Erik Loomis and Free Speech

As 99% or so of folks who read this blog probably already know, Erik Loomis, a labor and environmental historian, Assistant Professor at the University of Rhode Island, and blogger at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, has been under public attack following his posting the following angry tweet a week ago today:

I was heartbroken in the first 20 mass murders. Now I want Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.

Loomis was initially denounced by conservatives who falsely accused him of calling for the murder of Wayne LaPierre (who is head of the National Rifle Association). Within days he had received visits from the Rhode Island State Police and his Dean.  Earlier this week, the President of the University of Rhode Island issued the following statement:

The University of Rhode Island does not condone acts or threats of violence. These remarks do not reflect the views of the institution and Erik Loomis does not speak on behalf of the University. The University is committed to fostering a safe, inclusive and equitable culture that aspires to promote positive change.

In response, bloggers at Crooked Timber, one of the leading academic blogs, issued a statement of their own on Wednesday, the nut 'graph of which reads as follows:

Even to suggest that Loomis’s tweet constitutes a “threat of violence” is an offense against the English language. We are dismayed that the university president completely fails to acknowledge the importance of academic freedom and of scholars’ freedom independently to express views (even intemperate ones) on topics of public importance.  This statement—unless it is swiftly corrected— should give alarm to scholars at the University of Rhode Island, to scholars who might one day consider associating themselves with this institution, and to academic and professional associations that value academic freedom.

If you haven't done so yet, please go and read the whole thing.  Among the most important other points they make is that, while this case raises issues of academic freedom, in fact, what's happened to Loomis is part of a much broader issue: the ability that employers in general have to punish their employees for expressing unpopular political views that have no bearing whatsoever on the performance of their jobs. 

Given that Loomis does not have tenure, that some opponents were calling for his firing, and that his institution has fundamentally misrepresented his actions in a public statement, I believe it is particularly important that his fellow academics, especially those of us who also blog, to defend Loomis from these attacks. The bloggers who put together the Crooked Timber statement have asked other bloggers to support it and have set up a comment thread on which you can do so. I already have expressed my support on it (along with about a thousand others at this writing); I urge you to do so as well.*  That's the primary purpose of this post.

Its secondary purpose is to create an open thread to discuss this case...perhaps even in an historical context (as would befit this blog).  So have at it!

A few more thoughts below the fold...

First, I wanted to link to some other materials on this case.  It was covered today by Inside Higher Ed.  The foreign policy blog Duck of Minerva also issued a statement supporting Loomis's free speech rights.  One of the most thoughtful letters to the URI administration was written by UNM history professor Virginia Scharff.

Though the URI administration has yet to respond (at least publicly) to the criticism of its statement, some of the leading academic conservative bloggers who had attacked Loomis for his tweet have, at least, explicitly stated that he probably shouldn't be fired (perhaps because they themselves have used violent rhetoric in the past). 

Finally, I wanted to say that my wholehearted endorsement of the Crooked Timber statement should not be read as enthusiasm for Loomis's now-infamous tweet.  While it was in no way an incitement to violence, I'm not a great fan of violent rhetoric like this.  Loomis himself has expressed regret about employing it, if only because it (pretty predictably) became a distraction from the real issues raised by the Newtown shootings. My disagreements with using such language run a little deeper.  However, I almost didn't add this thought to this post, because I think it is quite beside the point when one is talking about the free speech issues raised by the campaign against Loomis and addressed by the Crooked Timber statement (which are the principal topics of this post).  One does not always defend free speech that one likes...indeed, if one is committed to free speech, one often defends speech that one doesn't.  And pointing out one's dislikes while issuing such defenses of speech can, in a sense, detract from those defenses. 

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* It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that I do these things as an individual and that I am not speaking for this blog nor for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, which are not in the habit of issuing collective statements and have no plans to begin doing so at the moment.  I'd also add that I think this is basically a good thing, as issuing truly collective statements can often be a complicated and contentious matter. Indeed, even Crooked Timber attributed its statement to the individual bloggers signing it, not to the blog collectively.

Freedom to Offend: On Disagreeing with Sam Harris

The last week or so has provided abject demonstrations of the freedom to offend.  In the New Yorker Salman Rushdie chronicled the arc of his last 23 years of living under a death sentence declared by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini; Russia's political vanguard, Pussy Riot, received prison sentences for their demonstration against the collusion between Russia's latest tyrant Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church; and a wave of violent protests erupted in Muslim countries over a pathetically awful anti-Islamic film.  Each example differs from the others, but all illustrate an abjectness.  Rushdie wrote a novel worthy of critique but instead engendered unbridled hatred and unqualified celebrity.  Pussy Riot exposed the illusion of civil society and were made, summarily, victims of the absence of law in Russia.  The protests by groups of Muslims degenerated into violence against innocents while their collective frustration was made into an abstraction by a process in Western liberal thought that treats challenges to its own assumptions as barely worthy of contempt.

In  2007, the University Press of Kentucky published a book I wrote entitled, "Freedom to Offend." I wrote about the decline of the nation's strictest censorship culture in New York City and the way that trend influenced the development of the city's movie culture.  I studied the collusion between the movie industry, the Catholic Church, and government officials--all working in some harmony to get what each wanted.  For Hollywood, that meant easy profits; for the Church, that meant the ruse of obedience; and for the government, that meant placating constituents.  By the early 1960s, this jig was up and the censorial regime collapsed under its own illogical weight.  The straw, so to speak, that broke this camel's back was the realization that moviegoers rejected the protection censors promised to provide.  In short, the constituencies "protected" by the censors embraced a freedom to be offended.

That notion is one misunderstood by Sam Harris, our contemporary Cassandra whose passionate defense of freedom to offend anyone rests on a belief that such freedom has a singular definition and that the holders of that definition can determine what offends it.  In other words, it is the freedom that is offended by those who act in ways disconsonant with Harris's understanding.  In one essay, Harris argues that religion (his all-purpose offender of freedom) is like sports because both are generic terms that fail to describe what practitioners actually do.  Only a someone raised in contemporary western culture would imagine that sports carries the same transcendent purpose as religion--indeed, in America it is possible to worship through sports in a way similar to religion, and many should probably find that a problem.  

Here's the difference between Harris, Pussy Riot and Rushdie.  Rushdie wrote his novel with the purpose of exploring the power of revelation--something that has no corollary in science or the regime of rational thought subscribed to by Harris.  Rushdie's biggest regret was not his inability to predict the response his book instigated but that he had, at one point, backed away from the seriousness of his own argument and agreed to issue a statement that the targeting of him was a critique of his own insensitivity to religious pluralism.  Like Harris's abstract understanding of freedom, Rushdie's statement made no sense, ultimately, because he could no more defend or define religious pluralism than Harris can lead us to a world in which "freedom" is to be protected from all who would offend it.  Likewise, Pussy Riot entered the most important church in Russia in order to expose a corrupt state fully aware that that same state would slap them down in defense of the abstract notion of the state.

What I saw in the much less violent and consequential struggle over censorship and movie culture in the 1960s was the same drift toward abstractions.  If it was wrong for the censors to protect the virtue of the public or to legislate against blasphemy (as if the state had a way to define that term) it was equally problematic for the defenders of a new movie culture to claim that art was exempt from withering attacks because it was ART.  Likewise, the alternative to a world of in which all offenses provoke violence is not, as it seems Harris would have it, a world of unfettered freedom, whatever that means.  In this way, Harris is not much different from George W. Bush who boldly declared in his second inaugural address that we would seek to end tyranny.  Harris could be the corollary to that illusion, seeking an end to the notion that we can be offended.  After all, just as Bush's doctrine blurred the line between ending tyranny by imposing an American version of it, Harris would end offenses to freedom by deny those offended the freedom to be offended.