Opinion
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Academic Freedom And Historical Denial
Michael Brooks
Community View
N
Ann Arbor
orthwestern University
Professor Arthur Butz
is back in the news.
His longstanding notoriety is not
for his academic achievements
but for his repeated assertions
that the Holocaust, one of the
20th century's most horrific
events that consumed the lives
of millions of Jews, gypsies, gays
and political dissidents during
the genocidal Nazi reign of ter-
ror, never happened.
In uttering this canard Butz
shares the media stage with
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the
recently elected president of Iran,
who has expressed a similar
view. While both of their pro-
nouncements have evoked deep
concern, they have distinctly
different significance and it is
important to understand why.
Ahmadinejad, who one day
may be capable of launching a
missile with a nuclear warhead,
has called for Israel, the world's
only Jewish state, to be wiped
off the map. Because of this
potential he may represent an
existential threat not only to the
Jewish people but also to much
of the world that will not have
the luxury of watching from the
sidelines if he decides to ignite a
second Holocaust.
Butz, however upsetting and
infuriating his remarks, does not
represent such a threat, and calls
for Northwestern University to
dismiss or silence him are inap-
propriate.
Conundrum
While the Jewish community
is understandably outraged by
Butz's remarks, they represent a
far greater challenge for the uni-
versity. Northwestern President
Henry Bienen's disavowal of
Butz's opinion as "a contemptible
insult to all decent and feeling
people" while invoking "the vital
principle of intellectual freedom
that all academic institutions
serve to protect" doesn't fully
explain the remarkable and
counter-intuitive boundaries that
inform discourse in the academy.
A university, precisely because
it is constituted for the unfettered
discussion of ideas, must have a
much higher free-speech bar and
concomitantly tolerate a much
higher level of obnoxious and
offensive speech in order to not
squelch discourse that borders on
being unacceptable.
This doesn't mean, however,
that any and all speech is accept-
able. Indeed, it is in some ways
more circumscribed in areas
where people are supposed to
have expertise.
Butz wraps himself in the
mantle of historical revisionism.
Whatever one might think about
the conclusions of revisionist his-
tory, it does follow a certain logic.
A revisionist historian might
argue, for example, that President
John F. Kennedy was not killed
by Lee Harvey Oswald but by the
CIA who then had to eliminate
Oswald to cover their tracks. A
revisionist historian might even
maintain that Pearl Harbor was
not bombed by Japan but by
American planes with Japanese
markings at the instigation of
President Franklin Roosevelt as a
pretext for America to enter the
war.
But to maintain that Kennedy
was not killed or that Pearl
Harbor was not bombed is not
historical revisionism. It is his-
torical denial and as such would
be beyond the pale of acceptable .
discourse in a university history
department.
Denial Or Revision?
When our daughter was 8 years
old she wanted to know why
moving the light switch up and
down turned the ceiling lightpn
and off. One day we were enter-
taining a friend, a professor of
electrical engineering at a presti-
gious East Coast university, and
suggested that she ask him for an
explanation.
"There's a little genie that
sleeps in a box behind the
switch," he told her. "When you
flip the switch up it wakes him
up and he runs faster than you
can imagine up to the ceiling,
turns on the light and then runs
back to the box and falls asleep.
When you flip the switch down it
wakes him up again and he runs
back up to the ceiling, turns the
light off and returns to the box
and falls back asleep."
"Oh, go on:' she said, "do you
really believe that?" •
"I'm not sure if I really believe
that," he replied,"but if I told you
what I really believe I'm not sure
you would believe me at all."
It was a sweet and perhaps
age-appropriate explanation, one
that even an 8-year-old could see
through. If he had been teach-
ing this theory in his electrical
engineering classes, however, he
probably would not have been
teaching there for long.
If a professor of art history
were to promulgate such a view
it would be laughable but would
not compromise the academic
enterprise because she wasn't
hired for her expertise in electri-
cal engineering. A professor of
botany might well believe that
the South lost the American Civil
War because God was on the
side of the North, but it would
be dangerous for a university to
sanction him for espousing such
a belief on his personal web site.
President Bienen was on
target when he said that Butz's
"reprehensible opinions on
this issue are an embarrass-
ment to Northwestern!" After
all, how could someone intel-
ligent enough in his field to be
granted tenure at Northwestern
University engage in discourse so
patently false that it would not be
acceptable in an academic arena
where scholars are supposed to
know what they're talking about?
Removing professors for their
foolish or even offensive extra-
curricular speech would harm
the university even more than
tolerating such speech would
embarrass it. Anti-Semites will
hate Jews with or without the
support of a feckless profes-
sor of electrical engineering in
Evanston, Illinois. The world
has much more reason to be
concerned about the untenured
president in Iran who might be
tempted to let the nuclear genie
out of the box. ❑
'Michael Brooks is executive director
of the University of Michigan Hine'.
This commentary was first published
in the Jewish Week of New York.
Think Globally, Give Globally
Jeffrey D. Sachs
Special Commentary
New York/JTA
he Jewish commitment
to charity is both deep
and illustrious, going to
the core of the Jewish faith.
Maimonides offered a scin-
tillating account of the moral
hierarchy of charitable giving
that has not been surpassed in
a millennium. He regarded as
the highest of all giving to be
the kind that allows the recipi-
ent to break the poverty cycle
and become self-reliant. As the
world changes, so too must our
response to the profound corn-
34
March 30 2006
mandment of charity.
I would like to urge a glo-
balization of our tzedakah; we
should increasingly aim'our
charitable impulses and energies
to places on the planet in most
urgent need, where tzedakah
can mean the difference of life
over death for millions of our
fellow human beings each year,
and where our giving can satisfy
Maimonides' call to break the
poverty trap itself.
The Jewish charitable impulse
arose in the distant past, far
before our present affluence. We
remember the moment in Fiddler
on the Roof when the beggar
complains at receiving only one
kopeck rather than two. When
the donor responds that he had
a bad week, the beggar famously
replies, "You had a bad week, so I
should suffer?"
The deeper truth in this
exchange is that charity has been,
historically, deeply ingrained
in communities in which even
donors faced tremendous and
chronic risks of impoverishment,
famine and deprivation. Charity
was and is a commandment for
all, even the poor, and even at
times of mass vulnerability.
Today's middle classes in the
high-income world, not to men-
tion the more affluent members
of the community, live far beyond
the material standards of the
royalty of all earlier ages. While
the vagaries of life continue to
be real, they are not due to the
imminent risks of extreme mate-
rial deprivation.
But this is not true for more
than 2 billion people on the
planet who live in conditions
of severe material depriva-
tion, and it's certainly not true
for the poorest billion people,
whose material deprivation is
so extreme that life is a daily
struggle for survival.
The poorest billion lack reli-
able access to food, mic•onutri-
ents, safe drinking water, basic
preventive health care and essen-
tial health treatments when sick.
Best estimates are that around 8
to 10 million people die each year
for the simple and preposterous
reason that they are too poor to
stay alive.
Scientific studies have shown
what can be accomplished even
in marginal environments if the
poor are empowered with the
tools of modern, proven tech-
nologies. Africa can grow vastly
more food than it does if farm-
ers are availed of improved seed
varieties, better water manage-
ment (e.g., drip irrigation), and
organic and chemical systems to
replenish depleted soils. Diseases
such as malaria, African river