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From the Editor: Academic Freedom and National Security
Lawrence Hanley
Within recent weeks, the president of a California community college has issued a memo warning professors not to discuss the current war in their classrooms. The alumni association of a prestigious, private New England university has rescinded an award to a graduating senior who joined in a protest against President Bush's visit to campus. Early last month, I saw Robert O'Neil—professor of law, former president of the University of Virginia, and contributor to this issue—discussing the merits of academic freedom on television with Bill O'Reilly, the well-known conservative host of The O'Reilly Factor. Academic freedom is in the news, and these examples are among the more vivid symptoms of an encroaching anxiety about the friction between academic freedom and the newly heightened imperatives of national security.
So far, as O'Neil explains in his article, this anxiety is based more on the potential threats to academic freedom harbored by new legislation, regulations, and oversight instituted since September 11, 2001. Actual, significant infringements on academic freedom have yet to reach a critical mass. But, as O'Neil writes, through its Special Committee on Academic Freedom and National Security in Times of Crisis, the AAUP is already acting to monitor and assess the condition of academic freedom in a nation at war. Daniel Denvir, an undergraduate at Reed College, offers a view of the forces contending over the meaning and status of academic freedom for students on today's campuses. In his elegantly argued essay, Robert Post explicates the issues of professional standards and academic conduct surrounding a controversial course description at the University of California, Berkeley.
These pieces engage—eloquently and rigorously—with the immediate challenges to academic freedom in today's academy. Yet academic freedom is not a static ideal. Pressures on academic freedom also emanate from deeper shifts and modifications within the university. In their articles here, Eric Marshall and S. David Mash question how, respectively, the increasing presence of part-time faculty and the campaign for virtual libraries need to reshape the ways we think about academic freedom. Balakrishnan Rajagopal asks how we can better protect the academic freedoms of increasing numbers of international students and faculty.
In his article, Joseph Raelin attempts to reconcile the conflicts between academic administration and academic freedom. And Erica Rand, in one of the most thoughtful and challenging reflections on academic freedom I've read, explores the existing tensions within academic freedom, particularly when it comes to issues of sexual identity and teaching. Academic labor, technology, globalization, managerialism, and new complications of professional identity and duty: these are the challenges to thinking about academic freedom that will persist beneath and beyond our current time of crisis.
This is not to underplay our immediate situation. Things are moving fast, and probably not in a propitious direction. As Post writes, the contemporary challenges to academic freedom are "multiple, novel, and complex." Armed with a tolerance for complexity and surprise, we can best preserve and strengthen academic freedom, now as always, by exercising it often and strenuously.
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