The Introduction to WHO'S AFRAID OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM?, by Akeel Bilgrami and Jonathan Cole

who’s A F R A I D of

ACADE M I C F R EED O M ?

edited by

akeel bilgrami & jonathan R. cole

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this volume, despite its associative distractions, is meant quite literally. A primary achievement of the essays in the pages that follow is to identify and analyze different groups and tendencies in our society that fear academic freedom and attempt to thwart it, sources as diverse in range and generality as intellectual orthodoxy, intellectual obscurantism, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, Israeli and other pressure groups, U.S. legislation and government policy, and actions taken within universities such as speech codes and restrictions on research . . .

As a value within the academy, it is arguable that freedom of inquiry is unique and may be given a lexicographical priority over other values because it is an enabling value. It enables the pursuit of other values and, therefore, it cannot be weighed on the same scale as the values it enables, whether these be “truth” in the outcome of inquiry, or more generally “excellence” in the pursuit of inquiry, or simply the peace of mind of inquirers . . . We have said it is “arguable” that this is so. It cannot complacently be assumed to be so.

Some of the essays in the volume try to provide the arguments by which it may be established, addressing considerations that are sometimes raised to question this priority of academic freedom, considerations that appeal to the very values that it claims to enable.

Such lexicographical priority is, of course, often granted to freedom of speech and discussion outside the academy as well, so much so that it is enshrined as a familiar and fundamental law of the land. There are essays HE TITLE OF

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here that wrestle with the question: Is academic freedom just a name for the practice, within universities, of the political freedom guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, or is it, for reasons having to do with the specific nature of the academy, set apart from that more general freedom?

That question needs to be considered in conceptual and analytic terms, but also historically. One of the curious features of the value of academic freedom is how little it has evolved since the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) first articulated the value in its formal statement in 1915, which was reinforced and somewhat expanded in 1940. The value has not evolved over time the way the interpretation and scope of the First Amendment has. While there have been essays and books written about academic freedom since 1940, it may well be time for a more detailed and considered articulation of what exactly academic freedom protects and what it does not— and whether we should reconsider its original intent, which was (as Robert Post has claimed in a number of essays) that academic freedom is distinguishable from First Amendment rights and has more to do with the “contract” that exists between faculty members and others, including trustees, academic administrators, and outside authorities. Some essays here make an attempt to give some historical grounding to this issue, while others dispute it by showing its extreme restrictiveness.

Though questions of academic freedom affect all of society and not just the society of scholars, though its fruits are reaped by everyone and by most institutions, a specific group that is most affected by its presence or absence is the faculty in universities with their special duties of teaching and research.

With this in mind, the editors decided to carry out an empirical pilot survey of Columbia University full-time faculty opinion on a wide variety of questions revolving around the academic freedom they enjoy and expect but which is sometimes under question and threat. The survey is presented here with an analysis by Jonathan R. Cole and his collaborators. One question that is derived from the results of the survey relates to the hierarchy of values in a university: Is academic freedom seen by the faculty as a special enabling value, or is it considered by most contemporary faculty members as one among a set of contenders for priority? The fourteen vignettes contained in the empirical study, which in some cases asked faculty members to choose among competing university values (one of which was always free inquiry or academic freedom, although that was never explicitly mentioned in the survey), suggest that most faculty view academic freedom as essentially freedom of speech.

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The survey also suggests an erosion of certain core values within the academy.

Is academic freedom one of them, as apparently are values like disinterestedness (exemplified in, among other things, the normative prohibition against faculty members profiting from their discoveries)? The pilot study raises more questions than it answers, one of which is whether different major universities and colleges place different weights on these various values. It is fair to say that ever since John Coulter in a celebrated address stressed the value of Lehrfreiheit to the idea of the modern research university, followed several decades later by the equally and rightly celebrated Kalven committee report, the University of Chicago has been something of a pioneer in this country on the matter of the centrality that academic freedom came to have in higher education. A comparison of other universities with the University of Chicago on the question of freedom of inquiry may therefore be one way to assess these differential weights. Two essays here that focus on the University of Chicago may provide a start in helping to make such a comparative study possible.

Taken together, these essays powerfully convey how no freedom can be taken for granted even in the most well oiled of functioning formal democracies. It is in the nature of power to resist the possession and exercise of freedom by those over whom it exercises power. And power, as we also know, does not threaten freedom always by coercion or, to put it differently, the opposite of freedom is not necessarily always coercive agents and policies and institutions but the presence of much less easily identifiable tendencies. The modern university is not a medieval cloister and is as subject to the political and economic interests that generate these tendencies and threaten freedom as most, if not all, other institutions. (One extraordinary, up-to-the-minute example of this is the very recent amendment to a budget bill by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), which was passed by a voice vote and signed into law by President Obama. The amendment, or rider, to the bill ordered the National Science Foundation to refrain from funding any political science research “except for research projects that the [NSF director] certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.” Not since former president Ronald Reagan’s effort to eliminate all social science funding by the NSF has there been such a blatant attack by Congress on free inquiry and research judged as superior by the members of NSF panels of experts.)

In analyzing the nature of these tendencies, their sometimes hidden sources, and their detailed and widespread implications, the essays presented here are exercises in and for democracy.

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What follows is a set of very brief summaries of each essay in the book to steer the reader to specific interests and points of focus in the volume.

Geoffrey Stone provides us with “A Brief History of Academic Freedom,” which traces the origins and evolution of academic freedom from Athens to the present. It explores the many battles that have been fought over the years to give meaning and content to that freedom; examines its meaning today; and considers the political, economic, and cultural challenges academic freedom continues to face now and in the future.

Akeel Bilgrami finds a celebrated argument in John Stuart Mill appealing to human fallibility to be both fallacious on its own terms and unnecessary to make the case for freedom of inquiry. He rejects such metaphors as “the marketplace of ideas” and “balance in the classroom” that are encouraged by Mill’s argument and provides an alternative analysis for what it is in dogmatism that threatens freedom of inquiry.

David Bromwich articulates the case against the sort of sequestering of academic freedom from the more generally articulated political freedom enshrined in the Constitution that has recently been put forward by both Robert Post and Stanley Fish, and in doing so raises a question about the extent to which their position reflects (and feeds) the increasing transformation in our societies of knowledge into a form of “expertise.”

Jonathan R. Cole’s essay deploys the ideals and logic of the Kalven committee report as a point of departure for his analysis of the logic and limits of academic freedom. He suggests that the threats against academic freedom are very much still with us and proposes how great universities ought to respond in certain ways that are consistent with this value. He outlines the nature of the threats and the roles that the university and its faculty ought to play in responding to them. Indeed, he argues that great universities cannot be created or continue to exist without a vigilant defense of this value, upon which is built most of the rest of the structure of a great university. He argues, as does the Kalven committee report, that the best of our universities are by design meant to be unsettling—to be critical of our society’s weaknesses, as a source for new, even radical ideas (in all disciplines) that must also meet the test of extreme methodological rigor. The essential tension with the university is between the acceptance to listen to the most radical ideas and simultaneously to apply the most stringent methodological criteria for establishing fact or truth.

Joan Scott exposes the weaknesses in conventional efforts at making and maintaining a distinction between politics and scholarship by appeal to a

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notion of “objectivity,” and thinks the consequences of this through for the diverse use that is made of notions of “academic responsibility” to restrict academic freedom.

Jon Elster’s polemical essay is on how tolerance of two broad tendencies in academic disciplines that he finds “obscurantist” can be a threat to academic freedom. At first sight, this would seem to be an argument for there being too much academic freedom. But that is not his view. He distinguishes between freedom of thought and freedom of speech and claims that “excessive politeness” toward obscurantism undermines the former. The essay should raise an interesting question for the reader. Suppose even that we put aside the protest that one person’s obscurantism is another person’s depthful clarity, and grant him that we have permitted a great deal of obscurantism in the academy. The interesting question is: Why is this a form of academic unfreedom? Obscurantism, if and where it exists, is no doubt a wrong, but why should all wrongs be the same wrong? Should we count it as the same wrong as academic unfreedom, as promoting the same wrong as coercion or dogmatism does, or as a different sort of malaise in the university?

Michele Moody-Adams addresses conflicting values as they affect questions of academic freedom. As she notes, academic freedom can have culturally and politically unsettling consequences, particularly when practices of intellectual exclusion that are central to academic freedom and define academic life conflict with values of inclusion that we deem important to democratic institutions. Her essay considers the causes and implications of such conflicts, as well as broader cultural sources of unease about academic freedom, to show that the benefits of protecting academic freedom far outweigh any potential dangers.

As we said above, Robert Post has written extensively in the past on aspects of the history and practice of academic freedom in the United States, and has made a clear and sharp distinction between the concepts of academic freedom and the First Amendment clause protecting freedom of speech.

He has argued that academic freedom grew out of an effort to redefine the relationship between academics and their employers in an era (the first two decades of the twentieth century). His is an argument that academic freedom protects the rights of experts from disciplines to make a series of decisions about the quality of scholarship and the organization of how to evaluate it without external interference. In the current essay found here, Post makes a structural argument that the constitutional law of academic freedom, properly

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speaking, protects neither professors as individuals nor universities as institutions, but the disciplinary norms which define the scholarly profession and which universities exist to nourish and reproduce.

Philip Hamburger explores conflicting norms in his essay where he argues that the use of institutional review boards, or IRBs, violates the principles of academic freedom. He argues that licensing of speech or the press was a method of controlling the press employed by the Inquisition and the Star Chamber, and the First Amendment unequivocally barred it. Nonetheless, the federal government has revived licensing through the regulation of human-subjects research. Although federal regulations provide for academics and students to get permission for “research,” which sounds like mere conduct, both the text and the effect of the regulations reveal that they provide for licensing of speech and the press—initially in academic inquiry and then in its publication. Of course, research on human subjects can be harmful, and the government aims to prevent that, but the harms prevented by the humansubjects research regulations are minimal compared to the harm caused by suppression of speech. Particularly in medical research and its publication, the suppression evidently causes several thousands of deaths each year. Hamburger juxtaposes these two norms of the academy, while arguing that, in fact, the federal regulations are unconstitutional. Indeed, the resulting censorship is the most widespread and systematic assault on the freedom of speech and the press in the nation’s history.

Richard Shweder’s essay seeks first to define the ancient Socratic ideal of freedom of thought and the application of the methods of critical reason as the ultimate ends of academic life. According to this view the university is primarily an intellectual, not a moral, political, or commercial, institution.

What makes a great university great is its commitment and willingness to nurture and protect the ardor and fearlessness of autonomous minds to following the argument where it leads regardless of moral, political, or commercial interests or popular opinion. Is this antiquarian conception a foolish ideal in the contemporary academic world? To what extent does a self-consciously neo-antiquarian academic institution such as the University of Chicago live up to the standard? Would Socrates be welcome and thrive within the halls of the modern university or would he slowly suffer death by a thousand cuts?

Robert Zimmer examines some of the history and context of academic freedom and its meaning, fastening particularly on the uses of that history at the University of Chicago as a case study. He examines the nature and role

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of the Kalven committee report, which reflects long-standing views within the University on the subject of academic freedom and the critical role that the report played in the implementation of this value. The essays by Zimmer and Shweder, and to some extent Stone’s as well, are understandably rooted in issues that arose at the University of Chicago. This is not merely because they are all professors there but because, as we have said, that university was one of the earliest sites where the issue of academic freedom was aired and documented.

Matthew Goldstein and his coauthor Frederick Schaffer are particularly well suited to explore the core issues their paper raises: How is academic freedom to be viewed from the point of view of the relative roles that faculty members and academic administrators ought to play in the governance structure of universities that are seeking to transform themselves? The division of academic labor has become very much entrenched, and as much as most outsiders believe that faculty members at our great universities are diehard liberals, those who have tried to “move” universities from one position to another know that when you bring two or more faculty members together they can be extremely conservative. This skepticism about change and novel ideas has its upside, since it tends to dismiss the many fads and fashions that would envelop the university. Yet when there is need for meaningful structural or substantive reform, which potentially includes the closure of some units of a university or a dramatic shift in its curricular orientation, the faculty members often are deeply offended by initiatives taken by academic administrators.

Goldstein and Schaffer open up an important area for further thought and investigation: In times that require change at universities, what should be the relative roles of faculty members and administrators in initiating and carrying out that change? Does administrative initiative, with faculty consultation, violate principles of academic freedom and the roles that have been carved out over the decades for the two groups?

Stanley Fish and Judith Butler take opposing sides on the relation between academic freedom and the academic boycott politics surrounding the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. While Fish takes this particular issue as yet another location to argue for his view that the academy is a relatively narrow and isolated enterprise whose pursuits must not be contaminated by larger political struggles, Butler makes an argument that academic freedom is a conditioned value, a value that can only be implemented under certain conditions that are necessary for it, and if those conditions are being manifestly

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abrogated by the Israeli government’s policies and practices, then it cannot be a threat to academic freedom, as is sometimes thought, to propose an academic boycott of the sort that some would wish to impose on Israel.

John Mearsheimer looks at the variety of ways in which the “Israel lobby” adversely affects the freedom of the academy in the United States, from smear tactics against professors who are critics of Israel and working toward excluding such critics from visiting and speaking on campuses to co-opting students to support Israel and discouraging donations to universities that do not internally subdue criticism of Israel.

Noam Chomsky expands the canvas of these issues from Mearsheimer’s narrower interest in the intrusive presence of the Israel lobby on campuses to the much more generalized voluntary subservience of university administrators and intellectuals to state power, with some telling details of the recent history of this form of subservience as it relates to American foreign policy toward the Middle East.

Finally, little is known about what faculty members at major universities feel about the principle of academic freedom, especially when it may conflict with other values and norms at the institution. With his coauthors Stephen Cole and Christopher Weiss, Jonathan R. Cole explores the faculty reactions to fourteen hypothetical situations (that were, in fact, based upon actual academic freedom and free inquiry cases). The pilot study polled fulltime Columbia University faculty, asking them to assess certain actions of a fictional professor (although each was based on actual academic freedom and free inquiry cases) and to tell us whether and/or how much the professor should be sanctioned for her or his actions. The results of the study are presented in this essay as a first step in an effort to stimulate the gathering of more empirical evidence about faculty members’ attitudes and values surrounding academic freedom.

Two essays in this volume, the ones by Chomsky and Bilgrami, were presented as lectures on occasions whose context is not entirely detachable from some of the substance of what they have to say. The same may be said of Jonathan R. Cole’s essay, which appeared previously in an issue of Daedalus.

The editors have therefore retained references to the context in those essays.

Modern social life is everywhere characterized by the undue demands that are made on individuals in the occupations that they choose or are landed with and by the brief and distracting release from such demands in recreation. Life in a thoroughly professionalized academy cannot be counted as an exception

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to this. There is scarce time and energy remaining for serious critical reflection on what one does in living such a life, and this often induces an unwilled complacence about what one may have allowed as fundamental threats to the basic liberties that enable the pursuits of inquiry. But, as even these brief summaries of the essays in this volume display in gratifying abundance, there are also pockets of determined resistance against such complacence. In inviting and presenting them, we have sought both thematic range and historical depth in identifying and diagnosing the threats to freedom of inquiry, but above all we have sought to exemplify the spirit of controversy that many of the contributors believe universities should protect, indeed encourage.