Academic Freedom and the Educational Task: First of Two Parts

Academic freedom is a fantastically complex subject, and any discussion of it must necessarily be selective. In this essay we will examine some aspects of the question that have been pushed to the fore by contemporary conditions, particularly by the attempt of some to transform the university from a place where the intellectual life is explored and extended to an area in which self-appointed militants conduct a war upon existing institutions and structures.

Academic integrity has through the centuries sought adequate symbols, and the one that is commonly accepted in our time is “academic freedom.” This is generally implemented in the university by the practice of tenure.

Freedom of inquiry was an issue in medieval Europe, and became acutely controversial during the rise of independent science in the Renaissance era. To be sure, freedom of the mind had been pursued much earlier. Socrates, charged with inculcating views that underminded popular superstitions, drank the cup of poison rather than yield to pressures that would enslave his mind. Jesus the Christ was sent to the Cross for proclaiming a message that would free the minds, as well as the hearts, of men.

The Western understanding of man presupposes his natural right to seek truth wherever he will, and in whatever ways seem fruitful to him. The English-speaking peoples, especially, accept as basic the right of the individual to free inquiry and free expression. Within this belief, each person is expected to decide where, and to what depth, he will seek for truth.

This understanding of individual intellectual freedom is embodied in English and French constitutional procedure. The French constitution of 1791 guaranteed the “natural” right of every man “to speak, to write, to print and publish his ideas without having his writings subjected to any censorship or inspection before their publication.” In England the Star Chamber was abolished in 1643 (an achievement due in good part to the efforts of John Milton), and in 1694 Parliament abolished licensing of the press. John Stuart Mill held that even the average man could be relied upon to sift truth from error, and urged that even false views be permitted to do battle in the arena of ideas.

This freedom of speech and press is guaranteed in the United States by the Bill of Rights. Too, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 recognizes the right to freedom of opinion and expression. It is thus written deep into our basic law that inquiry should be free; and certainly the academic community is right to assume itself the bearer of this heritage.

The university stands in an especially sensitive relation to the free society. The academic community has been subject to heavy pressures from those societies to which it has looked for support, while at the same time it has sought to retain its integrity in the quest for understanding. In this struggle, several theories have emerged. Some feel that indoctrination, the educator’s offering of prefabricated answers to any and all questions, is entirely compatible with freedom of inquiry. On the other hand, there has developed the radical form of libertarianism, which offers loyalty to no permanent and fixed points of reference, and in which no view can claim to be preferable to any other. The first stresses responsibility at the expense of freedom and quest, while the second maximizes quest and minimizes responsibility and commitment.

In our era of rapid change, the understanding of the role of the academic community is under severe scrutiny. The thoughtful person cannot avoid asking, for example, what went wrong with Germany, which during the nineteenth century led the nations of the West in educational matters, and also produced within that century political ideologies that assumed the status of “divine” absolutes, which in this century were embodied in a regime that subordinated the quest for truth to the brutal demands of the ideologues.

Thus our decade is seeking a definition of “the academy.” Perhaps the definition of the role and function of the university most favored today (especially by academic youth) is that given by Henry Steele Commager in his article “The Nature of Academic Freedom” in the Saturday Review for August 27, 1966. Here Mr. Commager assumes that the university must be regarded as an institution that is sovereign in its realm, and subject to no regulation of any sort by the society that supports it. The role of society is to provide the financial resources and to furnish the scholars and students. These persons form a community that is exempt from the usual expectations of citizenship, ordinary modes of law enforcement, and legal due process.

In “normal” times this procedure would seem benign enough. Serious problems arise, however, when a society is caught up in a deep malaise in which confrontation, rather than reason and persuasion, becomes accepted as the sole medium and stimulus for change. Some universities, far from being beacon lights of reason, become centers for a “politics of raw power” in which groups that can assemble enough force to disrupt normal social processes decide that the possession of such power justifies the disorganization of orderly society. Such a climate is hardly conducive to a sober appraisal of the larger questions of academic freedom that are at stake. More serious still, such factors can scarcely be expected to provide an atmosphere in which responsibility, which must always be the correlate of freedom, can develop. The tendency is that freedom will degenerate into license, which is but a way station on the road to anarchy and chaos.

The topic before us divides rather naturally into three parts: first, the bearing of the question of academic freedom upon the one who teaches; second, the freedoms that belong to the student; and third, certain specialized problems of academic pursuit in institutions that have unusual and special commitments.

Assuming that academic freedom is basic to the free search for truth and to its free articulation, one can see at once an aspect of the question concerned primarily with the teacher. As a basic documentary source, we use the 1940 Statement of Principles of the American Association of University Professors (hereafter AAUP), which was reprinted in the AAUP Bulletin for summer (June), 1967, under the title “Academic Freedom and Tenure.”

Significantly, the second paragraph of this statement includes these words on academic freedom: “It carries with it duties correlative with rights.” We shall come back to this aspect of the problem from time to time in this essay. Freedom never occurs in a vacuum but always carries with it in Siamese-twin fashion the element of responsibility.

Academic freedom concerns primarily freedom of research, publication, and classroom discussion. The underlying assumption here is that the free competition of ideas in the forum of learning is essential to the correlative and corrective functions in the search for truth. Implied is the freedom to use all sources for knowledge (within the general area of public order; some documents may be restricted, in the interest of public safety or defense), and to use these as a basis for instructional or published materials. It goes without saying that research that involves financial remuneration should be conducted upon the basis of a clear understanding with the administrative authorities of the institution concerned.

As for classroom presentation, academic freedom implies not only the liberty but also the positive obligation to present a balanced view of issues at stake, particularly of those that are debatable. The teacher is also obligated to refrain from introducing into his professional work, particularly his classroom teaching, controversial matter that bears no relation to his subject. Above all, his work should be structured in terms of his personal commitment to reason.

The fact that the teacher is also a citizen creates special problems of responsibility. Some teachers now regard participation in “political action” as an extension of their professorial duties, rather than as an exercise of their rights as citizens. Thus their self-assumed role is, not that they are citizens who may from time to time work alongside other citizens to influence and shape public policy, but that they have a special obligation and dispensation to extend their classroom mission into an ex cathedra and privileged form of participation in the service of political objectives.

To assert that public acts affecting public policy are professional actions rather than actions performed as citizens is to erode the distinction made in the AAUP statement between the role of the citizen and that of the teacher. The former is governed by the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. The latter should be guided by the principles of academic freedom. The professor who performs acts suitable to the former but uses his position as a professor to lend weight to his opinion, or to secure immunity from consequences that might flow from his actions as a citizen, seems guilty of exploiting a trust reposed in him.

Clarification of the ambiguity involved in the teacher’s dual role as professional person and private citizen is not widely sought at present. Seemingly, many in the academic world prefer to fly with low visibility here, since rational analysis might reduce or eliminate some legal immunities now being enjoyed.

The problem is pointed up when Henry Steele Commager’s article in the Saturday Review is seen in contrast to another article that appeared along with it. In this other article, the man who is now President of the United States points out that “teachers must, of course, be free to take positions on all issues. But the position which they hold in our society requires them to act with self-restraint.” Writing of an episode that occurred at one of the New Jersey state institutions, Mr. Nixon says: “But there is a far more difficult question: Should academic freedom protect a professor when he uses the forum of a state university to welcome victory for the enemy in a war in which the United States is engaged?”

Mr. Nixon observes that while the issues involved in academic freedom are delicate, the members of the academic community must find some viable and agreed-upon via media between the extremes of the tyranny that would throttle freedom and the anarchy that tends to emerge when a single group assumes itself wholly right and all opponents wholly wrong.

On the other hand, Mr. Commager seems to suggest that the teacher has no responsibility to be governed by the normal canons of good taste that guide general public opinion, and that the sovereignty of the academy is subject to no limitations from the outside. Presumably this would mean that no administrative official of a college or university is justified in seeking assistance from public law-enforcement agencies, even when the usual campus authorities prove unable to handle the violence or threatened violence of a group bent upon crippling the institution. There is, it seems, no legitimate relief or “due process” to those teachers and students (usually a majority) who desire to assert their freedom to pursue studies under conditions of normal order and tranquility.

Mr. Commager also leaves unanswered the question of the demand of students who, in their excess of activity and their intemperance in opinion, run afoul of the law, that the university “bail them out” of their legal difficulties. He seems also to wink at the behavior of those who make it impossible for an institution to award an honorary degree to a distinguished public official whose views differ from those of the protesters. He has, of course, no fear of the free exchange of ideas. With this we agree; but is it consistent for him to applaud those who would restrict the expression of ideas to the patterns of opinion they hold? Nor does Mr. Commager seem to be aware of the manner in which highly disciplined elites, both of the right and of the left, have used constitutional guarantees to impose their will upon entire societies.

There is yet a great distance between those who feel that academic freedom has its inevitable and continuous correlate of responsibility and those who feel that freedom is in itself the guarantor of creativity. Another severe temptation comes to the academic person at the point of taking a citizen’s interest in his world. If he can be the first to advance a position in public policy, he gains an enormous advantage, since any one who speaks in rebuttal is immediately cast in the role of being unprofessional in criticizing a colleague.

One simply cannot divest himself of his role as a professional person. Unless the strictest care is exercised, the media will assume that he made his pronouncements in the role of professor. He has then deprived the spokesman for an opposing view of any possibility of an ethical criticism. Again, a climate has arisen within which activists, whether teachers or students, regard silence as agreement. The obverse of this is, of course, that the statement of opposing views is a kind of “professional treason.” These facts seem to suggest that the professor needs to exercise more restraint in making public pronouncements than that demanded of the private person.

Most professors who use their academic status as a platform for the enunciation of public policy statements are not eager to subject themselves to the hurly-burly of ordinary political discussion. As Bernard Crick notes in his book In Defense of Politics, “the politician lives in a world of publicity, calumny, distortion and insult.” It is scarcely “playing the game” when those from the halls of academe assume hard public stances in political or social matters and then hide from the normal consequences under the canopy of professional immunity.

These facts remind us that the line between freedom and license is particularly fine in academic procedures. In times when feelings run high over matters of public policy, the academic person is especially tempted here. A radical sample is afforded by the writings of Herbert Marcuse. In his essay “Repressive Tolerance” in the volume A Critique of Pure Tolerance (pp. 81–117), this writer seems to have overlooked the important distinction between liberty and license.

Marcuse asserts that in our time the “equal right of opposites” in public and free discussion has been forfeited in American life. Assuming that our government’s policies have passed beyond the point of public debate, he asserts that we are now in a post-fascist period in which free discussion of all points of view represents “clear and present danger.”

Such freedoms as that of free discussion, he says, “depend on the material and intellectual resources available at the respective stage.” Then he proceeds dialectically to assume that we must now exercise only a “liberating tolerance,” which “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

Marcuse’s entire thesis rests upon the negation of the principle of academic freedom, which involves commitment to non-coercive methods and argument, and demands that a pluralism of opinions be allowed in the arena of free discussion. Professor Marcuse would act in real integrity if he would leave the academic world entirely and become, if he wishes, a professional revolutionary. To continue to take shelter in the halls of academe, and at the same time to flout, openly and frankly, the entire concept of academic freedom, is to act irresponsibly and to exchange license for liberty.

One wonders how Mr. Commager would react to these opinions of Professor Marcuse, for in his article in the Saturday Review Commager denies that “in time of crisis it [academic freedom] must give way to the importunate demands of national unity.…” One hopes that he would include those of the New Left along with “the Southern slaveocrats and the Nazis and the white supremacists of South Africa” when he asks: “Do those who would suspend academic freedom in time of crisis because it imperils national unity really understand the implications of their argument?”

The AAUP statement, with its emphasis upon the special obligations that fall upon the professor who is also a citizen, has something to say at this point:

As a man of learning and an educational officer, he should remember that the public may judge his profession and his institution by his utterances. Hence he should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that he is not an institutional spokesman [AAUP Bulletin, Summer, 1967, p. 247].

This seems to suggest that some procedures represent not liberty but license. An academic person scarcely commends himself to the confidence of thinking persons when, in connection with his actions as a private citizen, he appeals to his professional status and position to secure immunity from criticism, loss of prestige, or legal penalties—immunity that the general citizen does not enjoy.

The symbol and procedural guarantee of academic freedom is tenure, and the basic canon for tenure is found in the 1940 AAUP statement:

After the expiration of a probationary period, teachers or investigators should have permanent or continuous tenure, and their services should be terminated only for adequate cause, except in the case of retirement for age, or under extraordinary circumstances because of financial exigencies.

In simple terms, this means that after a period of testing a teacher is to be considered secure in his post, subject to explicit stipulations. This is designed to guarantee him a large measure of freedom from the caprice of his public, change of or within administrations, and the possible ill will of those about him.

Tenure makes it possible for a teacher to pursue what he feels to be the course of free inquiry, without regard for the favor or disfavor of the employing institution or its directorate. Such a privileged position ought not be taken for granted; and certainly no professor is justified in invoking his professional status as an instrument, either to attain personal prestige or to exempt himself from the normal results of “due process” that might follow certain forms of behavior as a citizen.

It goes without saying that tenure is insufficient if it merely secures the privilege of employment. That is, there need to be included in the larger sphere of tenure the more subtle forms of protection, such as the assurance that unpopularity with (say) an administrator will not jeopardize advances in salary or rank, and the safeguarding of the use of normal means for redress of grievances. More and more, administrators are adopting policies that spell out these and other safeguards, and that secure the professor’s freedom from the hidden forms of improper pressure or threat. But the implementing of such policies must depend upon a mutual recognition that academic responsibility must also serve as the permanent safeguard of freedom from the encroaching threat of license.

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