Cass Sunstein has a Guest Essay in today’s New York Times that argues that the First Amendment is the key to the norms that govern free speech on campus: “Only the First Amendment Can Protect Students, Campuses, and Speech.” His point is that universities should either adhere to First Amendment jurisprudence or legislate and enforce some functional equivalent of it. The First Amendment is (on this reading) supposed to be a content-neutral protector of free speech, with exceptions that Sunstein duly enumerates in the latter half of the essay.

Some of what he says seems fine, and some of it seems wrongheaded, but I was struck by the insouciant sloppiness of this particular sentence: 

In a class on Shakespeare, students and professors can be instructed by administrators to discuss Shakespeare, not the presidential election.

No, they can’t. That’s not how academic freedom works, not how Shakespeare works, and not how pedagogy works.

I understand Sunstein’s larger, unstated point. Every class has a subject-matter determined ahead of time and codified in the Course Description and Syllabus. It’s false advertising and academic dereliction to agree to teach a class on subject X, but fail to do so, e.g., by teaching something else, or failing to teach anything at all.

Point granted. Indeed, I think I have a better-than-average grasp of it than most. My 26-year university teaching career ended back in 2020 when I discovered that a “colleague” who’d been assigned to teach Intro to Political Science had in fact not been showing up to teach his class at all. Where was he? Well, Professor Absent was something of a local media personality, so he was off curating his (Trump-supporting) social media at the times when he was contractually obliged to teach his class. He missed fourteen classes in a row, didn’t respond to student queries, didn’t respond to my queries as Pre-Law Advisor and academic advisor, and handed grades out to students without benefit of instruction. I initiated an investigation into the matter with the Dean’s office, and was told by the Dean that the accused professor had made a full admission under questioning. But as a donor to the university, he was too valuable an asset to be treated with the kind of impartiality reserved for less important faculty. Or so it was thought. 

The university felt the need to cover up the instructor’s malfeasances, and ordered me to facilitate the cover-up.  I refused. A loud altercation followed, during which great offense was taken at my various remonstrations, objections, and unapologetically hostile denunciations. Apparently, candor violates the norms of academic speech when taken too far. To make a long story short, I resigned before the university managed to fire me. Thus ended my untenured academic career. To belabor the obvious, it ended over the principle that an instructor is obliged to teach the class he agreed to teach, an obligation not discharged by teaching no class at all, then going off to promote the Trump Presidency on Facebook and Twitter. I lost all I owned in the aftermath of that quarrel, and though it’s a long and winding story, lost more than that. 

So I don’t dispute the unstated principle–or rather, don’t dispute the principle I just stated but that Sunstein didn’t. But the fact remains, Sunstein’s Shakespeare example is an exceptionally poor illustration of the principle–so bad, I would say, that it doesn’t really count as illustrating it at all.

The example is, for one thing, really unclear. A “class on Shakespeare” can be a class dedicated entirely to Shakespeare, a class devoted in large part to Shakespeare, or a class that covers a bit of Shakespeare. Those aren’t the same thing, and the principle doesn’t apply in the same way to them. It obviously doesn’t apply the same way to an advanced graduate seminar on Shakespeare, a 300-level undergraduate lecture on Elizabethan literature, or a 200-level poli sci course on Shakespeare and the Modern American Presidency. Yes, the last example is contrived, but so are a lot of course titles. Which one of these does Sunstein have in mind? The last example seems like counter-example enough on its own. But I personally could easily imagine an innocuous conversation about Shakespeare and the presidential election taking place in any of the three. I wonder why Sunstein can’t. 

The example also flouts the content of the plays themselves. Many of Shakespeare’s works have political implications, and some are specifically about political leaders. Indeed, scholars have written thousands of pages on the topic (see this or this, among hundreds of possible examples). It’s surely a truism by now that we often read literature so as to understand the world beyond the text, including the political world. Why wouldn’t Shakespeare’s specifically political works have some bearing on the presidency, or on the election? Assuming they would, what would be wrong with reading one of Shakespeare’s plays–whether his historical ones or his tragedies–to achieve a better understanding of the presidency, the election, or the presidential election? Or vice versa? Wouldn’t doing so require talking about both Shakespeare and the presidency? How else would you do it? 

Sunstein seems to be suggesting that there’s something untoward either about discussing Shakespeare in relation to contemporary politics, or about discussing contemporary politics as such in the classroom–and that administrators have the right to step in and put a stop to it when it takes place. People say this a lot nowadays, often with great confidence, and often with the sense that the problematic consequences of violating the implicit norm are patently obvious. They’re not at all obvious to me. So I’m curious to hear what the rationale is supposed to be. What’s wrong with political talk in the classroom? What goes wrong if you do it? 

I spent a quarter of a century teaching philosophy, and often taught Shakespeare in courses on political philosophy–usually The Merchant of Venice or The Tempest. When I did, I had no qualms about discussing Shakespeare in relation to contemporary politics, or vice versa. I also, for that matter, had few qualms talking politics in the classroom when I wasn’t teaching Shakespeare, including the couple of semesters I spent in Palestine teaching intifada in the classroom. The tactic occasionally backfired, as all tactics occasionally do, but it sometimes generated insight, whether in students or instructor or both. Is that wrong? If so, I guess I got things wrong for a quarter of a century. But to paraphrase Van Halen, it didn’t feel wrong. So if it was wrong, I’m desperately curious to know what was wrong with it.   

In “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” Michael Oakeshott points out that an authentic conversation is an inherently unpredictable thing. Once you start one, there’s no telling exactly where it’s going to go. And digressions are part of the charm. Just read Montaigne, or Nietzsche, or Freud, or Leslie Jamison, or any essayist worth her salt. A conversation trammeled by arbitrary administrative decrees, or inhibited by the threat of administrative scrutiny, is to that degree less of one. That’s why we have academic freedom in the first place. And teaching in the humanities–particularly teaching something like Shakespeare–is an inherently conversational activity. So the Oakeshottian insight has redoubled application there. 

So no–don’t let an administrator tell you how to teach Shakespeare, or what to bring up when you do. If they insist, exercise your right to free speech. Tell them to fuck off, and insist on doing things your way. Remind them that pedagogy doesn’t take place by administrative decree, and that if you need their advice, you’ll ask for it. 

I can’t say that things will go smoothly if you do things like this. Nor can I guarantee the security of your job or your future. I couldn’t guarantee my own. I can only say that if you’ve been tasked with teaching a class, you should have the freedom to decide how best to do it. Yes, you should teach any given class according to the Course Description and the Syllabus, according to your contract, and in general, in accordance with the law. But that’s a very coarse-grained set of guidelines. The First Amendment isn’t going to tell you what to do next. That’s up to you. Whether a discussion of Shakespeare is best advanced by discussing the presidential election or some other way is your call, not some administrator’s. So make it yourself; don’t cede it to them. There’s a reason why you’re in the classroom and they aren’t.