as “expressions of the need to participate more directly in the making of policies that vitally affect one's life.” ( “A Call to Radicalism,” p. 603) That is, he sees student protests as sites of participatory democracy in shaping the agenda of the university. This mixes the idea I attribute to Weber with experiments in living. He also thinks it is a form of education in citizenship, teach-ins and the like “are surrogates for participation in the processes by which public policies are formed and from which those involved in these activities are normally excluded.” ( “A Call to Radicalism,” p. 605)
I wouldn’t endorse this argument for everyone at every university. As regular readers know, I am myself somewhat dubious about the fondness for mass demonstrations among certain colleagues. But as Meena Krishnamurthy (Queens) has suggested (2012), one cannot know this without experiment in living for oneself: “in order to determine if my ends are most rational for me, I need to be able to implement my ends or put them into practice.” (“Reconceiving Rawls’s Arguments for Equal Political Liberty,” p. 269; see also p. 271ff.) That is, student protests and social movements may, amongst other ends, be sites of true experiments for individuals, and society.
+Sahlins’ views on how he coined it and the wider political context are very much worth reading also because of his analysis of the way different kinds of protests complemented and competed with each othr.