Freedom to Think, Question, Research, Write, and Teach
by Janet Salmons, Research Community Manager for SAGE Methodspace
Let’s define key terms:
Academic freedom refers to the freedom to read and teach, research and write about any topic or problem without fear of reprisal and without jeopardizing your career. Intellectual freedom is more far-reaching, signifying the freedom to be curious and inquisitive, to ask hard questions, and discuss challenging, perhaps provocative topics.
Sage is actively involved with efforts to support academic freedom, including partnering with the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom and Unite Against Book Bans. Given the Methodspace focus on scholarly inquiry, pressures on educational institutions that can inhibit the free conduct of research, publication and discussion of findings are of great concern. We’re exploring academic and intellectual freedom in the United States and around the world in a series of posts and roundtable discussions that will continue through Banned Books Week in October and Academic Writing Month in November. This post focuses on academic freedom and implications for research in the United States. Coming posts will shine a spotlight on issues in other settings around the world.
New takes on old problems
Until recently, discussions of academic freedom in higher education in the United States typically centered on faculty tenure. In short, the position in favor of job security for faculty who merited tenure pointed to the importance of both freedom of inquiry and stability that allowed natural and social science researchers to conduct studies and establish long-term projects with laboratories or institutes. Arguments noted that by linking academic freedom with tenure, adjunct or contingent faculty, as well as students, were excluded from protections. These unresolved matters are of even greater concern now. Discussions of academic freedom are now taking a different turn, because in the US governmental bodies are stepping into the workings of higher education in ways that touch nearly everyone in academia, from established tenured researchers to curriculum designers, teaching faculty to students.
State legislatures are taking unprecedented steps to constrain research, instruction, textbook selection, and discussion on topics they consider inappropriate. Criteria for approving tenure are sometimes part of these legislative actions. While these directives have more limited impact on private colleges and universities, legislatures wield considerable power over state institutions. At the Federal level, the House Judiciary Committee is looking into research about online information and disinformation in ways that do impact private as well as public institutions. In response, Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, an organization that works to safeguard freedom of speech and the press, said “I think it’s quite obviously a cynical — and I would say wildly partisan — attempt to chill research.” As noted in a previous Methodspace post, public threats, including banning books on particular topics, make it difficult for much-needed studies to be proposed and approved, conducted and published.
As with many contemporary issues, it can be illuminating to look at lessons from the past. Maybe we can learn something that will help us succeed and secure the freedoms needed for a more open-minded and inclusive future.
Last week? Or last century?
In an article from The Atlantic Monthly in September, 1905, the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Henry Pritchett asked: “Shall the University Become a Business Corporation?” He made some points that resonate today with those of us concerned about academic and intellectual freedom in the United States:
[T]he American university has tended more and more to conform in its administration to the methods of the business corporation… It is no longer considered necessary that the president should be a scholar. A man [sic] chooses his college in America, not for the sake of the great teacher, but because the college has a name, or has certain associations, or perchance is well known in athletics. All these considerations tend toward local pride, not toward a wider tolerance and a more sincere appreciation of truth.
They [management practices] are evidences of a more complete machinery, but not necessarily of a deeper scholarship or a larger intellectual life or a better training for citizenship….Furthermore, while our machinery of administration holds the student to certain forms of responsibility, these have little to do with cultivating the taste, still less the thirst of the scholar. Success for the student means adaptation to the machinery and consequent graduation; success for the institution means the same thing, but this success has little to do with scholarship.
The push to make universities more business-like means academics are asked to see students as customers. While excellent teaching involves respect for students, this reframing of relationships de-emphasizes the expertise of the faculty. If, as the saying goes, the customer is always right, we lose the sense of mutual exchange so essential to intellectual freedom. Faculty are expected to serve customers, rather than to inspire, engage, motivate, and partner with learners. The push for successful program or degree completion, as Pritchett observes, does not necessarily cultivate the taste or thirst for scholarly exploration. Pritchett thinks the purpose of the university is to develop appreciation for the intellectual life, and points out that this “can take place only in the air of freedom, however evident are the dangers which freedom brings with it.”
A few decades later Charles Wesley Flint, Chancellor of Syracuse University and a Methodist minister, expressed his passion about inter-related freedoms of thought and speech. In1935 he wrote:
For many decades the danger zone of academic freedom, or “area of sensitiveness”, was in the field of the physical and natural sciences, where physical evolution seemed to clash with the church’s teaching. Now, however, the field for inquisition is in the social sciences, where social evolution seems to clash with the established order.
Against the background of this realization that the area of social sciences has become a danger zone, we ask: what is this “academic freedom”?
In relation to students or to the classroom, it is the teacher’s right, rather their duty, along with the students, to dig out all the facts without prejudice or passion, to examine and to present all sides of each proposition. For example, social, economic, and political life in all its phases should be thoroughly studied, all schools of thought, all serious plans and proposals, all doctrines, and all -isms.
This 1935 observation is only too true today, and Flint importantly suggests that “all -isms” merit thorough study. Yet, while the initial controversies targeted racism and Critical Race Theory, larger fields of study in the social sciences and the humanities are taking the brunt of recent attacks. Flint goes on to relate academic freedom with the Constitutional right to free speech, noting:
Whence these fears and questionings among us? Have we not confidence in the truth? Have we not confidence in knowledge? Have we not confidence in the American people, in their capacity to know and to discriminate in their balance and poise ? Have we no more faith than that in ourselves and our institutions? The only safe indoctrination is with truth-more and more truth. Repression, ignorance, and half-truths are always dangerous.
In this statement Flint asks us to trust that our students, our readers, our supporters, possess the ability to discern whether what we are discussing is of value, or not. Rather than protect students and library patrons, Flint would encourage us to encourage the development of skills necessary to critical thought and evaluation. These points are highlighted in a more recent statement written in the 1980s and republished in 2002 by John Boyer, a professor and Senior Advisor to the President at the University of Chicago.
Broadly understood, academic freedom is a principle that requires us to defend autonomy of thought and expression in our community, manifest in the rights of our students and faculty to speak, write, and teach freely. It is the foundation of the University’s mission to discover, improve, and disseminate knowledge. We do this by raising ideas in a climate of free and rigorous debate, where those ideas will be challenged and refined or discarded, but never stifled or intimidated from expression in the first place. This principle has met regular challenges in our history from forces that have sought to influence our curriculum and research agendas in the name of security, political interests, or financial considerations, to name a few desired ends. When I wrote this book, the challenge came from a national climate of fear and innuendo about the shape of liberal-arts curricula. This took forms that were strikingly new (such as anonymous denunciations on websites constructed to police classrooms) and depressingly familiar (such as threats to withhold financial contributions if faculty members pursued an unfavorable line of teaching). But it amounted to an effort to influence the content of our teaching and writing by pressuring the administration to censure or at least pressure individual behavior.
We need to revisit these commitments today because we are again in a climate that questions the value and scope of academic freedom. It is important to note that many of the recent challenges to this principle have been raised in the interest of pursuing some public good. Academic freedom requires a robust tolerance for disagreement and criticism, a willingness to have one’s assumptions questioned, and an openness to new ideas that may prove offensive. This tolerance always has the potential to conflict with other virtues and causes, so it needs to be defended repeatedly and vigilantly. Critics may find reasons for ceding ground to the political interests of the moment, but it will be at the cost of sacrificing a more essential value.
Similar themes emerge in statements from 1905 to 2002, including the juxtaposition of autonomy versus control, openness to exploration and tolerance of different ideas, versus fear of the unknown.
What can we do?
We’re busy! Getting ready for a new semester, finalizing a manuscript after getting reviewers’ comments, completing a grant proposal, and more. Academia is notoriously segmented with divisions between disciplines, between programs with a professional or scholarly focus, between full-time and part-time faculty, even between quantitative or qualitative researchers. At this point it seems imperative to put those differences aside, and as Boyer suggests, re-commit ourselves to the larger purpose that drew us to this line of work.
Three ways to do so are:
Pay Attention: Whether a public attack or legislative effort will directly impact you or not, pay attention to the developments in this arena. Follow the American Library Association, PEN, and the Chronicle of Higher Education to find out what is going on, and to join in as you can. Methodspace will continue to explore implications for social science researchers, and will dig more deeply into issues for writers during Academic Writing Month in November.
Speak Up: The articulate statements of the writers included in this post show the power of our words. Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, exhorts us to “use our bully pulpits to teach the difference between political issues people can respectably disagree on and the foundational values that demand consensus to sustain a free society. We must be champions for civil and human rights, proclaiming the dignity and worth of all persons not only within the confines of our campus but in the larger society. We must insist on the freedom to speak, to teach, to enlarge knowledge through research and scholarship.” What do you have to say? Be courageous; don't self-gate-keep or self-censor. Can you stand for academic and intellectual freedom in letters or articles in your local press, or by speaking at relevant meetings? Contact me if you have something to contribute or resources to share with Methodspace readers.
Support Students and Colleagues: Students, new and early-career researchers are more vulnerable to changes in policies, curricula, or employment conditions. If you are in a secure position, look for ways to support and encourage others.
Join others: Who in your field or discipline is taking a stand? How can you stand with them? For example, the Textbook and Academic Authors Association and a number of organizations in higher education have signed the American Library Association’s and American Publishing Association’s Freedom to Read Statement and invite us to sign on.
Vote: Choose to support those who affirm the value of education, academic and intellectual freedom.
References
Boyer, J.H. ( 2002). Academic freedom and the modern university: The experience of the University of Chicago (Occasional Papers on Higher Education X). Chicago: University of Chicago.
Pritchett, H. S. (1905). Academic Freedom. Journal of Education, 62(18), 494–494. https://doi.org/10.1177/002205740506201804
Flint, C. W. (1935). Academic Freedom. Bulletin of the Department of Secondary-School Principals of the National Education Association, 19(58), 34–36. https://doi-org.proxy.library.cornell.edu/10.1177/019263653501905809
More Methodspace Posts about Academic and Intellectual Freedom
This must-read article in The Scholarly Kitchen caught my attention: “Who Is Going to Make Money from Artificial Intelligence in Scholarly Communications?” See this thought-provoking interview with the author, Joseph Esposito.