By Jerome A. Cohen
Saturday's NY Times carries an important and fascinating story by Michael Wines detailing the decision of a Florida federal judge, Mark Walker, ordering the University of Florida to stop enforcing a policy that barred six of its professors from giving expert testimony in lawsuits against the state. The judge’s ruling reportedly “accused the university of trying to silence the professors for fear that their testimony would anger state officials and legislators who control the school’s funding. Judge Walker likened that to the decision last month by Hong Kong University to remove a 25-foot sculpture marking the 1989 massacre of student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square by the Chinese military, apparently for fear of riling the authoritarian Chinese government. If the comparison distressed university officials, he wrote, ‘the solution is simple. Stop acting like your contemporaries in Hong Kong.’”
Chairman Mao reputedly once admonished us to never underestimate the power of negative examples! I don’t know where the judge got this terrific idea from – whether from his own reading, the plaintiffs’ brief or his law clerks. But this example opens up many possibilities for, as both Chinese and foreigners like to say, “turning a vice into a virtue.”
It is sad to see a major American university engaging in such repression today. It was bad enough when, sixty years ago, the University of California at Berkeley forced philosophy professor John Searles and me to cancel a program scheduled to condemn the U.S. House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee. When we protested, the campus vice-chancellor told us the university could not afford to offend the legislature. We should have sued. Instead we both moved on to freer climes.