みんな「保守」！（by Stanley Fish）

STANLEY FISH*1 “We’re All Conservatives Now” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/were-all-conservatives-now/

スタンリー･フィッシュ先生はここで、米国の大学における〈学問の自由〉の危機に対する右翼（保守主義者）と左翼による主張を採り上げる。
先ず右翼の方としては、David Horowitzによるもの。フィッシュへのe-mailによれば、

(…) Penn State University had weakened “the only academic freedom provision . . . worthy of the name.” What the university had done was revise an 1987 statement stipulating that “it is not the function of a faculty member . . . to indoctrinate his/her students with ready made conclusions on controversial subjects.” That sentence disappeared, as did a warning against “introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of [the instructor’s] study.”

これは左翼による保守派排除の陰謀であるという*2。
左翼の主張としては、Edward J. Carvalho and David B. Downing (eds.) Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era*3という本が紹介される。この本には、Noam Chomsky、Cornel West、Ward Churchill、Henry Giroux、Norman Finkelstein、Cary Nelsonなどが参加している。この本に所収のJohn K. Wilson”Marketing McCarthyism”というエッセイによると、”Despite the tears shed by Horowitz and his allies for the plight of conservative students, “censorship in academia by conservatives” is(...)“more common than censorship on the left.””なのだという。
右翼と左翼とどちらが正しいのか。フィッシュはどちらも正しいかも知れないという；

The left is right to point to the withdrawal of state funds from public universities as precipitating “the neoliberal rush to privatize and vocationalize all facets of higher education,” a rush that has brought us “educational cuts, tighter budgets, increasing tuition and student debt, hiring freezes, the rise of contingent faculty and the erosion of secure academic employment” (Carvalho and Downing).

But the right is right to point out that the faculty who work within these ever-more-pinched spaces are predominantly liberal and have over the years created “new inter-disciplinary fields whose inspirations were ideological and closely linked to political activism” (Horowitz, “Reforming Our Universities”). (Of course, the fact that a course of study was born out of ideological/political concerns doesn’t mean that instruction in its materials is necessarily ideological and political; any subject matter, whatever its origin, can be taught from an appropriately academic perspective.)

Each side, then, has its points and some evidence to support them, but what is most interesting is that each looks backwards to the same idealized past and laments the loss of the same values and practices. Horowitz signs on (wistfully) to John Sexton’s description of the research university as a place “of rigorous and reasoned skepticism,” where norms “are not fixed or given, but are themselves subject to re-examination and revision” in a spirit of “critical reflection.”

Susan Searls Giroux, citing Zygmunt Bauman, inveighs against the “hurry-up-and-learn” consumerist mentality of the current academic scene, where “the language of development or maturation” of knowledge is replaced by knowledge as a commodity with a “ ‘use by’ ” date, and there is no time or patience for “the slow careful accumulation of knowledge tested and retested and improved when found wanting.” You could assign Searls Giroux’s statement to Horowitz and Horowitz’s to Searls Giroux, and nothing would change in their respective arguments.

どちらも、カントの「啓蒙とは何か」*4でいう「人が自らに強制した未熟からの浮上（man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity）」としての「啓蒙」の理念に照らして正しいのであり、また「コンヴェンショナル」というか「保守的」であるという。そして、ネオリベこそが「啓蒙」の敵だよというのがオチとなっている；

To be sure, there are some things to fear, but their names are not West or Chomsky or Horowitz. The forces — call them neoliberal, call them corporate capitalism, call them political indoctrination — that have in different ways turned the university away from the emancipatory project Kant called us to (and every one of these authors celebrates) are enemy enough. We don’t have to demonize each other.

啓蒙とは何か 他四篇 (岩波文庫 青625-2)

*1:See http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080715/1216088636 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20090107/1231339106 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100616/1276631039 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20101229/1293610997

*2:For detail, see Ashley Thorne and Steve Balch “Free to Indoctrinate: The AAUP Applauds Penn State's Retreat from Academic Freedom” http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?doctype_code=Article&doc_id=1699

*3:See http://us.macmillan.com/academicfreedominthepost911era それにしても、定価90ドルとは高いぜ。

*4:See also http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20091127/1259318413 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100703/1278181982