International Higher Education Volume 1

An Encyclopedia

Philip Altbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415684316
• eBook ISBN: 9781136628917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This encyclopedia is the result of a highly selective enterprise that provides a careful selection of key topics in essays written by top scholars in their fields. Comprehensive and in-depth coverage of a limited number of countries, regions and themes is provided. The essays not only feature statistical and factual information but significant interpretation of those facts and figures. The chapters on themes and topics are both analytic and interpretative and deal with the most important topics relevant to higher education everywhere. More than a compendium of facts and figures the encyclopedia is a comprehensive overview of a growing field of research and analysis.

Topics

Academic Freedom

Edward Shils

The Idea of a University and the Right to Academic Freedom

A university possesses an image or images of what it is and should be. At the core of this collective self-image is the interest in truth; the university's primary task is to transmit and discover truths about important matters. These images contain or imply norms for the conduct of the members of universities, their tasks regarding each other, and their responsibilities toward the society outside.

If a university is conceived as an institution that transmits definitive truths that cannot be improved upon and that cannot be modified or revised without diminishing their truthfulness, the norms governing the activity of teachers would stipulate the complete abstention of the individual teacher from critical intellectual efforts and limit him to the repetition of what has already been accepted as truth. If, however, as is the case of modern universities, the objective is the attainment of the best possible truths, with the best possible interpretation, and the best critical improvement of truths already attained, then the governing norms of conduct, method, and theory will require the attempted improvement of truths, already attained, their critical and methodical reassessment, and the search for better truths more in accordance with methodologically sound observations and rational interpretation.

The imperfection of any existing theory and the need to improve it do not make it permissible to regard all propositions as equally valid. The absence of finality is not grounds for believing that any proposition about a given subject is as true as any other: some propositions are definitely truer than others. Cognitive traditions, whether scientific or scholarly, are not to be lightly discarded, although all must be regarded as susceptible to improvement. The improvements cannot be foreseen with any certainty. As a result, at any given time, there is an acknowledged zone of indeterminateness as to what is valid. The substance of the improvement cannot be determined in advance. There are always a number of claimants to the improved or more certain truth. Each believes that he or she is right. In such situations, usually no sufficiently reliable consensus emerges to accredit some claims and to discredit others. The range of "reasonable disagreement" is the range over which academic freedom entitles individual academics to be free to investigate and to enunciate in spoken or written form the results of their investigation.

Academic freedom is a situation in which individual academics may act without consequences that can do damage to their status, their tenure as members of academic institutions, or their civil condition. Academic freedom is a situation in which academics may choose what they will assert in their teaching, in their choice of subjects for research, and in their publications. Academic freedom is a situation in which the individual academic chooses a particular path or position of intellectual action. Academic freedom arises from a situation in which authority-be it the consensus of colleagues in the same department, the opinion of the head of the department, the dean, the president, the board of trustees, or the judgement of any authority outside the university, be it a civil servant or a politician, or a priest or a bishop, or a publicist or a military man—cannot prevent the academic from following the academic path that his intellectual interest and capacity proposes. Academic freedom is the freedom of individual academics to think and act within particular higher educational institutions, within the system of higher educational institutions, and within and between national societies.

The range of academic freedom is not identical with the range of human cognitive beliefs. Astrological propositions about the determination of the fortunes of individuals by stellar configurations, or assertions that the British Isles were originally settled by the lost tribes of Israel, or beliefs that the cosmos and the human species were created within six days are not generally acknowledged as falling within the legitimate range of ideas that academics are free to assert. Such propositions do not come under the protection of academic freedom.

The criterion of truthfulness of assertion in teaching and research and the associated method of attaining it confer a right to freedom in academic matters: these in turn impose a set of obligations. The right to freedom in the search for and the assertion of truth not only confers a right on academics to seek the truth by methods of acknowledged validity and to assert the truth orally and in writing but it also imposes obligations on colleagues and on university administrators to acknowledge that right to freedom in the search for truth and its assertion. It also imposes obligations on nonacademic persons and institutions to acknowledge that right to freedom and to respect the institutional arrangements through which that free search and free communication are carried on.

Academic freedom exists where academic persons (i.e., persons who are members of academic institutions) are free to perform their academic obligations (i.e., the actions to which they are committed to perform by virtue of their being members of academic bodies).

The first obligations of an academic are to teach and to do research: each of these entails many subsidiary obligations. There are also obligations regarding proper conduct with pupils, with institutional colleagues, with administrators, and with colleagues in academic institutions other than one's own. These are the rules of the academic profession and of academic institutions that provide the context for the pursuit and transmission of truth through study, reflection. and research.

There is a second sphere to which academic freedom pertains: the sphere of political and social contention. Academic freedom has long come to include the civil freedom of academics. This has to do with the freedom of academics outside their freedom and obligation within the university. It is different from academic freedom proper in its content and in the place in which it occurs. These two kinds of academic freedom share certain features. The freedom of teachers or researchers is the absence of any compulsion or dangers that would cause them to depart from the path laid out before them by the academic norm regarding the respect for and the pursuit of truth.

The Constitution of Academic Freedom

The existing extent of academic freedom might or might not be congruous with the extent of legitimate academic freedom. Academics often have less academic freedom than they ought to have: but they also sometimes have more academic freedom than they ought to have for the optimal transmission and pursuit of truth and for the optimal functioning of a university as the institutional setting of that pursuit.

Academic freedom, in the sense in which it is used here, is the freedom of individual academics to teach and to conduct research in accordance with their intellectual inclinations and standards and to espouse in their academic activities, through spoken discourse and through written or printed publications, propositions that they have, on the basis of their studies and research, concluded to be true. It embraces the freedom of academics to form learned associations and to be free to participate in them. It is also the freedom to communicate through publication, oral communication, and correspondence with other academics within their own university and in other universities, within their own society and with academics in other societies.

Academic freedom is not just the freedom of individual academics holding appointments as teachers and as research workers to teach and to do research in accordance with the standards that obtain in the academic community; it includes the freedom to express their views on public questions with impunity and to join learned societies, national and international, and to participate freely in those societies.

Academic freedom is also the freedom of students to study the subjects and to pursue the courses of study that appeal to their intellectual and vocational interests in universities that they themselves have chosen to attend, and to form associations in accordance with their intellectual. political, and convivial interests.

Academic freedom does not exempt individual academics from the obligations that are incumbent on them as members of academic institutions. Thus, the requirements for the award of a degree should not be at the discretion of any individual academic unless the power to decide has been assigned to him by his department or by some other authority in the university who is empowered to do so. There are many activities necessary for the good functioning of a university as an institution that should not be decided by each individual academic at his own discretion. No single academic, for example, has the right to decide the number of hours he or she will teach or the standard by which A's should be granted in examinations. Such matters must be a collective academic decision.

Academic freedom is the freedom of university teachers to perform their academic obligations of teaching and research. These are obligations to seek and communicate the truth according to "their best lights." Academic freedom is not the freedom of academic individuals to do just anything, to follow any impulse or desire, or to say anything that occurs to them. It is the freedom to do academic things: to teach the truth as they see it on the basis of prolonged and intensive study, to discuss their ideas freely with their colleagues, to publish the truth as they have arrived at it by systematic methodical research and assiduous analyses. That is academic freedom proper.

It has a number of corollaries. One is the obligation to maintain academic institutions and the academic profession and its traditions, as well as the traditions of the particular fields, disciplines, and subdisciplines. This entails the obligation of assessing academic things academically, judging academic/intellectual works according to academic/intellectual criteria, regardless of the author's political or religious beliefs, his or her sex, ethnic origin, personal qualities, kinship connections, friendship with or enmity toward the individual or work assessed. It entails also the obligation to assess candidates for academic appointments in accordance with their academic qualifications; this in turn entails conformity with academic standards in the procedures for appointment.

Academic freedom does not extend to all the activities that academics might do or might neglect to do. An academic is not free to falsify the record of his observations; he is not free to forge or misrepresent the content of documents and inscriptions. He is not free to disregard in his reports or in his teaching observations of data that call into question or negate his assertions in teaching or in reporting the results of his research. He is not free to teach propositions that are contrary to the prevailing tradition unless he can support his contentions with evidence from his own research, from his own rational analysis of the traditional proposition that shows that those traditional propositions are erroneous or insufficient.

Academic freedom of individuals may legitimately be limited by institutional requirements. An individual academic is not entitled to the freedom to absent himself frequently from the classes that he has undertaken to teach or to refuse to examine a dissertation that he had previously agreed to examine. He is not free to refuse to conduct or mark examinations if such tasks are among the terms of his appointment. An academic is not free to refuse to teach certain subjects or courses that he is qualified to teach and that must be taught by members of his department. An academic is not free to change his discipline pronouncedly, deciding on his own that he will teach astrophysics even though the department of astrophysics did not appoint him to do so and even though he was appointed to teach constitutional law or Greek tragedy.

The Political Freedom of Academics

Academic freedom includes the political freedom of academics. The political freedom of academics extends to the espousal of the teacher's own political, economic, and social beliefs in teaching where these beliefs pertain to the subject matters that are to be properly expounded in classes within the university or inbooks, articles, and other forms of publication and where the teacher makes clear that his exposition of his political or ethical views is distinct from his analysis of the facts or his exposition of a theory about those facts. In general, it is desirable that teachers should not expound their own political or moral preferences and values in their classes, but if they do so they should take care to distinguish their evaluative judgments from their statements of facts concerning empirical observations.

The political freedom of academics extends to political activities outside the university, such as contending for public office on behalf of one or another political party. It extends also to representations of their political beliefs in public, nonacademic organs. It extends also to membership in political associations.

The political freedom of academics does not extend to activities or memberships that are prohibited by law, such as collaboration in terroristic activities. It does extend to the espousal of views that are not prohibited by law; it does not extend to the public espousal or defense, directly or indirectly, of ill...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Topics
• Regions and Countries