Feb 9, 2005
UNLV - Briefly
One member (at least) of the Board of Regents is making serious inquiries.Other members have been asked to do so.
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Gus diZerega - 2/11/2005
Good question.
I suspect us untenured faculty, bad as the situation can be, still have MORE freedom than those employed at think tanks. I have worked at think tanks on two occasions. One was a wonderful experience, the other a good deal less than that. I've never had a tenure track position, but I have had many visiting faculty and adjunct positions. I have plenty of horror stories to tell about ill treatment in both colleges and think tanks, so I am not describing either as ideal. But the differences are still substantial.
There are three reasons why colleges are better. First, academia has more respect for diversity of views than think tanks - even when the views differ strongly from the norm. Hoppe is actually proof of that, as was Rothbard.
This respect falls short in practice of what it is supposed to be in theory - but it still matters. Academic culture is not worthless. I have had MORE intellectual freedom in the academic departments I have taught in as an adjunct or visiting professor than I had in one of the two think tanks I have worked in. Yet the departments were all very liberal or left of that and the think tanks were both supposedly classical liberal.
Second, we are almost always able to teach the books we want in the way we want, so long as we are judged competent to teach the course. I never had to have a reading list or syllabus approved at any school I have taught at. I doubt the same holds true for think tank related teaching - though I am unsure since I have never been asked to do any. (I'm too unorthodox I think,)
Third, we usually have one year contracts in academia. In think tanks we are hired and fired or laid off at will. Of course that means we can leave a think tank when a position elsewhere opens up - but in practice that's a joke. I was once given a week's notice at a think tank. Not for anything I did wrong - they had a financial problem. There was no way on earth I could get even an approximation of such a position elsewhere. Of course, if I had been a more mindless Republican, like their CFO, my position there might have lasted longer, but I will never know. Fortunately I still had my own business to fall back on. This would NEVER happen at a university or college except, I guess, in cases of the most egregious misconduct. Maybe not even then because of appeal procedures and the like. So, on balance, untenured faculty are considerably more free in their work than tenured faculty - but still not nearly as free.
I think the language of contract does not capture the central importance of the culture of intellectual exploration that, if far from perfect, still provides more protection for the unorthodox in untenured academic positions than does any PURELY contractual arrangement.
Again, I write from years and years of experience as an untenured faculty member explicitly praising the work and insights of Hayek in liberal and left departments of political science and with about 2 and a half years experience in the think tank world.
Robert L. Campbell - 2/10/2005
Gus,
I'm going to agree with you wholeheartedly on this one. I hope you won't fall off your chair :-)
A drawback to covering the USM story in such detail is that I have trouble finding time to discuss all of the "public values" issues that you are raising.
So I will have to promise a full-length entry on the free inquiry question later.
But here, quickly, is my view of the Berkeley-Novartis deal from a few years back (which you may remember). The deal allowed Novartis, which was paying part of the upkeep of a department at Berkeley, to help itself to Berkeley professors' research results that it had not paid for (and keep them from being published for a period of time, if it wished).
If Novartis wanted to hire those researchers, assume the responsibilityfor their salary, benefits, equipment costs, etc., and install them in one of its company lab, then it could require them (under contract) not to publish anything without clearance from managemeent.
While the researchers were working for a university, Novartis had no business asking for authority over whether they published their work, where they published it, or when. (Not even authority over the researchers whose work it was actually subsidizing.) And university administrators had no business making such a deal with Novartis.
Berkeley eventually discontinued the deal. But there will be others like it.
Obviously, there's lots more to discuss here.
Robert Campbell
PS. There's more intellectual freedom at a university than a think tank for those who are tenured. Are you saying that untenured faculty also have more intellectual freedom than think tank employees?
Kenneth R Gregg - 2/10/2005
You can submit Letters to the Editor, Las Vegas Review-Journal here: http://www.reviewjournal.com/about/print/press/letterstoeditor.html and it will go in both the print and online editions.
In yesterday’s LV R-J, Lew Rockwell said http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Feb-09-Wed-2005/opinion/449020.html :
What an outrage that a scholar of world renown like professor Hans Hoppe can be persecuted by University of Nevada, Las Vegas administrators. C'mon, Rebels, live up to your heritage. Champion your own policy of academic freedom, banish the thought police, apologize to professor Hoppe and grant him sufficient compensation.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
AUBURN, ALA.
THE WRITER IS PRESIDENT OF THE LUDWIG VON MISES INSTITUTE.
In today’s LV R-J, Gary Peck has this to say http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Feb-10-Thu-2005/opinion/453993.html :
I want to set the record straight regarding the ACLU's involvement in challenging UNLV's efforts to discipline professor Hans Hoppe for presenting theories in class that offended students by suggesting that homosexuals tend to do less long-term financial planning than do heterosexuals.
The American Civil Liberties Union did not, as was suggested in the Review-Journal's Tuesday editorial, "write UNLV's standards for teaching controversial issues." Our organization has, however, been involved with members of the university community and the community at-large in the drafting of various policies that relate to free speech at the university. These include UNLV's computer use policy, student conduct code and rules governing hand-billing and other expressive activities on campus.
While we didn't participate in the crafting of the academic freedom provisions alluded to in the editorial, we do believe the treatment of professor Hoppe constituted a gross violation of the core principles inscribed in those provisos.
We don't subscribe to the professor's theories and understand why they offend some students, but know that his right to espouse them goes to the heart of academic freedom and is essential to cultivating the kind of marketplace of ideas that is the bedrock of any university that's worth its salt.
GARY PECK
LAS VEGAS
THE WRITER IS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION OF NEVADA
Gus diZerega - 2/10/2005
As I watch the two discussions over Hoppe and USM I am struck by an interesting irony. In both cases what is at stake seem to be rights which are best described as public/political rather than private/contractual- that is, rights that people believe any decent society should honor, and that we want to require public governmental organizations to honor. A private university could in principle do whatever it wanted to terminate nonconforming faculty. (Witness the difference between intellectual inquiry in universities and in think tanks. It is much safer in the first.)
I would suggest this kind of issue has two implications for classical liberals. First, that the logic of markets and contracts is not always harmonious with the logic of free inquiry. They sometimes support one another, and sometimes they do not
Second, that an adequate liberal theory must include public values that are not necessarily reducible to contractual ones in market terms.