THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 17, 1994 TAG: 9412160039
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: By KEITH MONROE
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
Are professors immune to demotion or discipline no matter what hateful, ill-informed nonsense they profess? A lower court said yes in the case of Leonard Jeffries. But recently the U.S. Supreme Court has said think again.
Jeffries was head of the black studies department at the City College of New York when he got into trouble for spewing venomous conspiracy theories. He asserted that Jews financed the slave trade and conspired with the Mafia to demean blacks in the movies.
There is no evidence to support such claims and CCNY removed Jeffries as department head, though he remained a tenured professor. But Jeffries responded with a lawsuit claiming his right to free speech had been violated. This is patently absurd. Jeffries had a perfect right to speak. But CCNY didn't believe he had a constitutional right to remain a department chairman if he insisted on talking trash.
Apparently, however, those who employ academics have little right to decide whether they are fit to teach. A federal judge said Jeffries' views were ``hateful, poisonous and reprehensible,'' but the school had nevertheless violated Jeffries' rights.
The legal basis for that decision is a provision that government employees can't be disciplined for speaking out on matters of public concern without proof that they have damaged government operations. The law was clearly designed to prevent partisan administrations from harassing government employees because of their political views. It was never intended to prevent colleges from weeding out the incompetent.
Nevertheless, the court ordered Jeffries reinstated as department head and said he should be paid $360,000 in punitive damages.
When Charles Dickens had Beedle Bumble say ``the law is a ass,'' he knew what he was talking about. It is hard to imagine a more asinine result. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals said a new trial would be needed on the question of damages but upheld the notion that Jeffries couldn't be disciplined without violating his rights.
The college administration argued that being forced to keep on an unsavory professor until he caused the institution serious damage was ``antithetical to responsible stewardship.''
Finally, a moment of sanity has come from the Supreme Court. It has thrown the case back to the appeals court with the admonition that it examine a decision last May in which it said public employees can get the ax for insubordinate statements even if the right to make them is protected by the First Amendment.
That's more like it. To uphold Jeffries would be to undermine any semblance of quality control in state-run schools. The principle at stake in this case has been obscured by issues of race and hate speech, academic freedom and the need to protect government employees from political machines. The real question is whether academic administrators ought to be able to judge professors on the basis of the views they espouse, to hold them accountable to standards established by their peers. With academic freedom ought to come academic responsibility.
In scientific disciplines, there is less confusion. A professor of medicine wouldn't last long if he began promoting leeches and bloodletting instead of CAT scans. A flat-Earth geology professor wouldn't be able to keep his job. It's only in the humanities where there are fewer objective criteria that crackpot theorists like Jeffries can get away with anything.
Conservatives have made an issue of so-called tenured radicals who have injected their politics into their teaching. But the larger issue is academic politics which often rewards ambitious professors for publishing trendy nonsense rather than teaching competently.
It is difficult for anyone other than a real scholar to find anything new and worth hearing to say about Milton or Mahler, Giotto or the Treaty of Ghent. But any fad-following dweeb can spew reams of unreadable gibberish about the semiotic meaning of Madonna's wardrobe and publish it in the Journal of Western Lingerie Studies.
Professors like Jeffries don't belong in the classroom, but such cases also don't belong in the courts. Academia should regard the Jeffries decision as encouragement to police its own ranks more vigorously. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star.
by CNB