arcoftheuniverse

Greetings, I am pleased to support this petition against academic boycotts. I enclose the text of the petition’s statement and encourage you to read it and consider signing.

I am grateful for the efforts of three colleagues in political science to organize the petition:

Ronald Krebs, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota

Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Arts & Sciences Emeritus, English Department, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Ron Hassner, Professor, Political Science, U.C. Berkeley

The text, authored by these colleagues, I reprint, beginning here:

Against Academic Boycotts

To sign the statement, click here.

On Friday, August 9, 2024, the American Association of University Professors, which has long eloquently defended the core principle of academic freedom, reversed course and declared academic boycotts legitimate.

We believe the AAUP’s new position is wrong-headed and dangerous. We cannot safeguard academic freedom by violating academic freedom. Normalizing academic boycotts poses a profound threat to academic freedom.

Academic freedom is always fragile. We do not defend the academic freedom only of those with whom we agree, but of those—and especially of those—whose views we find odious. The AAUP eloquently asserted the right to academic freedom in its 1915 founding document, and it eloquently asserted that right again in 1940, a moment in US history when US universities were hardly bastions of freedom and when the gates of free expression were, under the pressures of war, swinging shut. The AAUP’s clarion call did not immediately become the norm, and the right to academic freedom was, in the first two decades of the Cold War, observed more in the breach. Indeed, the AAUP itself failed the test of McCarthyism. It has now failed the test posed by the ongoing war in Gaza.

In 2005, the AAUP approved a statement condemning academic boycotts absolutely and unconditionally: “We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas.” A year later, a committee of distinguished scholars elaborated and defended the association’s stance. Despite significant debate in the two decades since then, the AAUP has maintained that position. The AAUP was right then—and it is wrong now.

Academic boycotts must be opposed, in principle, for two reasons.

1.         Academic boycotts are in deep tension with the basic animating spirit and values of the academy. Scholarly progress depends on the free exchange of ideas, and this in turn requires the free movement of people and cultivation of relationships among universities wherever they may be located. The only relevant measure of value lies in the substantive contribution of the scholarship itself—not the place where its authors reside or are employed. Scholarly knowledge cannot progress if scholars’ voices are silenced for reasons of politics, whether the political entanglements of their institutions or their national government or even the political views of the individuals themselves. The AAUP expert committee argued in 2006, “the search for truth and its free expression suffer if a boycott is in place… the need is always for more academic freedom, not less.” We cannot save academic freedom by endorsing and implementing boycotts that violate academic freedom.

2.         Academic boycotts punish individual scholars for the alleged misbehavior of their government and/or of their academic institutions. This is a material fact based on the structure of the modern university. They should not be judged complicit in policies which they had no role in formulating. To punish these scholars for the misdeeds of others is to engage in unwarranted collective punishment.

We are troubled by reports of violations of academic freedom on college and university campuses around the world. If individual scholars could lose their right to academic freedom because their institutions ran roughshod over others’ rights to the same, very few around the world would enjoy the right to academic freedom. Academics in China, Russia, Turkey, the Arab world, Singapore, and many other places should then be subject to boycott. And don’t forget the United States: academic freedom in the United States is under assault today from both the right and the left. If universities need to be free of sin for their scholars to deserve academic freedom, there would be no academic freedom at all.

Defenders of boycotts, including the AAUP in its latest statement, sometimes seek to distinguish between institutions and their members, asserting that they call for boycott only of the former. But this is a distinction without a difference. There is no way to boycott an institution without undermining scholarly exchange, joint research programs, and instructional collaborations and thereby violating individuals’ academic freedom. As the AAUP rightly observed nearly 20 years ago, “The form that noncooperation with an academic institution takes inevitably involves a refusal to engage in academic discourse with teachers and researchers, not all of whom are complicit in the policies that are being protested”—and the vast majority of whom are certainly not responsible for those policies.

Academic freedom is an inviolable right to which all scholars must be entitled regardless of whether they perfectly uphold that right for others. That extends as well to our colleagues who, in a sincere commitment to use whatever tools are at their disposal to effect political change, endorse academic boycotts and thereby violate academic freedom. Faculty members and students should not face institutional or governmental censorship or discipline for endorsing academic boycotts, though participating in boycotts should be seen as a violation of professional norms.

The only circumstance under which we might (and, even then, only might) see a boycott as justifiable is if academic freedom were so restricted that the academy had become simply, and nothing more than, a mouthpiece of government. In such a circumstance, academics have lost their right to freedom because they have become mere apparatchiks. However, if academic freedom were that severely compromised in a country, then a comprehensive economic boycott would be in order, not a targeted boycott of universities.

The AAUP does not speak for us. We call on our fellow scholars to join us in opposing boycotts of fellow scholars wherever they might reside and be employed.

To sign the statement, click here.

This question titles a piece that I just published in The Irish Rover that begins:

Days after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel—killing over 1200 men, women and children, beheading babies, murdering the elderly, killing more Jews in any day since the Holocaust—hundreds of students at our nation’s most prestigious universities protested … Israel.

What are these students being taught such that they would condone Hamas’s attacks? What they are not being taught is the natural law, I argue — the moral law that structures the universe and forms of the backbone of the United Nations Charter and the proscription of war crimes in international law. The student’s protests undercut the validity of these cherished and fragile international norms.

Catholic universities are in a strong position to teach the natural law and contribute to the nation and the international community, I go on to argue . . .

Last month, on December 14, 2023, I attended a remarkable meeting of religious leaders from around the world in Princeton University to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Common today is the view that religion is an enemy of human rights. The conference, though, recalled the remarkable consensus of world religious leaders that made the adoption of the UDHR possible in 1948, a story that Harvard Emeritus Professor Mary Ann Glendon has told in her book of 2002, A World Made New. Glendon was a starring speaker at the conference, along with Mr. Yahya Cholil Staquf, the General Secretary of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organization and a strong proponent of religious freedom. Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, evangelical Protestant, Mormon, and Buddhist thought leaders were all in attendance. Behind the conference was the Center for Shared Civilizational Values, whose efforts are detailed here. The members agreed upon a “R20 Princeton Declaration” of support for human rights from the world’s religions. If the logic behind the declaration is correct, human rights will depend on religion if they to remain globally prominent in the next 75 years just as they depended on religion for being adopted in the UDHR.

I was asked to speak about the possibility of religions changing so as to support human rights. I answered by drawing upon my own religion, Catholicism, in a seven minute set of remarks:

One of the themes of Mary Ann Glendon’s masterful narration of the crafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, A World Made New, is supremely relevant for our consultation: her story of how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came to be supported by major world religious and philosophical traditions – Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Confucianism. Religions? Human rights? Have not religions long relegated their heretics and other religions’ minorities to ghettos, dhimmi status, inquisitions, crusades, and second class citizenship? Such skepticism is not altogether misplaced. Prior to and even during modern centuries, it has been rare for any religious tradition to uphold religious freedom, one of the UDHR’s most important human rights. Religious traditions, it seems, must be capable of change if they are to become part of a global consensus on human rights.

Members of religious traditions, though, might find this backwards. If they hold their religion to be encompassingly true, they might well ask that human rights be made compatible with their religion rather than that their religion change to fit human rights.

If a religion is not compatible with certain human rights, then, it seems that we are stuck: Proponents of human rights demand that a religion change, while proponents of the religion resist this very change. A third way exists, though, that this binary choice elides. That is, a religion could change its position on human rights without compromising, and even through drawing on, its enduring claims to truth. I will argue that the Catholic Church did exactly this in its teachings on religious freedom and so became the world’s largest proponent of the global human rights cause.

The Christian Church was at first the recipient of religious repression. A Roman governor executed the Church’s founder at the behest of leaders of his own religion on account of his religious claims. All of Jesus’s apostles except for one were martyred. But then, just following the Roman Empire’s largest persecution came one of history’s greatest game-changers, the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312. Constantine tolerated other religions at first, but by the end of the fourth century, the Roman Empire sharply restricted other religions. An intellectual underpinning for this restriction came in St. Augustine’s decision to support the suppression of the heretical Donatist sect in the early fifth century.

Over the following sixteen centuries, the Church sanctioned the coercion and subordination of heretics and religious minorities. The Inquisition, a Church court whose persecution Black Legends have wildly exaggerated, nevertheless mandated the execution of some 6000 heretics between the 12^th and the 19^th centuries. Catholic princes, sometimes with the support of bishops, forced the conversion and exile of Jews and Muslims and treated them as second class citizens in countries across medieval Europe, especially Spain. In early modern Europe Catholics and Protestants killed one another in vying to establish and rule each of their churches in their territory. Even after the Catholic Church had its last heretic hanged in 1826, popes in the 19^th century continued to reject religious freedom as an “absurd and erroneous opinion” and “a putrid font of indifferentism” that they thought was rooted in the relativism of the French Revolution. As late as the 1950s, the Church in Rome taught that the state could restrict other faiths and silenced the writings of the American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, a pioneer of Catholic arguments for religious freedom.

The Church proclaimed religious freedom as a natural human right in its declaration, Dignitatis Humanae, of December 7, 1965, at the close of the Second Vatican Council. How did it come to its new position?

Certain seeds of freedom had been present since the earliest centuries. As Timothy Samuel Shah has shown, early Christian theologians such as Tertullian and Lactantius, a court adviser to Constantine, had taught religious freedom. Even during long centuries of sanctioned coercion, philosophers such as Augustine and Aquinas as well as certain bishops held that faith must be a free act and could not be coerced. They justified burning heretics on the argument that heresy, like sedition, was a threat to social cohesion and the souls of others. Thomas Aquinas compared religious heresy to counterfeit money, a threat to the entire society.

At the Council, skeptics such as Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani argued that error has no rights, but proponents replied that persons have rights, namely to search for religious truth. The doctrine that heretics could be legally punished for their social damage had been a political, not a dogmatic, one, and could be left behind without detracting from eternal truth. The council offered a basis for religious freedom, dignity, that differed from the basis on which 19^th century popes rejected religious freedom, relativism. The Church’s doctrine had developed.

The Church’s pathway to religious freedom may hold lessons for other religions. Islam, like Catholicism, has a long history of denying full religious freedom. Like Catholicism, it faced secular enlightenment claims of religious tolerance that did not tolerate Islam and were unsound in their own right. Like Catholicism, Islam also contains seed of religious freedom such as the Quran’s teaching (2:256), “there is no compulsion in religion.” Muslim thought leaders such as Yahya Cholil Staquf and Mustafa Akyol have pioneered arguments for religious freedom on traditional Islamic grounds, much as Fr. Murray did for Catholicism.

Yet we should be careful not to conclude from all of this that religious traditions are stragglers, forever catching up to what secular modernity has pioneered. Living in the Roman Empire, Christians not only advocated religious freedom but also laid the foundations for human rights in their notions of the dignity of every person, equality, and universalism. Natural rights appear in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, medieval canon law, the Spanish scholastics of the fifteenth century, and modern papal encyclicals. Meanwhile, leading secular theorists of human rights such as Yale’s Samuel Moyn, argue that human rights are expressions of partisan positions, an unpromising recipe for a global consensus that rights are universally valid. Perhaps the real question is not whether religions can come to support human rights but whether human rights can be sustained without religion.

The 75^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights just took place December 10^th. At 75, the declaration can celebrate extraordinary success in advancing human rights in international law, the foreign policies of states, and a formidable network of non-governmental organizations.

Will human rights enjoy this position 75 years from today? Signs of illness – fatal? – exist. The best guarantee of longevity is a recognition of their status as natural law. The best carriers of this recognition are religious traditions. It may be that 75 years from now human rights “will be the cause not of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, but instead of the Catholic Church, Nahdlatul Ulama (the world’s largest Muslim organization), Engaged Buddhism, and the World Jewish Congress,” I argue in a symposium published on Friday, December 8^th, in Law and Liberty. The other essays argue in a similar spirit, one on the Christian contributions to the UDHR, one on right and duties in the UDHR, and one on U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s “Incendiary Centrist” report on human rights. Add Andrea Picciotti-Bayer’s piece on Harvard Professor Mary Ann Glendon’s contribution to the UDHR’s legacy in the National Catholic Register here.

Religious freedom is a fragile human right. I hold that it is a natural right, grounded in human dignity, and universally merited, but relatively rarely in history have conditions existed in which religious freedom has been enjoyed in practice and guaranteed effectively by law. Even under constitutions such as that of the United States, a pioneer and model of religious freedom, new threats have emerged in recent years. A fortiori threats are faced by the Uighur Muslims in China, Christians in Nigeria, and Bahais in most places where they live.

Religious freedom faces a different kind of threat in skepticism of its worthiness as a right — different and in some respects more thoroughgoing. The defense of religious freedom in so many places depends on the presence of the human right of religious freedom in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights, other international law instruments, the constitutions of states, and other forums whose championing of this right depends on its presence in law: eighteen states whose foreign policies promote religious freedom, five multilateral bodies, including the European Union, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. If people cease to believe that religious freedom merits its place as a human right in international law and constitutions, this presence of religious freedom there will be endangered.

Numerous intellectuals, at least in the Anglo-American world, have published skeptical arguments that religious freedom deserves a right of its own. This is worrying, for it is in the university, including its law schools, that tomorrow’s advocates of human rights are trained as international lawyers, activists, government officials and much more.

In this paper, forthcoming as an article this month in the American Journal of Jurisprudence, I offer a fresh defense of the human right of religious freedom. Here is the abstract: 

This essay presents a fresh defense of the human right of religious freedom. It addresses two versions of skepticism of this human right, one a liberal variant, which questions religious freedom’s distinctiveness, the other a post-modern variant, which questions religious freedom’s universality. The case for a universal and distinct human right of religious freedom rests upon the claim that religion is a basic human good, manifesting human dignity and warranting a human right. The essay details four respects in which religion fulfills the meaning of a basic human good. Religion is a purposive set of acts, or practices; is a definable phenomenon whose core meaning is right relationship with a superhuman power; entails both an intrinsic good and derivate goods; and is universal in its scope. Finally, crucial to the human right of religious freedom is religion’s interiority, that is, its critical involvement of will, mind, and heart.

Response is welcome.

The war in Israel and Gaza puts the question of justice before all of us who read and pray about it.

The National Catholic Register ran a piece Friday with three writers voicing views on the justice of the conflict, of which I am one.

I also commend this particularly Catholic perspective of the justice of the conflict by Fr. Roger Landry.

Added November 13, 2023: See the excellent analysis of the justice of the conflict by Peter Sonski, the candidate for President of the United States of the American Solidarity Party.

Wounds remain. That is the premise of a new white paper published by the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, Fully Equipped For Every Good Work: A Proposal of Twelve Core Competencies in Ministering to Survivors of Sexual Abuse For Seminary Formation Programs.

The paper offers sound wisdom and proposals for seminaries to train priests to minister to people affected by clergy sex abuse. Implemented, it could go a long way towards the healing of victim-survivors, other people involved in sex abuse, and the Catholic Church — an approach that goes beyond protection, as important as this is, and legal settlement, which is often alone unrestorative. It is authored by Fr. Thomas Berg, Dr. Timothy Lock, and Dr. Justin Anderson, and grows out of their involvement in consultations held on clergy sex abuse at the University of Notre Dame in 2021 and the University of St. Thomas in 2022. The consultations also inspired the National Catholic Restorative Justice Initiative, which works for healing from these wounds in the Church.

Is there a case for reparations for racism in the United States?

Public Discourse has published a shorter version of the argument I made for reparations (and apology and forgiveness) as responses to racism in the paper that I posted on this blog in April. Public Discourse asked Dr. Derryck Green to respond to my piece, which he did thoughtfully. I had read Dr. Green’s chapter in the volume, Race and Covenant: Recovering the Religious Roots for American Reconciliation, edited by Gerald R. McDermott, where he argued for forgiveness even while he took a view of reparations different (though not entirely) from my own. His and the other essays in the volume were a strong inspiration of the paper I refer to above.

Both of our perspectives are written from a Christian standpoint, drawing upon both natural law as well as the Cross and Resurrection, which we see embedded in America’s national heritage and standing as resources for healing the wounds of racism.

The debate about war between Ukraine and Russia invokes different conceptions of peace. A minimal peace is what advocates of an immediate end to fighting propose. Genuine peace, though, realizes justice, which means not only Putin’s exit from Ukraine but also measures to heal the wounds of war. Such a justice is a Christian one of right relationship. This is what I argue in a new piece in America.