March 17, 2006
Opinion
Academic Freedom and Historical Denial
Michael Brooks - Special to the Jewish Week
Northwestern University Professor Arthur Butz is back in the news. His long-standing notoriety is not for his academic achievements but for his repeated assertions that the Holocaust, one of the 20th century's most horrific events that consumed the lives of millions of Jews, gypsies, gays and political dissidents during the genocidal Nazi reign of terror, never happened.
In uttering this canard Butz now shares the media stage with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the recently elected President of Iran, who has expressed a similar view. While both of their pronouncements have evoked deep concern they have distinctly different significance,and it is important to understand why.
Ahmadinejad, who may one day be capable of launching a missile with a nuclear warhead, has called for Israel, the world's only Jewish state, to be wiped off the map. Because of this potential he may represent an existential threat not only to the Jewish people but also to much of the world that will not have the luxury of watching from the sidelines if he decides to ignite a second Holocaust.
Butz, however upsetting and infuriating his remarks, does not represent such a threat, and calls for Northwestern University to dismiss or silence him are inappropriate.
While the Jewish community is understandably outraged by Professor Butz's remarks, they represent a far greater challenge for the university.Northwestern University President Henry Bienen’s disavowal of Butz’s opinion as “a contemptible insult to all decent and feeling people” while invoking “the vital principle of intellectual freedom that all academic institutions serve to protect” doesn’t fully explain the remarkable and counter-intuitive boundaries that inform discourse in the academy.A university, precisely because it is constituted for the unfettered discussion of ideas, must have a much higher free speech bar and concomitantly tolerate a much higher level of obnoxious and offensive speech in order to not squelch discourse that borders on being unacceptable.
This doesn’t mean, however, that any and all speech is acceptable.Indeed, it is in some ways more circumscribed in areas where people are expected to have expertise.
Butz wraps himself in the mantle of historical revisionism.Whatever one might think about the conclusions of revisionist history it does follow a certain logic. A revisionist historian might argue, for example, that President John F. Kennedy was not killed by Lee Harvey Oswald but by the CIA., who then had to eliminate Oswald to cover their tracks. A revisionist historian might even maintain that Pearl Harbor was not bombed by Japan but by American planes with Japanese markings at the instigation of President Franklin Roosevelt as a pretext for America to enter the war.But to maintain that President Kennedy was not killed or that Pearl Harbor was not bombed is not historical revisionism. It is historical denial and as such would be beyond the pale of acceptable discourse in a university history department.
When our daughter was eight years old she wanted to know why moving the light switch up and down turned the ceiling light on and off.One day we were entertaining a friend, a professor of electrical engineering at a prestigious East Coast university, and suggested that she ask him for an explanation.
“There’s a little genie that sleeps in a box behind the switch,” he told her. “When you flip the switch up it wakes him up and he runs faster than you can imagine up to the ceiling, turns on the light and then runs back to the box and falls asleep. When you flip the switch down it wakes him up again and he runs back up to the ceiling, turns the light off and returns to the box and falls back asleep.”
“Oh go on,” she said, “do you really believe that?”
“I’m not sure if I really believe that,” he replied, “but if I told you what I really believe I’m not sure you would believe me at all.”
It was a sweet and perhaps age-appropriate explanation, one that even an eight-year-old could see through.If he had been teaching this theory in his electrical engineering classes, however, he probably would not have been teaching there for long.If a professor of art history were to promulgate such a view outside the classroom it would be laughable but would not compromise the academic enterprise because she wasn’t hired for her expertise in electrical engineering. A professor of botany might well believe that the South lost the American Civil War because God was on the side of the North, but it would be dangerous for a university to sanction him for espousing such a belief on his personal web site.
Bienen was on target when he said that Butz’s “reprehensible opinions on this issue are an embarrassment to Northwestern.”After all, how could someone intelligent enough in his field to be granted tenure at Northwestern University engage in discourse so patently false that it would not be acceptable in an academic arena where scholars are supposed to know what they’re talking about?
Removing professors for their foolish or even offensive extra-curricular speech would harm the university even more than tolerating such speech would embarrass it. Anti-Semites will hate Jews with or without the supportof a fecklessprofessor of electrical engineering in Evanston, Illinois. The world has much more reason to be concerned about the untenured president in Iran who might be tempted to let the nuclear genie out of the box.
Michael Brooks is Executive Director of University of Michigan Hillel.