Some Reflections on Academic Freedom Today

...And both foundation and government officials are likely to use criteria in making grants which match those of their brethren within the academy...

...Yet, as long as there still exists a minority of professors who do profess, the defense of academic freedom against the backwoodsmen in search of moral deviations or political sins, and against the suave orgmen who wish to mold the faculty in their own image, remains a vital necessity...

...Arthur 0. Lovejoy put it neatly, "The principle of academic freedom asserts .. . that those who buy a certain service may not (in the most important particular) prescribe the nature of the service to be rendered...

...The majority of men who crowd the faculties believe very simply that they have been given a license to teach and do research within the specialized areas of their competence...

...Koch's dismissal created a storm of indignation within the academic community and beyond...

...Nor is the internal operation of the academic bureaucracy the only issue...

...I take this view to be profoundly mistaken...

...Moreover, a number of other issues are still very much alive: 1) The academic freedom of students, as distinct from faculty, has been poorly protected...

...In fact, they are often more conservative in their views than academic administrators...

...But too often we forget or neglect the fact that matters are still very different in those academic institutions which come in the middle or near the tail of the academic procession...

...The result has been a mood of academic complacency which fitted neatly with the generally complacent spirit of America in the last fifteen years...

...In bureaucracies men not fitting into the table of organization might create administrative havoc far transcending their immediate and direct impact...

...Even when their right to hear "controversial" opinions from their own faculty has been safeguarded, such rights have often been curtailed when "contamination" by outsiders was feared...

...He was not formally dismissed, but he had to leave when he refused to suppress the heresy...

...Eliminate from the university all those for whom the freedom to think differently is a vital necessity, and there would remain no potential for the infringement of academic freedom...

...Not because modern administrators are corrupted by vices from which earlier administrators were exempt, but rather because the older pattern of the few elite universities, still reminiscent of a medieval community of scholars, could permit "undisciplinables" a freedom that has been much more difficult to grant in highly bureaucratized organizations...

...In a letter to the student paper Koch had said, "with modern contraceptives and medical advice readily available...

...Yet many observers have pointed out that over the years the denizens of faculty clubs, even in major universities, have tended to look more and more like executives of major corporations...

...Being committed to a bureaucratic outlook on life, an outlook in which the removal of organizational friction is seen as a primary task, they quite naturally distrust "trouble makers" who might upset the desired routines...

...This case, although recent, still fits an earlier pattern...

...I suspect that nowadays when administrative officials wish to censor a member of "their" academic staff, they will seldom resort to oldfashioned methods of reprisal or threat...

...Koch's case was widely debated...

...It is rather a selective process operating, as it were, by means of a series of close-meshed sieves through which the faculty is passed...

...Academic freedom would then, in Paul Goodman's phrase, simply mean the freedom to be academic...

...Such subtle pressures, one might note in passing, are likely to be the most effective with graduate students and with untenured members of the faculties...

...Here was a man who insisted that a professor must profess...

...In the leading American colleges and universities the struggle for academic freedom has by now been almost won...

...Members of the academic professions have usually based their claim for freedom on the idea that their socially indispensable functions cannot properly be carried out if their performance is dictated or controlled by those who pay for it...

...Those who do not fit the new pattern have gradually been eliminated by death or the dean...

...And before the stiletto, the bribe: promotion, raises, leaves of absence, will be offered the erring professor...

...The rebellious professors are not usually fired...

...They will instead ask the erring professor to consider "the good of the university," "the spirit of the team," "the feelings of the community...

...Here, then, are further pressures which tend to curtail the chances for articulate dissent within the academic community...

...Probably there would have been similar moves in a number of other campuses, had any radicals been available for attack...

...All this does not mean, of course, that modern universities still do not have their share of eccentric professors...

...3) Perhaps one of the major reasons why there are not more academic freedom cases at the moment is very simply that there aren't very many radicals around...

...It is no longer so...

...The means of academic administration are in danger of subverting or deflecting the ends of academic life...

...I do not think so...

...The freedom of publication, speech, and opinion that is claimed by the university professor is not in principle different from that claimed by other men in liberal society...

...Nor need this be seen as a crude decision by which "good guys" are being rewarded and "bad guys" penalized...

...In the first place, the very expansion of the university has created a vast internal bureaucratic apparatus of deans, directors, registrars, administrators of the most variegated kinds...

...They distrust those unconventional men who cannot be fitted into organizational plans of research teams or who do not stay in academic niches...

...Gradually the usable particles are separated from the coarser ones—and the latter are refused access to research grants or generally pushed aside...

...But there would be no academy left either...

...It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the American university, after successfully freeing itself from clerical domination, found it difficult to impress on trustees and regents the idea that he who paid the piper was not to call the tune...

...Academic administrators are now part of a much wider web of power and influence which links them with their likes in public and private fund-granting institutions...

...To them, one feels, academic freedom is about as relevant as the residual right of every American citizen to make a "citizen's arrest...

...Three years ago the University of Illinois discharged an assistant professor of biology, Leo F. Koch, for publically criticizing conventional standards of sexual morality...

...Yet, despite the seriousness and frequency of such little-noticed incidents, one cannot help feeling that during the last few years there has been a marked decline in the infringement of academic freedom by trustees and other outsiders, at least in the more representative institutions...

...Sixty years ago William James could proudly say at a Harvard Commencement Dinner, "Our undisciplinables are our proudest product...

...These are stories of trustee-inspired victimization of teachers because they are alleged to be unorthodox in matters of sexual behavior (or in expression of views about such behavior...

...Until fairly recently most academic freedom cases could ultimately be traced to conflicts between men committed to the ethos of disinterested scholarship and men committed in their everyday affairs to the principle that payment should be based on the rendering of satisfactory services...

...there is no valid reason why sexual intercourse should not be condoned among those sufficiently mature to engage in it...

...but once it has been intimated to them in a variety of ways that they are not very welcome, only those with unusually thick hides will stick it out...

...Where the old-fashioned president, under the prodding of his trustees, was wont to swing a meat axe, the newer organization men will flick the stiletto...

...The matter is much more subtle than that...

...In a number of colleges the administration, most often probably because of trustee or regent pressures (or because of the expectation of adverse reactions from such men), has denied students the right to invite speakers of their own choosing...

...On the contrary, you can watch them practically every week making impassioned speeches in its defense at fundraising dinners...

...One reason why relatively few sanctions are needed in order to bring the tenured faculty into line is the simple fact that the weeding-out process which begins in the first year of graduate school operates with such ef ficiency that few rebels survive Ph.D...

...and these "captains of erudition" exercise a kind of control over their faculties which is quite different from that wielded by trustees or regents...

...It is a control much blander, more polite and pleasing, but at times also more insidious...

...It is not that they love academic freedom less but that they love efficient operation more...

...Is all this far removed from the issue of academic freedom...

...Difficulties surrounding academic freedom in the past arose mainly from the fact that the academician is also a salaried employee who claims the license to disagree with the views of those who provide or administer the funds from which he is paid...

...No university commands an independent budget sufficient to provide the necessary money...

...A handful of members of the Young Socialist Alliance at Indiana University has been hounded by the County Prosecutor for alleged subversive activities after they participated in a protest meeting against the Cuba blockade last year...

...They too are likely to distrust not unconventionality per se —in fact they have been known even to seek out an occasional odd-ball...

...And this, in turn, has tempted some people to conclude that since the old enemies of academic freedom seem to be routed, the battle is won...

...He closed his presidency by interrupting a baptismal service at Cambridge with a speech against infant baptism and the "corupcions stealing into the Church...

...training and the early teaching years...

...About such institutions one can still hear frightening stories—or read about them in almost every issue of the American Association of University Professors Bulletin...

...They have...

...Yet, to quote Kenneth Burke's memorable maxim: "People may be unfitted by being fit in an unfit fitness...

...Local funds must be supplemented from the outside...

...And while witch hunting for "reds" on the faculty, once the favorite activity of not-very-knowledgeable trustees, has now somewhat subsided, it still persists in many places...

...At no point can it be definitely established that their academic freedom has been infringed upon, for nothing that is done is open or clear-cut or even deliberate...

...The newer kinds of infringement of academic freedom are not likely to receive such publicity, in fact they are not likely to be known at all beyond small inner circles...

...How many professors are there today who have even given a thought to the etymological roots of the term professor...

...Just as in the business community the tycoon has by and large been re placed by the managerial glad hander, so within the academy new administrators armed with human-relations skills have taken over...

...The American Association of University Professors placed the University of Illinois on its list of censored administrations, and the case is still before the courts...

...I do not wish to imply that these men are in principle against academic freedom...

...Claims of this sort depart widely from the mores of a business society...

...It is a freedom deprived of meaning through persistent non-use...

...Who has ever heard of the—not entirely mythical—case of the chemist who insisted upon coming to the laboratory in sandals and in unstock inged feet, only very rarely entrusted his hair to a barber, was known to have insulted a dean while in a state of slight inebriation at a faculty cocktail party, and was subsequently told that the university did not see fit to support his grant applications, and would take a dim view of his chances of achieving tenure...

...2) There have been a number of cases recently, the South being only the most conspicuous one, where state legislators, witch-hunting District Attorneys, local patriotic and veterans societies, rather than trustees, have been the main movers in restricting academic freedom...

...The first president of Harvard, Henry Dunster, resigned when he found, after prolonged searching of his conscience, that he could not approve of infant baptism, the accepted theological doctrine...

...Even if one were to grant that outside attempts to control the ineffectual performance of professors no longer constitutes a major problem, this does not at all imply that the survival of academic freedom is insured...