“Academia and the Politics of Uncertainty”
President Bollinger, Dean Pinkham, members of the faculty, parents, friends, and my colleagues in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, it is an honor to stand before you today. I should confess at the outset, however, that I am quite daunted by the prospect of speaking on behalf of a group of people who are so vastly different from, and to a large extent, unknown to, one another. And as I sat down to gather my thoughts on what, if anything, we can all be said to share, I stumbled upon an even more sobering thought: this long, doctoral trek of ours has been more or less entirely coextensive with what is now being called “the long war on terror.” So I thought I’d offer a brief reflection on the kind of doctors of philosophy this particular historical juncture might make us.
I’m not sure how many of us started at what time, but for my part, I moved back to New York from the U.K. in August of 2001. You’ll probably all remember what a beastly summer it was—103 degrees as my family and friends and I schlepped boxes of Augustine and Hegel up five flights of stairs—and what a relief early September brought, its sudden breezes making even the subways bearable. But on the second Tuesday of classes that first year, as the towers were falling and the sirens wailed their way downtown and phones were ringing or not ringing and fighter jets were ominously circling the skies, I remember thinking, I would give anything right now to be where I was a month ago—sitting on the bank of the river Cam with Aquinas and maybe some strawberries, contemplating the ontological distinction. But that wasn’t the way things went.
Laboring through our various programs in this city at this time, I think what we share is that we have quite literally never been able to work in peace. No chance to hole up for five or eight years in an archive or an armchair or a laboratory without being profoundly disturbed…and it could be that this is the whole point. Again, I’m not sure about you, but frankly I’ve not been able to find a clear, doctoral path to what David Hume calls “the calm, obscure regions of philosophy” without tripping over this nation’s Shock and Awe campaign against Afghanistan and Iraq, its authorization of torture in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, all the failed negotiations in Israel/Palestine, the latest video from Osama bin Laden, another hundred soldiers dead, another massive march on Washington that didn’t make The New York Times, and now rumblings of a pre-emptive offensive against Iran. To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of all this except to say that this recent stage in the self-assertion of the American empire has not merely been the backdrop of the work we have done here; rather, it has been constitutive—thematically, pedagogically, and financially—of the work we’ve done here.
So I think there’s an ethical imperative simply in recognizing that this is the case. We are emerging as researchers, scholars, and teachers who have not been able simply to get on with our work in some apolitical vacuum, but rather have been—and, I think, must be—continuously interrupted by the infinitely distressing state of the union. Yet at the same time that the global stage is unequivocally telling us we cannot divorce our work from the political, many local, federal, and even academic authorities are claiming that we must—particularly in the classroom.
Two months after the attacks on New York and Washington, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, founded in 1995 by Lynne Cheney, published a report that accused American universities of being “the weak link” in the war on terror. Entitled “Defending Civilization,” the report opens by charging academics of being different from the rest of the country. It tells us that while 92% of Americans responded to September 11 with “anger, patriotism, and support for military intervention,” academics responded with teach-ins—as though teaching itself at such a time were a criminal act—and with what the Committee calls “moral equivocation.” In the round-up that follows of 117 anathema positions recently voiced on the nation’s campuses, we learn that “moral equivocation” ranges from attempting to situate the attacks historically, to criticizing American imperialism, to offering courses on Islam, to suggesting that violence met with violence tends to breed more violence. The furor over this last idea in particular is puzzling, considering for example that in January 2002, two months after the report emerged and just as we were “bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age,” George Bush II hung a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the East Colonnade of the White House. King, who not only taught us about breaking cycles of retaliation, but who also, interestingly enough, defended the practice of non-violent direct action by linking it to ancient pedagogical transgression. “To a degree,” King writes in his “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail,” “academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience.” Now, King doesn’t elaborate on this, but I think it starts to get at the question of what it is that’s so threatening, and so promising, about what we might do as scholars and teachers.
Socrates, as we know, was executed on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens, and although I don’t have time to go through it here, the same language that Plato records resurges uncannily on websites like DiscoverTheNetworks.com, CampusWatch, ProfessorWatch, EdWatch, and ParentsAgainstBadBooksInSchool, which monitor the activity of teachers who dare call American foreign policy into question. Many of the most prominent bad-guys from these sites have been rounded up into David Horowitz’s book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, which as you may know, targets nine of our teachers and colleagues here at Columbia. So Socrates, I imagine, would top Horowitz’s list, were the old guy around today—that gadfly who, we’re told in Plato’s Apology, “does not believe in the gods of the state.” In typical fashion, Socrates responds to this charge that if he divests his students of the narrowly conceived gods—for which we might read ideologies—of the polis, it is not for the sake of replacing them with his own gods and ideologies, but rather of demonstrating how little any of us really knows about the most important ideas we have—like justice, truth, knowledge, and the good.
So, at a time when we’re being asked to steer clear of contentious issues in the classroom, perhaps genuine civil disobedience would mean, not filling our students with our own political agendas, but rather practicing a kind of learned uncertainty—the sort of thing that got Socrates into so much trouble in Athens. Because it seems to me that at their best, this is what our various disciplines have taught us to do. At their best, the arts and sciences operate by means of a certain non-knowledge, calling into question even our most basic assumptions about the movements of the spheres, the composition of our bodies, the lessons of history, and the best ways to live in relation to others. Were we able to practice the constant re-evaluation and experimentation to which our various fields call us, we might become unpopular—even dangerous—at a time when the worst sin a person can commit is “flip-flopping.” But in the midst of the contemporary clash of raging convictions, a sort of Socratic uncertainty might therefore be genuinely transformative—of minds, of lives, and perhaps even of the violence that hasn’t given us a moment to think in peace.
