Richard Brodhead: Address to the University Faculty

Honored colleagues, I thank you for the welcome I've received since arriving as your president this summer. Your turnout in force in robes for my inauguration gave a chance for you to show your splendid stuff, and it was an impressive sight. But far more impressively, on that occasion you modeled a solidarity between this faculty and the University that I found deeply gratifying and will do my utmost to maintain. I learned long ago of the Christie Rules, the Magna Carta extracted by Duke faculty at some local version of Runnymede, and I affirm that I will continue to consult the faculty on all matters of import. I accept this not as an unavoidable limitation on my sovereignty but as a way of wisdom to be positively preferred. I have been a faculty member long enough (please don't forget that I am a faculty member even now) to know that free-lance administrative strategies pursued without broader discussion and support lead to no good end. We'll do good things in proportion as we think them through together.

In future years I expect to have specific issues to speak to on this occasion. But for my first address I want to speak to first things, the founding terms of our relation. As you know, there is more than one way a faculty can have its being in a modern university. In one arrangement, the institution is visualized as a vast, anonymous background, of absolutely no interest if tolerably well managed, though the faculty reserves the right to rise up and threaten hideous vengeances if its local interests are not served. Within this structure, faculty members confine their interests to the little worlds of their personal specializations, pursuing their own work except as they are required to deal with certain irritating interruptions ”teaching, advising, dissertation directing; though in practice those tasks can often be handed off to others, or performed in such perfunctory fashion as not to make a serious dent.

A university can be run on these terms and still enjoy a very considerable reputation. But it's not the only way a university can be organized, and it's certainly not the most interesting or productive (or fun) way, either for the students we educate or for faculty themselves. In another scheme of things, the faculty would also be defined by their highly evolved expertise, since specialization has been the precondition for all advances of knowledge in our time. But in this version, the limits of faculty curiosity would not be set by the boundaries drawn on the contemporary map of disciplinary subfields. The energies of inquiry that led researchers deep into their fields would make them see the relevance of work in parallel fields and the possible value of collaboration and cross-fertilization, converting the larger university into an intellectual stimulant and resource. In this world, students would not be understood as distractions or drudgery but as new recruits to and potential advancers of the work of inquiry, so faculty would find it an essential and valuable part of their work to communicate the interest of their fields in the liveliest and most compelling terms ”and to take those pains beyond formal teaching that enable students to become real partners in a community of inquiry. Out beyond their local spheres, the faculty would recognize that it matters how the university is managed and would seek to be co-creators of the milieu they inhabit ”and certainly to have a say in how the university's intellectual atmosphere is defined and maintained.

I am sketching a utopian scenario, but I've come to this university in the conviction that Duke approximates this dream far more closely than most schools, and that even when we fall short of them, these ideals still have considerable residual force as expectations. At a place of this character, it would not be absurd to say what your president will say to you here. We all have our special work at this place; but let's remember that our real work is to dream some adequate dream of what a university could be and to use our powers to bring that dream to reality. I began by acknowledging the rules of faculty governance at Duke and I will obey them, but in exchange I invite you to take the full measure of your governance role. Nothing of the highest significance happens in this university except as you help make it happen. Through your performance day by day, the members of this faculty help decide whether this will be the home of good quality work of the sort currently approved in the various disciplines or of brilliant, searching, innovative mental exploration; whether this will be a place where classes are taught as required or where education is an inspiring, mind-stretching, mind-liberating venture; where a default institutional culture is found sufficient or where we reach for a higher goal. In a crucial sense, Duke will be what the faculty aspires to make it ”so let's remember to aim high.

One event has taken place on my watch that touches on a deep question of university principle and that I should speak to here: I allude to the student-organized Palestinian Solidarity Movement conference held at Duke last weekend. In the ten long weeks between the first mention of the conference and the actual event, we had abundant opportunity to learn of distress provoked within the Duke community and across the nation by the idea that Duke would supply the site for this conference. As you probably know, Duke's decision was denounced by a nearly a hundred thousand signatories to an internet petition. This petition was based on a substantial misrepresentation of  previous PSM conferences held on other campuses, and the disinformation did not stop there: in an act of black propaganda that took my breath away, an e-mail was circulated last week from the student organizers of the conference confessing to the dark views and dire intentions their detractors had always known them to hold ”except that the e-mail was not authored by the students (who hastened to denounce it) but by an enemy with advanced internet skills. I know, however, that many people of good faith and honorable intentions were also profoundly troubled by Duke's hosting of the convention, whose organizers, while professing their personal adherence to non-violent tactics, refused to denounce Palestinian violence against Israeli citizens. Given the recent history of the Middle East and the bitter, life-or-death nature of its unresolved conflicts, such anguished responses were not only to be expected but particularly easy to understand.

That said, Duke University could not have deferred to the sentiment in opposition to the conference without violating a fundamental principle, a principle that has general application but also a special saliency in a university setting. The Bill of Rights and federal law forbid the abridgement of the right of free speech, and though there will be circumstances where understandable passions make us want to curtail the rights of others, it is just then that those rights need vigilant protection. Rights belong to that delicate category of realities that become real only to the extent that humans believe in them and act on them, make them real by observing them. The day we make it easy to curtail the rights to free expression of those we disagree with is the day we invite a radical shrinkage of a freedom we ourselves may want to claim some day. In a university setting, moreover, the legal rationale for a broad protection of free speech is seconded by a specifically educational rationale. The protection of free speech is the protection of the notion that people can teach each other and learn from each other through the play of their differences. To disbelieve that is in some fundamental way to disbelieve in education itself; and if educational institutions refuse to stand up for this value, it is hard to imagine who will.

The splendidly named Learned Hand wrote the formulation of this matter that I've found most helpful to my own thinking. In United States v. Associated Press (1943) Hand wrote that "the First Amendment presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection. To many this is, and always will be, folly; but we have staked upon it our all." This comes close to expressing the deep philosophy of the sort of university of which Duke is an eminent example. It implies, first, the notion that no one is in absolute possession of the whole truth. Right conclusions are reached, but not by being authoritatively declared right in advance. Rather, they are reached through a process, a labor ”they are gathered ”and gathered, in Hand's formulation, "out of a multitude of tongues." I take this to mean that where no position is deemed to hold a certifiable monopoly on rightness, the search for truth requires a willingness to engage and test the adequacy of partial truths or possible contenders for the truth, and this requires access to the fullest realm of possible positions: a cacophony of voices and competing points of view, a multitude of tongues. With superb consistency, Hand recognizes that his own philosophy is not right beyond question: the notion, he acknowledges, may be folly, and to many will always seem so. The trouble is, one must embrace it and support it, for all its possible risks and limitations, unless one is willing to fall back on the philosophy of "authoritative selection" ”the philosophy that thinks single points of view can be true in advance and beyond discussion.

Duke's decision to allow the PSM Conference to take place here was not an endorsement of the point of view of the conference's sponsors. It was an endorsement of their and everyone else's right to free speech and an endorsement of the belief that education arises through the free airing of difference and the mutual engagement of opposing points of view, not the suppression of those we dislike. If I speak of this matter to the Academic Council, it is because the Duke faculty played such a central and superb role in making the university's stand work. Many faculty members expressed their anguish over the issue to me, and, believing in free expression as I do, I would not have wished them not to. But I'm also grateful that, with markedly few exceptions, these faculty members saw the necessity of the university's decision and the importance of the principle that required it.  Some who opposed the conferee's beliefs helped mount rival programs expressing a range of differing points of view. Very appropriately, they added voices to the multitude of tongues and enriched the possibilities for education in this community ”a tactic preferable in every way to the silencing of others. A group of concerned faculty attended the conference sessions as informal marshals and helped guarantee that rival points of view were in fact free to speak. This is citizenship of a very high order: it's a lucky university where the faculty is willing to take responsibility for enforcing norms of discourse and educational values rather than leaving that to the administration or the police.

Finally, I express my gratitude to the Executive Committee of the Academic Council and its chair, Nancy Allen, for their help in the weeks just past. In best citizenly and collaborative fashion, ECAC did not merely endorse the rightness of the administration's position: they both supported and contributed to the elaboration of the position. I will read two parts of the ECAC statement on the PSM Conference, the first of which I found gratifying as a restatement of the line I had been taking for weeks, the second gratifying for expressing a side of the issue ”the role of free speech explicitly for students ”that had not occurred to me in this form: "Great universities are predicated on the notion that the free expression of ideas, however unpopular, and the critical dialogue they engender, are essential both to the vitality of the academy and to the health of democratic discourse beyond our walls. . . . The principle of open exchange is especially important to uphold when it involves student expression. The mission of the university concerns more than the transmittal of facts. At the heart of our shared project stands the development of informed voices, the search for good arguments, and the dogged protection of the space in which these processes may unfold. As faculty, we believe we have a special obligation to support our students when they create opportunities to engage with ideas, to consider them critically, and to debate them openly."

Amen say I -- and I will add just two more things to conclude. First, I thank every member of the Duke community who worked to make last weekend a display of the power of free expression in the service of education. We could have witnessed a carnival of censoriousness and intolerance; that we did not is a tribute to the moral strength of this community. Second and last, let's keep last week's events in mind as an image of what faculty governance can amount to. The right to tell the administration it's being stupid before it acts on its stupidity is a valuable right, I don't deny it; but far more valuable is the right, indistinguishable from the responsibility, to help this place live up to its high aims. That is our joint labor. We have more work ahead.

President Brodhead added the following comments at the end of his remarks:

Let me add a further word. On the Monday after the PSM conference, the Chronicle published an editorial entitled "THE JEWS" that deployed a variety of cliches with long-running careers in the history of anti-semitism. The editorial was regrettable on a variety of grounds. First, playing to a history of prejudice I must assume its author only partly understood, it displayed a form of stereotypic thinking deplorable under any circumstances and completely inappropriate to this community. Anti-semitism has no place at Duke, any more than any other form of prejudice. Second, the editorial was particularly regrettable in its timing. Just after this community had passed through a divisive chapter and weathered its storms, this piece reactivated divisions we seemed to have successfully transcended, causing hard feelings at a time when feelings were unusually raw.

Third, the editorial was particularly unkind in its choice of target. The students associated with the Freeman Center for Jewish Life had been under all the same pressure I had faced to oppose the conference. Instead, they had acknowledged the right of those they disagreed with to free expression, and had worked hard to do what a proponent of free speech would have recommended: to mount the expression of alternate points of view to enrich the chances for education. For students who had taken so much trouble and played so constructive a role to be slammed with the charge that they were using money and power to shut down criticism of the Jews was particularly painful, because particularly undeserved.

I was out of town when the editorial was printed and learned of it for the first time around midnight on Monday. Returning home on Tuesday, I read the piece and immediately wrote a letter to the Chronicle condemning its habits of thought. Having felt that it was the President's job to protect the rights of free expression, a crucial value in the university, I felt it was also part of my job to defend another core value: our collective right to live in an environment free from any form of prejudice. This is why I sent my letter.

I profoundly regret this chapter in Duke's recent history. I would give a great deal to have been able to prevent it from having happened.  Nevertheless, the event having occurred, it presents opportunities it's important to seize. While I would never have chosen this occasion, this episode has raised our collective awareness of the dangerous logic of anti-semitism in particular and of prejudice in general. No student on this campus will be as na¯ve about such matters today as he or she may have been two weeks ago. This is not the education Duke sought to provide, but it is a valuable education nonetheless, and one we will reinforce in coming weeks and months.

Let me add that, as a newcomer, I've found nothing more striking about Duke than the warmth and mutual appreciation that pervades this community. This is the best weapon against divisiveness and derogatory thinking. Armed with this asset, Duke will face down this and every other attack on the full humanity of every member of this community.