Sometimes you Can't Revert to Neutral Principles

Stanley Fish had a piece yesterday addressing the CUNY-Kushner controversy. As seems to be his wont, Fish argues that, contrary to some claims, CUNY's denial of an honorary degree to Kushner doesn't violate academic freedom or the spirit of open intellectual inquiry or any other duty of the University or its board, and that the balance of the controversy has been "beside the point." I actually agree with a large amount of what Fish writes in the piece, but in his never-ending quest to perfectly circumscribe and separate professional, social and political duty and discourse, Fish misses something important; namely, that sometimes circumstances allow for no other course but to actually take a position on the issue at hand.

To get at what I mean, I'll spell out a few areas in which Fish's analysis is right on. First, "academic freedom" is not really relevant to the debate. Kushner's not CUNY faculty, and nobody's contemplating firing him from anywhere because of anything he's written or published in an academic context. Second, the CUNY board is perfectly within its rights (indeed, I'd argue, within its duties) to take into account the totality of Kushner's public statements and persona before bestowing upon him an honor that is entirely the university's privilege to grant. It's the specific nature of and reasoning behind the decision it made that now has CUNY looking, in Prof. Fish's words, "small-minded, biased and stupid." Finally, the issue has very little to do with free speech as a larger principle. I doubt even the most ardent free speech absolutists would argue that nobody should ever face any negative social or economic consequences for making public statements about controversial issues.

Here, though, is where I part company with Professor Fish. CUNY, along with a host of other academic and cultural institutions, does play a role in setting the proper boundaries of public discourse. By denying Mr. Kushner an honorary degree because of Kushner's political statements, CUNY has implicitly declared those statements to be beyond the bounds of acceptability. There's nothing wrong with doing that in principle. If someone were to propose giving David Duke an honorary degree because, in some parallel universe, he'd made contributions to theoretical physics or something, I would hope that honor would be denied because Duke's public activism around race is beyond the plane of moral acceptability. No self-respecting institution ought to associate itself with the man. And it's precisely through such actions that the moral arc of the universe bends. Ideas move from being commonplace to controversial to repellent when there are social costs imposed for expressing them.

The problem here isn't that CUNY did or didn't step outside its mandate. The problem is that its board made a poor decision about specific statements made on a specific issue. That's not to say that granting Kushner the degree would have given his ideas the University's seal of approval. It is entirely reasonable to disagree with someone while recognizing that their ideas fall within the bounds of reasonable discourse. Put bluntly, discomfort with Zionism is reasonable. It's not always correct, at least not in my view, but it's reasonable. For an institution like CUNY to implicitly declare otherwise does violence to healthy public debate. Making such declarations falls entirely within the social role that major universities play. CUNY ought to play that role better, and Stanley Fish ought not pretend that it's all no big deal.