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What's in a name?
It's common for academics these days to assert that academic freedom is under attack. But what's just as common is for those assertions to take place in something of a conceptual vacuum. Quite often, the claim that academic freedom is being attacked is made in the absence of a clear understanding of what academic freedom really is; often, too, such claims involve an attempt to expand the definition of academic freedom beyond its proper purview.
This is a point ACTA president Anne D. Neal made at Inside Higher Ed earlier this summer. Citing the AAUP's foundational 1915 definition of academic freedom, Neal noted that today academic freedom is often taken to mean "anything goes," and is used to defend indefensible conduct on the part of professors. Such arguments, Neal observed,
arise from a basic conviction that academics should be free from accountability. They involve manipulating the term "academic freedom" in ways that undermine a concept of foundational importance to the academic enterprise. They amount to an attempt to turn the concept inside out--morphing what was originally a cluster of interlocking privileges and responsibilities centered on the public good into a justification for the false idea that academics have no obligation to the public at all. Finally, they stem from the profoundly mistaken premise ... that input from the public, from constituencies such as alumni and trustees, violates academic freedom as well.
Neal's point worth making again in the wake of Inside Higher Ed's coverage of a forum on academic freedom that was held earlier this week at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. According to Inside Higher Ed, the forum featured several presenters who all argued that academic freedom is currently under attack. And yet, as Inside Higher Ed describes it, the forum was characterized by the same sorts of conceptual confusions Neal outlined in June. No definition of academic freedom seems to have been established, and two of the panelists appear to have based their claims on misconceptions about what the term really is and what kinds of expression it is meant to protect.
Lisa Anderson, an international relations professor at Columbia University, reported that at Columbia, job candidates in Middle Eastern studies are being grilled about their politics and that appointments are being made on the basis of politics--troubling, indeed--as is her claim that Columbia is vetting outside speakers for their politics. Both claims, if true, suggest that Columbia is engaging in behavior that is quite contrary to both the tenets of academic freedom and the university's anti-discrimination policies. However, Anderson also argues that the academic freedom of Middle Eastern studies scholars has been damaged by criticism coming from people who disagree with their scholarship. And this is where her claims are compromised by confusion about what academic freedom is. Academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism--and, indeed, the energetic debate that has grown up around Middle Eastern studies represents the very sort of exchange that academic freedom seeks to foster.
Similar confusion governs the analysis of Neil Gross, a Harvard sociology professor who presented the results of a survey studying whether social science professors felt their academic freedom was threatened. According to Gross, about one-third did. But it's questionable whether, in asking professors about their feelings, Gross discovered anything at all about the actual state of academic freedom. Though he acknowledged that one explanation for the poll results is that his subjects could have been defining academic freedom in their own way, he nonetheless took professors' subjective impressions as proof that there is a problem, calling the one-third figure "alarming" and arguing that we are in "an up cycle" when it comes to attacks on academic freedom.
Such arguments do not tell us anything meaningful about academic freedom as such. What they do tell us is that academic freedom has become a distressingly amorphous concept. Because its history and significance are not broadly understood, "academic freedom" is now often used to forward ideas and claims that are, in fact, antithetical to it.
Posted by acta online at August 16, 2007 06:08 PM
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