Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity

Confronting the Fear of Knowledge

Joanna Williams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137514776
• eBook ISBN: 9781137514790
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Academic freedom is increasingly being threatened by a stifling culture of conformity in higher education that is restricting individual academics, the freedom of academic thought and the progress of knowledge – the very foundations upon which academia and universities are built. Once, scholars demanded academic freedom to critique existing knowledge and to pursue new truths. Today, while fondness for the rhetoric of academic freedom remains, it is increasingly criticised as an outdated and elitist concept by students and lecturers alike and called into question by a number of political and intellectual trends such as feminism, critical theory and identity politics. This provocative and compelling book traces the demise of academic freedom within the context of changing ideas about the purpose of the university and the nature of knowledge. The book argues that a challenge to this culture of conformity and censorship and a defence of academic free speech are needed for critique to be possible and for the intellectual project of evaluating existing knowledge and proposing new knowledge to be meaningful. This book is that challenge and a passionate call to arms for the power of academic thought today.

Part I

Academic Freedom Then and Now

1

Free to Be Critical

While the rhetoric of academic freedom continues to be upheld in higher education, discerning particular principles that lie behind the words can often be difficult. It can sometimes seem as if a lightly held but frequent recantation of the mantra of academic freedom is no more than a necessary rite for legitimate entry into the scholarly community. In practice, academic freedom is often misunderstood, rejected as elitist or redefined beyond all recognition, until the point at which individual scholars seek a defence of their own position.

Academic freedom has not always been held in such low regard. This chapter recalls the importance of academic freedom to those working in higher education in the past, not just as a personal insurance policy or an abstract belief, but as a fundamental tenet of scholarly work, central to intellectual and social goals which connected advancing knowledge to the pursuit of truth.

The role of universities in conserving, curating and pursuing knowledge was, until recently, based upon principles of truth and rationality which could be traced back to ideas of scholarship associated with the Enlightenment. Academic freedom was essential for allowing scholars both to critique existing understandings and to propose new ideas. The rejection and redefinition of academic freedom that has taken place over the course of at least the past three decades represents a significant challenge to the liberal academic project. This chapter considers the historical development of academic freedom as context to current debates within higher education.

Back to first principles

One of the first formal definitions of academic freedom appears in the 1915 Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure produced by the newly established American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The AAUP was not conceived with the primary goal of defending academic freedom, but rather to ‘further the professionalization of the professoriate’ (Tiede, 2014, p. 1) and to provide a voice for scholars within rapidly changing universities. Founding members of the AAUP, in particular Arthur Lovejoy, James McKeen Cattell and E. R. A. Seligman, only latterly pushed for a focus on academic freedom as one element of the demand that authority in the university should lie with scholars rather than administrators. They argued that the principle of tenure and the professional autonomy for scholars to teach, research and manage their own affairs as they saw best, was essential for maintaining academic standards.

The establishment of the AAUP, and its subsequent focus upon academic freedom, largely arose from a pragmatic response to a number of high-profile incidents in which professors had either resigned or been dismissed from their universities for espousing views that contradicted the teaching of the church or the beliefs of their institution’s financial sponsors. Throughout the 1890s, large-scale dismissals from American universities occurred following changes in the electoral fortunes of the political party controlling the state legislature. In 1895, Edward Bemis, a Professor of Economics and History, was dismissed from the University of Chicago after his sympathy with the cause of striking workers was reported in the press. The President of Brown University, E. Benjamin Andrews, resigned his post in 1897 in response to requests from the university’s trustees that he should ‘exercise forbearance in expressing his views’ (in Tiede, 2014, p. 22). The business magnate and philanthropist, Rockefeller, had been expected to make a large donation to Brown following his son’s graduation. When no such donation appeared, the trustees of the university placed the blame upon Andrews, a vocal advocate for the monetization of national debt. Andrews resigned, claiming he would not be able to carry out the wishes of the trustees ‘without surrendering that reasonable liberty of utterance [ … ] in the absence of which the most ample endowment for an educational institution would have little worth’ (in Tiede, 2014, p. 22).

In the previous year, 1896, the sociologist Edward Ross was dismissed from Stanford University for expressing views in his teaching which were critical of the institution’s sole benefactor, Jane Leland Stanford. As a result of the dismissal of Edward Ross, several other professors either resigned or were dismissed from their posts. This conflict between academics and benefactor prompted the publication, five years later, of the American Economic Association’s first report on academic freedom violations in the US. Arthur Lovejoy, one of the professors to resign from Stanford in response to the Ross case, took up a post at Johns Hopkins University where he issued ‘the Hopkins call’ to establish an association ‘to create means for the authoritative expression of the public opinion of college and university teachers; to make collective action possible; and to maintain and advance the standards of the profession’ (in Tiede, 2014, p. 22).

This association, which would later become the AAUP, convened on January 1st 1915 in New York and elected the philosopher and educationalist John Dewey as its inaugural president. The first AAUP committee, the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, was led by Seligman and its immediate task was to respond to one particular incident, the dismissal of four professors (and the subsequent resignation of 15 others) at the University of Utah. The investigation into this incident led to the publication of the Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom. However pragmatic in origin, this Declaration has stood for a century as a cornerstone in debates around academic freedom. One reason for this longevity is the intrinsic relationship that was drawn between academic freedom and the fulfilment of the scholarly ‘calling’ which Dewey described as ‘none other than the discovery and diffusion of truth’ (in Haskell, 1996, p. 68).

As noted in the previous chapter, the 1915 Declaration presents academic freedom as comprising three core elements: ‘freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extramural utterance and action’. Fundamental to this concept of academic freedom was the recognition that working in academia was unlike other forms of employment in private business, and that scholars served a social role in relation to knowledge which lent them a duty to ‘impart the results of their own and of their fellow-specialists’ investigations and reflection, both to students and to the general public’. In order for them to carry out this role they needed to work ‘without fear or favor’ so that:

in the interest of society at large, that what purport to be the conclusions of men trained for, and dedicated to, the quest for truth, shall in fact be the conclusions of such men, and not echoes of the opinions of the lay public, or of the individuals who endow or manage universities.

As will be explored later in this chapter, the AAUP Declaration was necessarily of its time. It is steeped in the aspiration to take knowledge out of the hands of amateurs and to professionalize its pursuit within the academy, and in that sense it is clearly ‘elitist’. Nonetheless its central tenets relate, not to the particular conditions and preoccupations of those working in higher education in 1915, but to the liberal scientific method and Enlightenment ideas about the nature of knowledge. Cary Nelson, writing in No University Is an Island, suggests the Declaration ‘relies on the scientific method as a model for the ideal exercise of academic freedom. In a broad, multi-disciplinary context, that means rationality, willingness to test hypotheses against evidence, openness to counterclaims by peers, and so forth’ (2010, p. 24).

The origins of academic freedom

One reason why the AAUP Declaration has stood the test of time is that it recalls a far older philosophical discussion of intellectual freedom as crucial to passing judgement on existing knowledge and the development of new ideas and original perspectives. Such a belief in the relationship between freedom, criticism and the pursuit of knowledge first emerged in Ancient Greece. Socrates, Aristotle and Plato are all credited with promoting ideals of free speech and free inquiry. Intellectuals in the ancient academy were ‘dedicated to the art of critical debate, the posing of questions, and the search for solutions’ (Poch, 1993, p. 3, in Papadimitriou, 2011). Socrates has been recorded as arguing for the freedom to keep challenging people in the agora, or marketplace, on the basis that only the gods are wise and humans can be wise only in recognizing their own ignorance (Annas, 2000, p. 59). Sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens with his ideas, Socrates’ defence in relation to the charges levelled against him is often cited as the first recorded statement of the need for freedom in teaching (Hofstadter, 1996, p. 3).

It is important to note that for Socrates, the freedom to inquire was less a special privilege of the learned than a duty upon everyone. A Socratic theory of academic freedom can be considered closer to general individual free speech rights, rather than one that depends upon the professional legitimacy of the speaker. In contrast, for Aristotle, intellectual freedom was a privilege earned through knowledge gained. He wrote that ‘All men by nature desire to know’ and that ‘humans are most like gods in the act of knowing’ (in O’Brien, 1998, p. 35). From this tradition emerges the belief that freedom of inquiry, specifically in the form of tenure, is based upon proven professional competence. One legacy of these ancient origins is that academic freedom has been enshrined within Article 16 of the Greek constitution since 1975 (Papadimitriou, 2011, p. 105). More broadly, we see the emergence of two conflicting views of academic freedom that persist to this day: a declaration of general free speech rights on the one hand, and a privilege based on professional competence on the other.

Centuries later, during the time of the Enlightenment, such ancient principles were revisited and the Socratic notion of intellectual liberty appeared at first to have won out. John Stuart Mill acknowledged a debt to Socrates, the ‘acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived’ (2005, p. 35). The Enlightenment philosophers first established the principle, which has continued into the modern era, that freedom was necessary to advance knowledge as it permitted the criticism and collective acts of judgement through which existing orthodoxies could be challenged and new ideas proposed.

Prior to the Enlightenment, knowledge within the medieval universities had been rooted in tradition and religion: the justification for its pursuit and transmission lay in bringing people closer to God. The first European universities were established by the Catholic Church and, although largely preoccupied with training men for the priesthood, were influenced by the work of Plato and St Augustine. They drew upon Plato’s Academy in offering a model for ‘essentially secluded non-utilitarian study of the higher spiritual purpose and destiny of human beings’ (Carr, 2009, p. 5). From the time of their founding, the Catholic Church did much to establish the principle that universities should have freedom from outside interference, most particularly from the nascent state.

As Conrad Russell indicates in his book Academic Freedom, ‘the claims of Universities to academic freedom have always been rooted in an intellectual tradition created to defend the autonomy of the medieval church’ (1993, p. 1). This defence was needed to protect individuals when the religious affiliations of the ruling elite changed. Persecution, resulting even in death, occurred when scholars found their religious affiliations suddenly out of kilter with those of the monarch of the day. In 1533, during the English Reformation, Protestant scholars at New College Oxford were expelled and others fled the country or were killed for not renouncing their religious convictions. Peter Quinby, a Lutheran, was locked in the college tower and left to die of starvation (Prickard, 2010, p. 70).

For medieval universities, the principle of ‘liberty’ emerged to defend a realm of society into which the state could not enter. However, the relationship between universities and the state could at best be described as ambiguous. Despite demands for institutional autonomy, from their inception universities sought physical protection and some degree of resource, often in the form of financial endowments, from state or monarch. Russell describes the relationship as one of ‘high assertion of intellectual independence, combined with a total physical dependence’ (1993, p. 17). This allowed for only limited freedom: universities had a degree of institutional autonomy from the state as long as they did not challenge the authority of the ruling monarch. At the same time, universities were completely under the control of the church. In many ways, this meant the Catholic Church often served the role of censoring on behalf of the state. For example, it was the church that, in 1546, published the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of prohibited books.

Significantly then, the freedom of universities from state interference did not imply a concomitant freedom for individual academics to criticize the church either as an institution or its teachings. As the personnel and authority of church and university were closely intertwined, little questioning of dominant religious ideologies emerged from within the cloisters of academe; rather, the institutionalized creation and transmission of knowledge was inherently linked to a divine concept of Truth. The intellectual leaps that began to occur with the dawning of the Enlightenment therefore posed a significant threat to the authority of the church. For example, the philosopher René Descartes’ 1637 declaration, cogito ergo sum, with its focus upon the individual and its location of the source of human knowledge within man, challenged the church’s view of God as the source of knowledge and authority.

Most significantly, Descartes developed a methodology for the pursuit of knowledge based upon principles of skepticism and doubt. From this we can trace the first underpinnings of the scientific method. Although later Enlightenment philosophers rejected many of Descartes’ findings, they reasserted the importance of his methodological approach, which would come to characterize the enduring liberal academic project. Descartes was necessarily careful to avoid direct confrontation with the Catholic Church; he was all too aware of the imprisonment meted out to Galileo for espousing a Copernican view of the solar system. As a consequence, Descartes suppressed much of his work during his own lifetime while other writings, including much of his Discourse on Method, were published anonymously.

It was not until 150 years later that Kant, writing in The Conflict of the Faculties (1979 [1798]) was able to extol the need for a transition from the religious authority of knowledge, to a more secular, rational and empirical source of legitimation. Even then Kant, a teacher and scholar at the University of Konigsberg, came up against formal censorship throughout his working life. This became most pronounced in 1788 when state officials and monarch were united in a campaign to ‘stamp out the Enlightenment’ (Gregor, 1979, p. xi). A new Censorship Edict designed to limit ‘the impetuosity of today’s so-called enlighteners’ (Gregor, 1979, p. x) was enacted that outlawed all writings on religious matters. In 1795, Prussian government ministers ordered the University of Konigsberg to forbid any professor from lecturing on Kant’s philosophy of religion (Gregor, 1979, p. xi).

Kant’s work brought him into direct conflict with the ‘Biblical theologians’ of his day and he had to write in such a way as to circumvent punitive censorship laws. In his personal correspondence, Kant complained that the Censorship Commission in Berlin met his arguments not with reason but with ‘anathemas launched from the clouds over officialdom’ (Gregor, 1979, p. viii). Through his battles with the censors, Kant formulated a defence of intellectual freedom by contrasting the obedience required from the civil servant paid to carry out public duties with the liberty of the scholar:

… the clergyman, as a representative of the state, is not free to argue with the tenets of the church when he addresses his congregation: here obedience, not argument, is called for. But the same man, as a scholar, has complete freedom to argue, to communicate to the learned public of the world the use of his own reason in religious matters. In his sermons he speaks in the name of the church and at its dictation: in his scholarly writings he speaks freely in his own name.

(in Gregor, 1979, p. ix)

Kant’s argument is that the professional role affords certain responsibilities which limit free speech; his concept of the scholar, however, was not a professional state functionary but an independent, critically autonomous individual.

The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked a paradigmatic break with the intellectual traditions of the medieval period and allowed a concept of knowledge based upon a secular view of truth to come to the fore. Empirical evidence and individual reasoning replaced religious faith. Kant argued that the capacity to reason, and therefore the basis for critical thought and the authority of knowledge, was to be found in the minds of individuals; indeed, this was what distinguished people from animals (Scruton, 2001, p. 92). He suggested that objective knowledge was only possible through the synthesis of experience and reason, which ‘transcends the point of view of the person who possesses it, and makes legitimate claims about an independent world’ (Scruton, 2001, p. 27). Kant’s denial of the religious foundations of knowledge was not a rejection of truth; rather, he argued, individual reason and empirical evidence were a superior way of arriving at truth.

Knowledge was considered to encapsulate an inherent truth derived from the objectivity of independent reasoning. Kant declared, ‘Reason is by its nature free and admits of no command to hold something as true’ (1979, p. 29). He considered truth to be dependent upon individual freedom to reason; knowledge and understanding could advance only if people were free to allow their own inner reason to develop. As Kant argued, ‘Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think’ (2009, p. 3). Kant’s challenge to the church and state lay in his belief that the freedom for people to reach the wrong conclusions and make mistakes was ultimately better for the pursuit of knowledge than denying people opportunities to think for themselves through presenting them with a predetermined truth.

Kant suggested that the university – especially the philosophy faculty, with its relative freedom from the professional strictures charged to the other three faculties of law, medicine and theology – could play a role in protecting critical reason from political and clerical authority for the benefit of society more broadly. But for this to happen, Kant argued, the philosophy faculty needed the freedom to make ‘its own judgment about what it teaches’ (1979, p. 25). The ‘medieval liberty’ (Russell, 1993, p. 3) by which universities had freedom from the state was a necessary precondition for them to play this role.

Despite Kant’s efforts, it took many decades before the influence of the church upon universities began to wane. The epistemological advances associated with the Enlightenment were made primarily by public intellectuals outside of the formal strictures of the academy; scholars within universities were expected to be obedient to church teachings. Walter Metzger, writing in Academic Freedom in the Age of the University, notes the extent to which, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a triad of assumptions (‘traditionalism as an educational goal, “stamping in” as a pedagogical method, the contumacy of youth as a major expectation’) prevented even the desire for academic freedom (1995, p. 5). Mostly universities sought to ally ‘Christian piety and humanistic study against the skeptical rationalism of the Enlightenment’ (Metzger, 1961, p. 3).

Academic freedom in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Academic Freedom Then and Now
• Part II: Knowledge in the Disciplines
• Part III: Beyond Criticism
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index