It's hard to imagine a more striking example of how liberal arts education is destroying itself than the explicitly political "Crying Wolf" project.
Academic freedom carries with it rights as well as responsibilities. The concept derives from the belief that academics, because of specialized training in their subject matter, have earned the right to teach their areas of expertise and to follow their research questions as the evidence dictates---free from political pressure from the government. Indeed, only through a guarantee of such freedom can academics engage in a search for truth.
A corresponding responsibility, of course, is that academics will actually seek to pursue the truth. If professors' research methods imitate the likes of James Carville or Karl Rove, then what purpose exists to safeguard the academy from the government? Indeed, at public universities, if the professoriate functions as partisan hacks, selectively plucking items to advance a political agenda, what's to stop legislative demands that the faculty mirror the partisan breakdown of the state, to ensure proportionate representation to all political viewpoints?
A newly announced project called "Crying Wolf," organized out of the Center on Policy Initiatives, seems blithely unconcerned with any requirements associated with academic freedom. As John has noted, project coordinators Peter Dreier (a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College), Nelson Lichtenstein (a historian of 20th century U.S. history at UC Santa Barbara who directs the university's Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy), and Donald Cohen, CPI executive director, are recruiting professors and graduate students (in "history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy") to perform "paid academic research" that can "serve in the battle with conservative ideas."
I bolded the key sentence: it's not just that liberal arts education is making itself useless by failing to teach anything of value, but it's also baiting the powers-that-be by undermining the foundation of the societal protection it enjoys. If "academic freedom" is used as a shield to protect political adversaries rather than merely unpopular truth, then why should society preserve it? Academic freedom will become just another political football at the mercy of whatever ideology holds power.
