Teaching about the relation of CUNY working conditions to the
students is protected by academic freedom, and by the provisions
of our collective bargaining agreement. But the fact that it is
legal does not resolve the question of whether it is right. The
"Teach CUNY" day of action was of course voluntary, and
each of us had to decide this question for herself or himself.
One question that faculty confronted concerns the nature of a
university labor contract: Is it merely a set of self-interested
demands for faculty and staff welfare, quite divorced from student
interests? Or is it—and in this case the PSC urgently insists
that it is—a document devoted to rebuilding CUNY and therefore
also devoted to our students as much as ourselves?
Another question has to do with the extension of a teacher’s
authority to advocacy of any sort. Here the nature of our
authority in the classroom has to be examined carefully. We are
teachers, not preachers or thought police, and students—though
obliged to be in class—are not a passive congregation of
believers nor a flock of dupes. They are, rather, thinking adults
with (typically) a good deal of life experience and resistance to
persuasion. They are skeptical and critical listeners, able to
judge a position and an argument, and vigorous discussants, ready
to argue the point. They will hear what we say, weigh it
carefully, and think about their response all along the scale from
enthusiastic support to outright rejection.
This is what "Teach CUNY" meant in an individual
classroom—to present facts, history, institutional structure,
arguments, and ideas about organizing for what we need, for
students to discuss and respond to. That is something quite
different from imposing a particular view of the CUNY situation
purely by force of our authority as teachers. What IS that
authority, anyway?
Academic freedom, in its classic 19th-century German
formulation as the freedom to learn and the freedom to teach (Lernfreiheit,
Lehrfreiheit), implies that a university teacher’s authority is
earned by its valuable relation to existing knowledge, earned in
performance, and judged by peers and students both. "Teach
CUNY" was fully in that classical spirit of academic freedom.
From that point of view, to pursue the self-reflexive question of
how my course, my classroom, and its intellectual concerns are
related to the institution in which it is located is to inquire
into the very conditions of the possibility of academic freedom,
especially in the new circumstances of the restructured
university.
Finally, more recent thinking in the humanities and social
sciences about the knowledge industry and the institutions where
knowledge is produced encourages acknowledgment of the always
already socially and politically inflected dimension of university
teaching. It is an older, problematic liberal idealism that would
segregate the university classroom from the political and ethical
tensions of contemporary life. To many of us, the freedom of the
classroom is always contested and claimed by competing ideas,
passions, and interests; and it is ethically better to acknowledge
that and be open about the ideas, passions, and interests one
deeply cherishes as a teaching intellectual than to postulate an
implausible neutrality free of commitments. That openness
certainly implies openness to contrary arguments in the classroom
and even an obligation to lay such arguments before students.
Examples of the justifications given by politicians, journalists,
and trustees for the attacks on CUNY were in fact included in the
"Teach CUNY" materials available on the PSC Web site.
Much more might be said. We are all learning as we go along as
academic unionists, for whom "the union" is us, not an
entity at 25 W. 43rd Street. To make the union an active
rank-and-file organization, to build the pressure for a decent
contract, means to rethink a good deal in our academic lives,
including our relation to students. The PSC means to do that very
carefully and with wide consultation, in our structures of
leadership and in our press. In this discussion, we may discover
some unexpected sources of renewal as academics in the academic
labor movement.
An earlier version of this article is on the PSC Web site,
www.psc-cuny.org.