A Needed Coalition for Academic Freedom

… At Yale, Winner of ‘Lifetime Censorship Award’

Just a few days ago, a fellow Yale alumna and former Yale faculty, Sandra Luckow, forwarded me a New York Post article entitled: “100+ Yale professors sign up to protect free speech—and save school from being a hot mess.”  The statement is something I would have eagerly endorsed, had I still been on the faculty:

Faculty for Yale … believe that Yale must rededicate itself to its fundamental mission: to preserve, produce, and transmit knowledge….

we call for a thorough reassessment of administrative encroachment on a number of important areas….  

Encouragement of activities on campus intended to foster greater tolerance for diverse points of view.

Endorsement of the principles set out in the Woodward Report [the Report that Yale denounced on the record in order to prevent my lawsuit from going into discovery]….

Endorsement of the Kalven Report’s principle of institutional neutrality, [which] of course … does not restrict faculty as individuals from expressing themselves….

Support for the implementation of the guidelines regarding donor influence….

As it turned out, Luckow and I were canaries in a coal mine.  We met at Yale in early 2019, when she, as a documentarian, invited me to hors d’œuvres and wine at the exclusive club, Mory’s.  “For once, Yale is on the right side of history!” she exclaimed, and she wished to make a film of my speaking up on Donald Trump.  When a scuffle between Alan Dershowitz and I arose in early 2020, at the height of his defending Trump during his first impeachment, she requested an interview of Dershowitz.

The same tricky Dershowitz, who declined a discussion I invited him to at Yale and then incessantly publicized instead that I refused to debate him, agreed and then retracted his agreement with Luckow, as she was making arrangements for her flight.  The next thing she knew, her contract with Yale was terminated after twenty years of exemplary teaching and less than a year after Yale honored her for being a nationally-recognized woman pioneer of her field!

The same, of course, happened to me a few months afterward: my contract was terminated after seventeen years of only the highest performance records—and not long after Peter Salovey, who would write the letter below about another case, personally thanked me for my role in raising Yale’s Global Health Program to one of the top in the nation (my course at Yale College was the most demanded in the Program, and it drew students from all regions of the country).

October 1, 2021

Dear Fellow Members of the Yale Faculty,

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that one of our colleagues, History Professor Beverly Gage, felt strongly that her leadership of the Grand Strategy program was questioned and interfered with by the program’s donors….

Let me be clear: Yale is committed to free inquiry and academic freedom—these are the university’s foundational values and have been my own over the course of my 35 years on the faculty.  I unequivocally support the faculty’s right to conduct research, scholarship, and teaching without outside interference….

With best regards,

Peter Salovey

President of Yale

These words rang hollow then and even more so now, as he made every excuse not to review my dismissal by John Krystal, chair of psychiatry, under Nancy Brown, dean of medicine, for what should have been protected speech, without any due process or even a discussion, as I requested.  Indeed, their evasive behavior was odd to start—certainly not that of people who had nothing to hide—especially after Krystal had publicly affirmed my freedom for the same speech less than two years earlier!  But the claim they would make in the courtroom was the most egregious: that Yale had no obligation to academic freedom.

It revealed an institution willing make any claim to “win”—i.e., dismiss my lawsuit so that nothing could go into discovery and reveal whatever ties with donors or political interests that they needed to conceal, at all cost (revelations even since indicate that they are extensive).  Many of the top legal experts of the country had been eagerly awaiting progress, stating that I had a “very strong case”—only to be let down, once Yale escaped scrutiny through its denunciation of all obligation to its own Woodward Report.

The University of Chicago’s Kalven Report that Faculty for Yale cited is also noteworthy.  It says:

The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student.  The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic….  To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.  A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community.

As a safeguard against authoritarianism, along with free speech, academic freedom is an essential part of preserving democracy, of sharing our intellectual gifts so that the public can benefit from the best available knowledge and make well-informed decisions.  Academic institutions have an obligation to provide the space for debates, where intellectuals can freely express and argue their viewpoints, without fear of retaliation.  It is not a place for the university to take a stand, as in my case, where even the American Psychiatric Association (APA) could not (since I was not a member and not under its jurisdiction).

Scholars and academics have a duty to share their ideas thoughtfully and confidently, and to contribute our education, research, and experience to the good of society.  The responsibility of a university is to foster thoughtful discourse, not to reinforce a given position.  Yet, what Yale did in my case, caving to the demands of a political partisan—Alan Dershowitz—to clamp down on public speech that was politically inconvenient—since many at the time were uncertain if Donald Trump would be reelected—to reinforce a politically-motivated and politically-rewarded “rule”—that is, “the Goldwater rule”—that was not even Yale’s own rule but a trade association’s, was the height of infringement on academic freedom.  This helped earn it the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2022 “Lifetime Censorship Award.”  If thoughtful discourse had been allowed, as I requested, we may have learned that more psychiatrists agree with my position (than the APA’s), that there is robust scholarship behind my position (unlike the APA’s), and that society may have vastly benefited from a viewpoint that arises out of medical neutrality, in a hyper-partisan environment that is now hungering for institutional neutrality.