Perils of Public Intellectuals

When academics leave their Ivory Cocoon to share their thoughts with the rest of us, these forays show them to be so out of sync with reality that we can see why they usually keep their ruminations in the classroom where they can become make-or-break test questions or term papers. For example, the McCain-Feingold federal ban on advertising that mentions issues during an election campaign was such an obvious assault on free speech and the First Amendment that it was opposed at the outset by both left- and right-wing groups.

The tacit censorship of the law was so apparent that the U. S. Supreme Court under John Roberts recently struck down this key provision of the congressional act as unconstitutional. What the Roberts court saw clearly, though, still seems to be over the heads of some so-called scholars.

“We’ve come full circle to the regime before McCain-Feingold,” Loyola law school professor Richard L. Hasen told the Associated Press in a story which appeared in the Newport News, VA Daily Press. “I don’t think Justice Roberts is naïve.”

“He knows full well that the test that the court has articulated today will lead to a great deal of corporation- and union-funded election advertising.” Chief Justice Roberts, fortunately, saw it a bit differently.

“Discussion of issues cannot be suppressed simply because the issues may also be pertinent in an election,” he wrote in the court opinion. “Where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker not the censor.”

One would think that the so-called “public intellectuals” whose livelihood depends upon this right to free speech would be acutely aware of the dangers to it embedded in a law championed by a Republican presidential candidate. Then there’s Julian Bond, U-VA history professor and head of the NAACP. While many have criticized the Bush Administration, not without cause, for its handling of both Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Iraq, Dr. Bond actually linked the New Orleans flood to the war in the Middle East.

“Katrina served to underscore how the war in Iraq has weakened, rather than strengthened, our defenses, including our levees,” Dr. Bond said in Detroit, according to an Associated Press story that appeared in The Washington Post. “The problem isn’t that we can’t prosecute a war in the Persian Gulf and protect our citizens on the Gulf Coast at home.”

“The problem is that we cannot do either one.” Perhaps the link between the two seemingly unrelated controversies is the word “Gulf.”

By the way, Georgetown University, boasting about its new African-American Studies program, just hired Michael Eric Dyson for the summer. The professor, who has made the rounds of colleges including stops at Ivy League citadels Penn and Brown, is probably most famous for his public spat with Bill Cosby.

“Cosby’s overemphasis on personal responsibility, not structural features, wrongly locates the source of poor black suffering—and by implication its remedy—in the lives of the poor,” Dr. Dyson has written. “When you think the problems are personal, you think the solutions are the same.” Imagine that.

Incidentally, the public is becoming increasingly aware of trends on college campuses, and cognizant that they are something less than the free marketplace of ideas that they advertise themselves to be. “As legislation is introduced in more than a dozen states across the country to counter political pressure and proselytizing on students in college classrooms, a majority of Americans believe the political bias is a serious problem, a Zogby Interactive poll shows,” that polling firm revealed in a release on July 10th. “Nearly six in 10—58 %—said they see it as a serious problem, with 39 % saying it was a ‘very serious’ problem.”

“The online survey of 9,464 adult respondents nationwide was conducted July 5-9, 2007, and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.0 percentage points.” That’s considerably less than the margin of error we have found in many textbooks.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.