May 8, 2011, 9:30 pm
By STANLEY FISH
On May 5, the historian Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University gave back an honorary degree she had received from John Jay College because the playwright Tony Kushner had been denied the same honor by the CUNY Board of Trustees. At the urging of a trustee who objected to Kushner’s views on Israel, the nomination, which had been forwarded by the faculty and administration of John Jay, was tabled. (Kushner had been informed of the impending honor.)
Professor Schrecker explained in a letter to the board’s chairman, Benno Schmidt, that she “could not remain silent when the very institution that once recognized the value of academic freedom now demeans it.” That doesn’t sound right. Kushner is not an academic and so he has no academic freedom that can be demeaned. And his more general freedom — his freedom as an artist and a citizen — has not been infringed on by what the board did. He can still write and speak and say pretty much what he wants. He just won’t be saying it at a CUNY graduation ceremony this spring.
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May 6, 2011, 7:15 pm
By PETER CATAPANO
The Thread is an in-depth look at how major news and controversies are being debated across the online spectrum.
In 1940, a Brooklyn woman named Jean Kay filed a suit with the State Supreme Court against the her city’s Board of Higher Education claiming that the renowned mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was morally unfit to teach at the City College of New York, where he had been offered a professorship. Kay, supported by a host of others in the public scrum, including Bishop William Manning of the Episcopal Church, argued that Russell, who advocated sex before marriage and other heretical lifestyle choices, posed a threat to the virtue of her daughter — even though the impressionable youth was not actually a student at the college. A judge ruled in Kay’s favor. Russell, who was not allowed to speak in his own defense, was denied his appointment at the college, which was, and is, part of the publicly financed City University of New York system. Today, the now-notorious incident is chronicled in an exhibition on City College’s Web site, called “The Struggle for Free Speech at CCNY, 1931-1942,” as is a recounting of the subsequent firings, spurred by the McCarthy era Rapp-Coudert Committee, of faculty members accused of being Communist Party members.
Jamie Mccarthy/Getty ImagesTony Kushner made the commencement speech at the 2010 Julliard commencement ceremony in 2010.Though the issues and stakes have changed, CUNY now finds itself at the center of another free speech controversy, which has erupted, 71 years and some months after Kay filed her complaint — as Patrick Healy of The Times, among others, reported on Wednesday:
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Stanley Fish on education, law and society.
