Building a Competitive Education Industry
A Weekly Column by Myron Lieberman

Readers may have read or seen on television the argument that censorship is emerging and our free speech rights are in jeopardy. Some allegedly horrific examples are a Texas editor who was fired after a column criticizing President Bush for "hiding" in Nebraska; talk show host Bill Maher, whose sponsors deserted his show after he said "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away." And Susan Sontag, a writer for The New Yorker who opined that the WTC developments were the predictable result of U.S. attacks upon defenseless nations elsewhere. When I viewed Nightline a few evenings ago, the program, or as much of it as I could stand, was devoted to the alleged danger that we are losing free speech, with censors lurking to hide behind patriotism as a way of intimidating the expression of opinions to which the censors object.

These reactions are reminiscent of academic controversies that emerged during my career as an academic; in my opinion, the basic issue was and is the same, but it is being totally ignored, at least in the recent discussion of it. Take Bill Maher's comment that U.S. servicemen were "cowards" for sending cruise missiles 2,000 miles away. In war, if you can inflict damage to the enemy without taking any risk, that is what you do. Adopting this strategy has absolutely nothing to do with cowardice. I'm sure that our military leaders in the Persian Gulf war had more risky options, but they were out to win the war with the least harm to U.S. forces. The comment that our armed forces are "cowards" because our leaders opted for a relatively risk-free way to attack an enemy was stupid; anyone who doesn't understand this should not be a host on nightly television shows. Firing Maher for incompetence would be completely justified without giving rise to censorship issues.

In fact, one of the remarkable aspects of the Maher case, and so many others like it, is that it has been treated as a censorship issue. In this respect, the media pattern is similar if not identical to the employment pattern in education, especially higher education. To this day, we have academics who are avowed "Marxists," in politics, economics, or both. Universities typically accept their presence in the classroom; to do otherwise would supposedly violate academic freedom. In my opinion, however, there is a competence issue. Professors are supposed to base their conclusions on evidence. One hundred years ago, there wasn't much evidence on the viability of Marxism; today, the evidence that it is a hopeless political and economic system, if democratic freedoms and standards of living are the criterion of viability, is overwhelming. University action that might have been a violation of academic freedom in some earlier time would be justified today on grounds of incompetence.

In the media, however, competence, in the sense of knowledge of the issues that are discussed, is not the criterion of employability. Employability consists of the ability to draw an audience. Making statements that will attract viewers is the crucial test. Unfortunately, stupid statements often attract more viewers than informed statements. Being able to stir up controversy is a big plus, no matter how nutty the statements giving rise to it.

Inasmuch as the Mahers of the world are hired on the basis of how many viewers they can attract, not on whether they are well informed, Maher is not the problem. The media standards for being a talk show host or columnist is the problem. In academe, the standard is supposed to be knowledge of the subject, so universities are justified in firing academics whose stock in trade is controversial statements that are contrary to the overwhelming weight of the evidence. Unpopularity should not be a criterion of employability in academe; the issue is or should be whether the controversial academic can produce adequate evidence and analysis to support his/her point of view. But just as unpopular views are not a reason to fire academics, they are no reason to continue to employ them on the assumption that firing them would be a violation of academic freedom. After decades of working in and around universities, I believe that the number of academics fired for incompetence is miniscule compared to the number of incompetents retained because firing them would be deemed a violation of academic freedom.