This is the first part of a two-part post. Today I focus on Israel and point to comparisons. In part 2, I explore the comparisons. –Jeff

I am mimicking the title of my second book, On Cultural Freedom: An Exploration of Public Life in Poland and America in the title of this post, as I am imagining writing a second volume, a case study focusing the theory in my book written thirty years ago to a particular cultural domain today. My thought experiment is motivated by a concern for my intellectual home, the university.

While the immediate stimulus for these reflections is the attack upon the Politics and Government Department at Ben Gurion University in Israel, first reported here on Tuesday, I think the crudeness of the attack is matched by more subtle, but also powerful, challenges to academic freedom and quality quite apparent in the United States, and elsewhere. I write about these concerns, thinking of my students and particularly of a Deliberately Considered contributor from Pakistan, Daniyal Khan.

The attack on the academic freedom of the politics and government of Ben Gurion University is straightforward political repression. There is an attempt on the part of the Israeli right to cleanse the Israeli academy of what it takes to be “anti-Zionism.” A NGO, sometimes labeled as Fascist, Im Tirtzu, has led the charge. Right-wing politicians have used institutional means to attempt a purge. There are only days left to forestall this dire outcome. (protest against these developments here)

An international review panel recommended reforms to broaden the intellectual profile of Ben Gurion University’s Department of Politics and Government (something I for one am not sure is a good idea) and the recommendations have been creatively misinterpreted by the Israeli Council for Higher Education (CHE), a government-appointed body charged with the supervision and financing of universities and colleges in Israel, to justify closing the department down. The independence of the university is under direct political assault.

This is classic case of political repression of cultural freedom, reminiscent of the fate of Socrates. The Israeli government, right-wing politicians and a segment of civil society are concerned that the Ben Gurion professors are corrupting the young, turning them away from patriotic feeling and commitment. A nice irony: the president of the university, Professor Rivka Carmi, is a leading critic of the left-wing professors of her institution, but has forcefully defended them:

The sub-committee’s decision was reached without any factual base to back it up; it is unreasonable and disproportional and most notably, it does not in any way reflect the opinion of the international committee which oversaw the process. We therefore wonder what is actually behind this decision.

A critic of the left, but also a critic of political repression, Professor Carmi is a defender of academic freedom. I would interview her for my imagined book. I would like to know in detail her reasoning and explore her judgment. I suspect a fundamental commitment to the goods of scholarship and teaching as a priority over politics and the ethos of the state would be the basis of both of her critical moves. I imagine her commitment would be to cultural freedom.

From my point of view, as the author of On Cultural Freedom, Carmi’s commitment to academic freedom can be understood in terms of three different, though related, conversations that are threaten by the actions of the Israeli state apparatus: the conversation the political scientists and theorists in the department have with their predecessors, the conversation they have with their peers, fellow researchers and thinkers in Israel and around the world, and the conversation they have with their students. Ideology and the interest of the state are disrupting these conversations.

I explained cultural freedom in terms of the conversations in On Cultural Freedom (formulated a bit differently). My point now, informed by my earlier inquiry, is that academic freedom exists if such conversations are ongoing and vibrant. It is under attack when forces interrupt them. Clearly in Israel this is happening. Even if the Department of Politics and Government is not closed down, there is an escalating demand for ideological correctness from researchers and teachers, and students learn from this. Politics is challenging academic life. I believe comparisons to McCarthyism are understatements.

Young researchers will wonder if they will get a job if their work crosses a political line. Established professors will think twice about questioning political orthodoxy, fearing for the secure positions of their departments and colleagues, and for themselves. Closing the department at Ben Gurion will close the Israeli political mind.

The academy and Israeli democracy will then suffer a serious blow. This is extremely worrying for those concerned about the independence of scholarship and education, and for democracy in Israel. Academic quality and state enforced political correctness don’t mix, and informed decision without academic quality is unlikely in a modern democracy. In my imagined book, I would spell this out.

But I would want to underscore that the threat to academic freedom does not only come in the form of overt political repression. This was a key point of On Cultural Freedom. I showed how, despite overt political repression, the three conversations were sustained, with varying degrees of success, around the old Soviet bloc. And I showed how the repressive aspects of the market sometimes worked to kill cultural freedom just as effectively as a powerful state: analyzing how this worked specifically in the cases of theater in Poland and America. In my imagined book, I would explore this insight, concerned as I am by the escalating penetration of market and corporate logic into university practice in America. In my new book, I would examine the case of the attempted firing of Theresa Sullivan as President of the University of Virginia. I would also explore how both political and economic interference in academic life affects the prospects of a new generation supporting the life of the mind on universities around the world, including a young aspiring academic in Pakistan. More on that in my next post.

The members of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University have agreed among themselves not to individually publish opinion pieces on the threat of closing of their department. For this reason, I have taken down the first version of this post. Instead I reproduce here the explanation of the situation of the department and the state of academic freedom in Israel given on the site Israel Academy Under Attack. For more information on the attack, go to the site, which includes suggestions for ways concerned readers can effectively respond to this assault on academic freedom.  -Jeff

On September 4th 2012 the sub-committee for quality control of the Israeli Council of Higher Education recommended that the department of Politics and Government at BGU be prevented from registering new students for the 2013-14 academic year. This recommendation — which, if implemented, will lead to the closure of the department — will be voted on by the CHE in its next general meeting, due to take place on October 23rd. Below we provide an overview of the events that led to the sub-committee’s decision.

The saga began when the Israeli Council of Higher Education established an international evaluation committee to scrutinize political science departments in Israel.

From the very beginning, the process was mired by irregularities. First, Prof. Ian Lustick, a prominent American political scientist from U of Penn and an internationally recognized expert on Israeli society and politics, was removed from the evaluation committee for unknown reasons. In response, the original committee chair, Prof. Robert Shapiro of Columbia University, resigned and the political science department at Hebrew University stopped cooperating with the committee. The committee was subsequently recomposed with Prof. Thomas Risse from Frei University in Berlin taking the helm (Risse was aware that the other people resigned and still took it on), and included such people as Israeli Prof. Avraham Diskin who had previously written articles in support of the radical right wing group Im Tirzu.

This committee, whose members are praised as positivist and empiricist political scientists produced a report that was not only biased but erred on key facts, errors that facilitated its unprecedented conclusion – the department of Politics and Government, which was established purposefully in order to foster and advance interdisciplinary, critical and qualitative research (the kind of research which is currently under represented in all other political science departments in Israel) was instructed to introduce mainstream positivist political science into its research and curricula. Failing to do so, the Council of Higher Education should consider shutting it down.

This evaluation, which was biased both politically and disciplinarily, was also based on basic factual errors. For example: The committee counted only 50% of the refereed articles published by department members. And while criticizing the department at BGU, they praised the department of political science at Tel-Aviv University which published the same amount of articles but have twice as many faculty members. Furthermore, in the original report the evaluation committee erroneously stated that faculty members have not published books in leading academic publishing houses, but the nine full-time faculty have, in fact, published six books in the three years prior to the report, of which three appeared in the top 10 academic publishing houses (California, Cornell, Columbia), two more with Routledge, and a sixth with the top press in France.

The excellent quality of scholarship members of the department have produced, and the fact that they are frequent and welcome guest at the best academic institutes (the Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, the school of public health at Chicago, or Cambridge University) has found little echo in the report. The committee was also not impressed with the average grant per faculty member, which is over $100,000, a relatively high sum in the discipline, and perhaps the highest among political science departments in Israel. Finally, it ignored the fact that this fall graduates from the department are beginning their PhDs at universities like Columbia and Northwestern.

On the basis of such errors the committee under-evaluated the department in terms of individual merit, and could easily direct its criticism to the “excessive social activism” of its members – which means nothing but their leftist political leaning – and to the interdisciplinary ethos and of the department (where half of the faculty come from fields like political geography, public health, and history).

For obvious bureaucratic and political reasons, the administration of Ben Gurion University felt it had to comply with the report and directed the department to hire three faculty members in areas mentioned in the report: comparative politics, quantitative methods and political theory and to introduce some changes to the curriculum. Two international evaluators – Thomas Risse and Ellen M. Immergut, appointed by the Council to oversee the implementation of the report, wrote in a letter sent to the Council that they “congratulate the department on successfully recruiting three new faculty members in the areas of comparative politics, quantitative methods, and political theory, and for its plans for a fourth recruitment next year.” They called upon the University to allow these young scholars “the time, resources, and mentoring to publish in top ranked international refereed journals and university presses,” in a way that would help the department “fulfill its deficits in mainstream political science,” adding that “the department should increase its diversity in terms of methods and theoretical orientations in future recruitments”. No criticism or sanctions were mentioned in this letter.

And yet, on September 4th 2012 a sub-committee within the Council of Higher Education followed this letter with a proposal to shut down the department because it failed to comply with the report of the international committee. The gap between the report filed by Risse and Immergut and the decision reached by the sub-committee of the Council of Higher Education underscores that this whole “evaluation process” has turned into a witch hunt, or was such a hunt in disguise from the beginning. For reasons which are difficult – or too easy? – to understand, the authors of the abovementioned letter, professors Risse and Immegut, have failed so far to clarify their opinion about the way their service to the Council of Higher Education has been abused so as to silence excellent academics some of whom happen to be identified as active members of the left in Israel.