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Academic freedom, 2000 and after

Radical Teacher - December 22, 2001

What is the present condition of academic freedom? I say it's pretty vigorous, and will later explain why. Critics of "political correctness," whose voices are louder than such as mine, have for a decade shouted that academic freedom is weak: that it has been subverted by doctrinaire leftists and feminists who intimidate conservative or maverick scholars, disrupt their classes, persuade -- administrations to ( adopt repressive speech codes, and so on. (1) There are such events; the 1990s brought us books stuffed with them. But if you scan the news in an evenhanded way, you will not see such a pattern. In roughly the first six months of 2000, for example, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran about twenty stories of professors under fire. (2) Three match the stereotype of politically correct repression: a San Diego State professor denied tenure in African American Studies because, by her account, she was not "black enough" (but she won a settlement in court); vigorous protests at Princeton against Peter Singer's position on euthanasia; and the burning of an agricultural facility at Michigan State for its supposed work in foisting biotechnology on the Third World. Three others would be a stretch, for PC sleuths: a scholar at Cal State Long Beach accused of holding Jews responsible for the Holocaust; a Columbia Law professor criticized by students and then the school's Dean for using offensive examples (e.g., fetus murder) in an exam; and a faculty member at Florida Atlantic who sued over a sexual harassment charge (she lost in court).

And then, for symmetry, three stories raise questions about pressure from the right: a gay faculty member fired by a Catholic college (it claimed that was not the reason); George Mason University's conservative "Board of Visitors" (=trustees) intervening to place two traditional courses in a new curriculum; and Michael Sperber of Indiana University raking unscheduled leave because of intense heat, including death threats, from alums and others loyal to the egregious basketball coach, Bobby Knight, whom Sperber had criticized.

The remainder of the stories are about faculty members fired or suspended or denied reappointment for alleged offenses of one kind or another. The list includes two bizarre cases (one professor charged with using grant money to buy heroin for his subjects; another fired after pleading guilty to a child pornography charge--I take no position on the validity of such accusations, which are of course often vague or loaded with ideology). The other cases are humdrum, sad, and not very instructive: eccentric or rebellious professors in trouble with their bosses for. . . what? Typically the administration or department says unprofessional conduct or inadequate performance on the job; the professor says, being critical of the administration or department.

This sampling does not support the fears of the Right, as expressed for instance in the Republican platform ("At many institutions of higher learning, the ideal of academic freedom is threatened by intolerance"). In fact, the sampling doesn't clearly warrant any conclusion about academic freedom, 2000. My opening question calls nor for a snapshot but for a narrative reply: that's how it was then, this is how it is now, these are the forces that changed it. Such a narrative might be converted into a prediction: the same play of forces will take academic freedom farther along the same (dismal/hopeful) path; or those forces are changing, and with them the course of academic freedom.

Well, a number of stories in that form are now circulating. E.g., "In the late 1960s and after, leftists, feminists, and other dogmatic groups eroded academic freedom, which is fragile now and will continue to sicken." Or, "staunch defenders of academic freedom have put down the assaults that weakened it for two decades, and its prospects are now good." Or, "the Culture Wars had little effect on academic freedom, which is and will be healthy enough, unless the Right is allowed to create a new McCarthyism." Or, closest to the story I would myself tell, "1960s movements greatly expanded academic freedom, but the Right's counteroffensive has been telling, and will, along with cutbacks, probably reverse the gains of recent decades." A listener to these contending stories, and more, will suspect not just that the tellers see recent history through different political lenses, but that they mean different things by "academic freedom."

And certainly a contest has gone forward over the scope of that idea, as well as over who's trampling on whose rights and sensibilities. Daphne Patai speaks for many when she complains that

The battle cry of 'academic freedom' is still aimed at assaults from outside the academy--no longer McCarthyism, but now corporatization and privatization. Yet encroachments on academic freedom from inside--speech codes and antiharassment policies, for example--are tolerated, indeed welcomed, and that the concept of academic freedom has in this way been thoroughly debased.

("Speak Freely, Professor--Within the Speech Code, "The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 99, 2000, B8-B9).

Critics of higher education from well to the right of Patai have for a decade seen violations of academic freedom nor just in speech codes and harassment policies, which are formally adopted by the university, but in attacks by students on the incorrect views of their instructors, and in occasional disruptions of classes. From another political quarter, many students and faculty members have argued that academic freedom does not protect a right to demean or insult any group, certainly not one represented among an instructors students, whose right to speak and learn freely is impaired by racism, homophobia, and other hostilities emanating from from behind the lectern.

The battles of the last ten years have centered on policies and practices such as those just mentioned. It is worth noting that none of them (not even McCarthyism, except when enforced by university administrations and trustees) was among the threats against which the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) sought to guard academic freedom in its "1940 Statement of Principles," the document that, along with various commentaries and supplements, has guided case law in this area for sixty years. The "1940 Statement" postulated that "Institutions of higher learning are conducted for the common good," which "depends upon the free search for truth and its free expression." It went on to enumerate with elegant simplicity the activities of professors that were to be protected in this high cause: "full freedom in research and in the publication of the results," "freedom in the classroom," and freedom "from institutional censorship or discipline" when instructors "speak or write as citizens." All three fr eedoms are, like that last one, couched in terms making it plain against what danger the drafters meant to protect freedom: "censorship or discipline" by the university that employed the instructor. The second part of this document, "Academic Tenure," is devoted to procedural safeguards of academic freedom before and during personnel decisions. In short, the explicit working idea of academic freedom for many years concerned a faculty member's right to do research, to write, to teach, and to speak out as a citizen without being fired as punishment for unorthodox or irritating views. The AAUP proposed, advocated for, and, with what weapons it had, enforced this principle. The overwhelming majority of colleges and universities accepted it as a guide to routine practice, and still do.

So what stretched the idea of academic freedom to cover fights having little to do with the arbitrary dismissal by universities of intellectually and politically wayward faculty members? This is no place for a history, but consider just a few moments of conflict and adjustment. Calls for help from professors targeted by McCarthyism forced universities and the AAUP to think whether they meant academic freedom to protect not just the speech and writing of citizen-professors, but their membership in a party widely held to be both treasonous and a destroyer of free speech. (Could a Communist possibly be doing research in "full freedom" or practicing "freedom in the classroom," while following the Party line?) There were also battles in the 1950s over a faculty member's right not to speak at all, when under subpoena or the threat of it--i.e., to commit principled civil disobedience, or maybe just save his or her own skin. Faced with this expansion of the work that the idea of "academic freedom" was asked to perfor m by those under anticommunist assault, and with considerably higher stakes, few universities acted bravely on behalf of free speech and free silence. The AAUP itself failed to meet the challenge, hiding its head in the sand for several critical years (see Ellen Schrecker's No Ivory Tower for the best account.)

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