Academic

A Warning for Academic Freedom?

By Tommy Crocker

Writing recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Roger Bowen proposes a Faustian Bargain for Academic Freedom: we should give up on tenure as the sole protector of academic freedom in favor of legislative or constitutional protections. Bowen writes: ?The real threat to academic freedom today . . . generally comes from outside academe, not from within it. How can we secure academic freedom when its guarantor?tenure?is on the wane, and the public is indifferent or even hostile to it?? His solution is to work for political or constitutional protections, primarily at the state level, for an ?academic bill of rights.? Tenure?s going to be scuttled eventually anyway, he suggests, so we should look to the British example of parliamentary protections for academic freedom.

For evidence of public indifference and hostility to academic freedom, he relies first on the Freedom Forum?s First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University which reports on annual surveys of American attitudes. Among relevant attitudes, the 2008 survey reveals that 63 percent of Americans think that the founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation, and 55 percent think the Constitution establishes one. These results suggest something about the background beliefs of Americans concerning constitutional principles. He adds, closer to his topic, that an AAUP survey reveals that ?85 percent of Republicans (compared with 25 percent of Democrats) believed that ideological or political-party restrictions should be imposed on faculty members; and that 68 percent of the public believed liberal faculty members dominated our colleges.? Bowen notes that ?[t]he survey concluded that the opponents of academic freedom tend to be the elderly, those with low levels of educational attainment, conservatives, and Republicans.?

What is troubling for academic freedom from these and other attitudes, for Bowen, is that these surveys reveal ?an incurious public, wed more to religious certainties than to critical thinking.? These attitudes endanger academic freedom from outside the academy because the public either does not know or does not care about the values academic freedom promotes. This is why Bowen thinks that the political effort on behalf of academic freedom would be worthwhile, because in the process, the broader public would be exposed to arguments about why academic freedom is so important. Although I am one who continues to believe in the importance of tenure, given the large number of academics who lack tenure, Bowens concerns are serious, and his proposal has some merit?perhaps, however, mostly as a ?both and? strategy. We should continue with tenure, but consider strategies to bolster protection for academic freedom legislatively.

What I am most curious about is the partisan split among supporters for academic freedom. I offer some reflections after the break.

Why should it be that Republican respondents overwhelmingly support ideological restrictions on faculty members? Is it because Republican party officials and surrogates have for years targeted the ?liberal elites? at universities? After all, with enough repetition, such claims can take on a prominent role in the social imaginary. Is it because there is an ideological desire to see their views authoritatively prevail? Or, do they simply not understand what academic freedom entails? I don't think I have satisfactory answers to these questions. But I do think that partisan affiliation should be irrelevant to debate within academic disciplines about disciplinary matters. I also think that self-conscious consideration of partisan affiliation of faculty members by universities as a whole in any attempt to create a supposed "diverse" academic atmosphere should also be irrelevant. Faculties exist to conduct research and teach within the areas of their professional expertise and interest, not to fulfill partisan quotas.

One would think that to the extent that liberal or centrist personal political views are more common among the American professoriate (the NY Times reported this summer on a growing centrism), this fact should be academically irrelevant. Does a Republican or Democratic orientation for a chemistry professor or an English professor matter? It should not matter. As Stanley Fish likes to remind us, the university classroom is not a partisan political forum. At a deeper level, perhaps the surveyed Republicans are on to something, something that Fish ignores. To the extent that more partisan political views arise from deeper commitments and worldviews steeped in theoretical traditions, the kinds of questions one asks in an English class or a law class are inflected by what kinds of issues, and which aspects of those issues, one thinks are most relevant. One could focus, for example, on constitutional decisions during the New Deal era as part of a legitimate constitutional transformation, or one can focus on the era as a turning away from the true Constitution, leaving behind a ?Constitution in exile.? So how one approaches this material will be inflected by background theoretical beliefs that are also manifest in different partisan political beliefs.

First, note that what matters in such a debate is not the partisan political affiliations of individual academics, but the reasons and arguments one can make to support a particular interpretation of history and the Constitution. Second, note that the need for academic debate returns us to the issue of academic freedom. The fact that the ?Constitution in exile? is a minority, if not fringe, view reflects the ?marketplace of ideas? through which academic discussion creates consensus views as well as on-going research projects that both further and challenge the contingent boundaries of consensus. Sure, we might be able to generate a different consensus through partisan-conscious hiring (sometimes referred to as ?political diversity?) of individuals who believe in a ?Constitution in exile,? but that would not be a consensus formed through professional academic debate; rather, it would be a top-down, ex ante choice to produce an artificial and different (though not academically professional) prevailing view. Something like this must be at issue in the University of Colorado?s desire to create a Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy, as Stanley Fish discusses. In an environment of academic freedom, by contrast, growth in knowledge and changes in academic consensus occur through reason-giving under conditions of intelligent academic research and debate. If tenure does a poor job of protecting these conditions of academic freedom, then we should seek additional sources of protection as Bowen suggests.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on October 27, 2008 (boomark / email).