DURHAM, N.C. -- When the State University of New York at New Paltz sponsored
a conference earlier this month on "Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of
Women's Sexual Freedom," some called it borderline pornography and others
celebrated it as an exercise in free speech. But what is at once interesting
and depressing about the controversy is that both sides are indulging in
the usual forms of bad faith.
Gov. George E. Pataki and the trustees who are egging him on display bad
faith when they declare that the issue is scholarship and academic standards.
No, the issue for them is that the scholarship represented in the conference's
panels is scholarship they don't like, in part because it doesn't resemble
the scholarship they encountered when they attended college a generation
or two ago.
They don't remember (and neither do I) any professor of theirs talking about
body parts, excretory functions, the sex trade, dildos, bisexuality, transvestism
and lesbian pornography on the way to explicating Shakespeare or analyzing
the political strategies of Queen Elizabeth I. Well, like it or not, that
is the kind of talk and research being engaged in by many professors today.
Just recently, Routledge has put out "The Body in Parts," a volume in which
an all-star roster of historians and literary critics, including the newly
appointed president of Bryn Mawr College, contribute essays on the tongue,
the anus, the breast, the belly, the entrails and so on. Whatever else they
are, these essays are incredibly learned, filled with analyses of anatomical
treatises, ancient medical encyclopedias and commentaries on scripture.
Right now the body, in all its forms and functions, is big and serious business
in the academy, and anyone who wants to participate in high-level discussions
of literary, historical and cultural issues had better be thoroughly conversant
with these new discourses, if only so as to be able to argue against them.
Arguing against what is new in intellectual circles is a respectable and
necessary activity, but it is, or should be, an activity reserved for people
who have read the relevant texts and are informed about the history and
traditions of the disciplines. Governor Pataki and his political appointees
are not such people.
They don't know anything except what they don't like. And what they don't
like has nothing to do with academic standards and everything to do with
nostalgia and an eye for risk-free political advantage. The Governor of New
York has come out against sadomasochism. Who knows where such bravery will
take him next. To a denunciation of war or the common cold?
Things aren't much better on the other side. If the critics of the New Paltz
conference miss the mark (because they don't know what the mark is and are
not really interested in it anyway), the conference's defenders have their
own way of obscuring what is really at stake.
To hear them talk, what is at stake is the abstract notion of free speech
rather than the interest or quality of what has actually been spoken. If
it's speech and it takes place on a campus, they say, then it should be allowed
to go on no matter what its content.
The trouble with this line of reasoning is that it short-circuits the
consideration of the educational question -- the question of what subjects
and modes of instruction are educationally appropriate -- and gives
administrators reluctant to make hard decisions an all-purpose rationale
for doing little and explaining nothing.
When one SUNY trustee, Candace de Russy, complained that the conference "had
absolutely nothing to do with the college's undergraduate mission," the college
president, Roger W. Bowen, should have replied either, "Yes it does, and
here's why," or, "You're right, and I made a mistake."
If Dr. Bowen thinks -- as I tend to -- that the conference is defensible
in academic terms, he should have said so and laid out the terms. Instead
he went on about academic freedom, and then added, as if to assure everyone
that he knew trash when he saw it, that he "personally found several of their
planned panel topics offensive."
"Offensive" is a known weasel word; it allows one to make a judgment and
withdraw from it at the same time. Dr. Bowen uses it to avoid the real question:
not whether the panels were offensive or inoffensive -- neither quality is
a reason for putting a panel on -- but whether they were plausibly related
to some sound educational purpose.
Dr. Bowen is doing just what Governor Pataki does, but with an A.C.L.U. twist.
Mr. Pataki says, I don't like it and therefore it doesn't belong on the campus.
Dr. Bowen says, I don't like it and therefore it does belong on the campus.
The Governor is trying to make campus life dance to the tune of his personal
convictions. The college president is running away from his stated personal
convictions -- even those that relate to his office -- in his eagerness to
stand up for the First Amendment. One man is trying to do the other's job;
the other has forgotten what his job is.
It is not the job of a college president to uphold the First Amendment --
that is the province of the courts -- but to choose from the many forms of
intellectual inquiry and pedagogy those that will best realize a bona fide
educational mission. In the course of pursuing that mission, First Amendment
questions will surely arise (these days, anything can become a First Amendment
question) and will have to be dealt with. But if First Amendment questions
are substituted for questions of educational purpose, if they trump all other
considerations, you might as well do away with classrooms, exams and criteria
for hiring and promotion. Just set up rows of soapboxes on the quad.
O f course, Dr. Bowen doesn't really mean what he says. He doesn't mean,
despite his pronouncements at the opening of the conference, that he is committed
to defending speech "no matter how odious." For if he did, he would have
no response to the Holocaust denier who wanted to spread lies on the New
Paltz campus under the cover of freedom of expression.
And I don't think the Governor will be accepting any invitations to serve
on the steering committee of the college's women's studies program so that
he might help guide its educational direction.
Both men are spouting the rhetoric demanded by their political situations,
playing to constituencies -- conservative Republicans and First Amendment
zealots, respectively -- that have very little stake in what actually happens
at New Paltz and will soon move on to some other hot spot in the ongoing
Culture Wars.
Meanwhile the news media, as usual, ride the story's extremes, and talk show
panelists get to spend a couple of weeks hurling sound bites at one another
-- you say no tax dollars for whips, I say the First Amendment first, last
and always.
But that's not what it's all about. What it's all about is responsibility
and the making of distinctions -- distinctions about what a governor is supposed
to do and what a college president is supposed to do, and the responsibility
of one to keep his hands off the educational process (except in the area
of appointments) and the responsibility of the other to be hands-on and not
confuse genuine judgment with the invocation of some magic phrases.
Stanley Fish is a professor of law and English at Duke University. The
30th anniversary edition of his "Surprised by Sin: The Reader in 'Paradise
Lost'" has just been published.
School for the Scandalous
By STANLEY FISH