Not all cases of alleged harassment are so prima facie absurd, of course. Forty miles to the south of UCLA, Orange Coast College political science professor Ken Hearlson has been suspended with pay following a heated mid-September exchange with four Muslim students in one of his classes. The students claim that Hearlson is biased against Muslims, that he accused them personally of supporting terrorism and that he inspired a jingoistic rage among other students in the class. Hearlson denies these charges, saying that he merely intended to stimulate a discussion about whether there is a double standard at work among Middle Eastern governments that have denounced the World Trade Center attacks but praise Hamas suicide bombings in Israel.

The Hearlson case, like Richard Berthold's, is squarely about in-class behavior, not about professors' freelance expression of opinion at teach-ins or on Op-Ed pages. This is a crucial distinction for Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the author of There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too. Fish takes a strictly unsentimental approach to academic freedom: "It's a guild arrangement," he says. "It's designed to allow professors to teach without interference from ecclesiastical or political authorities. I try not to attach to academic freedom any big-think notions like Truth or Independence. It's a trade-off: The outside world leaves us alone, and in exchange we police ourselves, and behave responsibly in the classroom." Fish is unsympathetic to Berthold's insistence that his Pentagon joke is obviously and automatically exempt from university scrutiny. Suppose he'd quipped that "anyone who bombs a mosque gets my vote"--couldn't the university legitimately censure him for that? So, too, with Ken Hearlson's case. If the charges against him are true--if he indeed crossed the line and personally harassed students on account of their ethnicity or religion--doesn't the school have a clear responsibility to squelch such behavior?

As a basic proposition, Fish's claim is reasonable. But the catch is that it's far from certain that colleges in cases like Hearlson's will always make a good-faith effort to sort out the facts. The track record of campus antiharassment policies is not encouraging--they tend to define "harassment" extremely vaguely and to offer weak due-process protections at best. Hearlson was sent home the day the accusations were raised against him, before any investigation at all. "The college completely bypassed the faculty union's contract, and also bypassed the formal procedure for student grievances, all on the grounds of the September 11 emergency," says Carol Burke, president of the academic senate at OCC. The case has been turned over to an attorney with the Orange County Department of Education, who is interviewing student witnesses. An audiotape of the class, meanwhile, supports Hearlson's account of events, according to Burke. "There are thirty-five new adjuncts and faculty members here, and this has just terrified them--'You mean we can be taken out of the classroom just like that?'" Burke continues: "Of course serious claims of harassment should be investigated. But the college can't just short-circuit the contractual fair-hearing process. Meanwhile, this guy has been kept out of the classroom for eight weeks."

So a great number of questions--about speech codes, due process and faculty independence--obviously remain to be sorted out within academia. But to focus just on these matters is to miss the more immediate dangers from outside the campus: the rise of media demagoguery and the specter of populist violence, "the return of good old American anti-intellectualism," as Fish puts it. A drunken man entered Berthold's house and attempted to assault him, while several antiwar faculty members have received death threats, including Catherine Lutz, an anthropology professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and one of the objects of FrontPage's ire. Berthold says, "These two talk-radio hosts in Albuquerque play this game where they teeter right on the edge of telling their listeners to, you know, come get me. And it's ironic, because they're stretching the limits of the First Amendment themselves."

Outside the heavy-breathing precincts of talk-radio, some button-down conservatives are attempting to stigmatize even the most innocuous discussions of world affairs. On November 13 the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative watchdog group founded by Lynne Cheney, issued a report titled "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It." It lists 117 comments made by faculty and students in the wake of September 11, some of which are simple statements of fact. (Number 68, in its entirety: "Todd Gitlin, professor of communications at NYU: 'There is a lot of skepticism about the administration's policy of going to war.'") ACTA vice president and general counsel Anne Neal insists her organization does not call for censorship, but the report leans heavily on the rhetoric of "unity": "Academe is the only sector of American society that is distinctly divided in its response [to the terror attacks]."

The academy is indeed divided, and should be proud of it. But even as self-styled free-speech defenders like Horowitz and FrontPage are exposing their true colors, we should beware of similar hypocrisies from our own quarter. "It would be a sad day when the state decides what can and cannot be said on a campus," says Thor Halvorssen, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which has defended Berthold and Hearlson. "We're very happy that [UNC Chancellor] Moeser has stood up in defense of his faculty--but will he be just as tough when there's some nonsense from the other side of the spectrum, if people in Chapel Hill try to shout down Ward Connerly or ban a homosexuality-is-a-disease speaker? We'll be watching carefully. The public has got to be assured that campuses are not full of crazy double standards."

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