Get Herald RSSBy most standards, Pope Benedict XVI presented a more liberal vision of Catholicism on his recent U.S. tour than that which His Holiness has historically espoused. He apologized for priestly sexual abuses, visited a synagogue and performed mass with a secular choir in Yankee Stadium.
But one reactionary set of remarks undermines the goodwill of these progressive gestures. Speaking at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., the pope praised Catholic educators who infuse all aspects of their teaching with religious doctrine.
That, as one might expect, means no performances of "The Vagina Monologues" or "The Laramie Project" on campus, and no courses in evolutionary biology. But the pope framed this ideologically restrictive ideal in the language of academic freedom.
"Academic freedom," he said, compels us "to search for truth wherever evidence leads," so long as we do not "appeal to academic freedom to justify positions that contradict the faith." For Benedict, freedom and truth exist only in Christian doctrine.
Shockingly, mainstream media outlets endorsed this dangerous and paradoxical link between the suppression of theological dissent and the search for objective realities. Catholic academics told newspapers how pleased they were to have the Pope defend their search for God's truth, while those in secular academe were rarely asked to comment at all.
Time Magazine thus triumphantly proclaimed, "Both advocates of untrammeled academic freedom and obedience to orthodoxy could claim a victory." Yet there is something decidedly trammeled about the way Benedict defines freedom and truth.
A similar contradiction emerges among liberal academe in a tenure battle at Columbia. Barnard College anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj came under fire from fellow professors for her supposedly anti-Semitic work: In her first book, Abu El-Haj explored the historical and social roots of Zionism and its ties to Israeli identity and politics.
In arguing that she should be denied tenure on the basis of her controversial work, her opponents invoked the principle of academic freedom. They argued in blog posts and e-mail petitions that Abu El-Haj's academic conclusions suppressed the intellectual liberty of her Jewish students by challenging their political beliefs.
Like the pope's speech, the petitions usurp the language of "academic freedom" to pervert it. Academic freedom protects the whole spectrum of opinion, because it refers to the pursuit and rational analysis of evidence and to the rigorous scrutiny of bias itself.
This is precisely what Abu El-Haj sought to do - to historicize and interrogate ideology. The tension her work might create for students is precisely the sort of encounter education should aim to facilitate. "Daring to know," as the philosophes called it, requires us to question and reconsider our own beliefs. That scholars at an institution of Columbia's caliber invoke "academic freedom" to thwart the pedagogical process is an embarrassment and a cause for alarm.
It suggests that we, as a society, are coming to accept a selective definition of objectivity applying only to those whose views we approve. We accuse ideological opponents of bias and invoke freedom of opinion to protect our allies. MSNBC and Fox News anchors routinely accuse each other of being slanted, while they attempt to position themselves as the objective voices.
The irony is that this is the hyperlinked Information Age where any segment of reality including the "bias" of our ideological foes should be impossible to suppress. But in fact, as the Columbia petitioners remind us, the Web can just as easily serve to restrict truth. On a more universal level, think of how easily we can customize online news sites to show us only the reality we want to know.
Combine this with the postmodern rejection of objective truths and the pope's claims suddenly seem justifiable. According to Time magazine, the pope was simply articulating a 21st-century definition of reality as inherently subjective: "It's time to reconsider what you mean by truth."
To the extent that it encourages us to pay attention to bias and be skeptical of language, this postmodern ethic is valuable. But the moment it becomes an "all-truth-is-subjective" alibi for an assault on any one viewpoint, this ethic flips on itself, turning academic freedom into shackled academe.
Commentators on the changing intellectual landscape of the 21st century often wonder what role academics can play in the web of self-taught online experts. The answer lies in reclaiming objectivity, turning academic freedom and intellectual liberty to the development of society's critical mind. Academia's goal should be, as it has been since the Enlightenment, to search for truth wherever evidence leads, especially when it leads us to question ourselves.
Maha Atal '08 will be continuing her musings after Commencement at instantcappuccino.blogspot.com
