University Redefines Academic Freedom
The University of California issued a new statement on academic freedom in September. The policy it supersedes had been in place since 1934. The statement establishes that faculty have primary responsibility for articulating the professional standards by which academic freedom is sustained.
The revision was substantially drafted by law professor Robert Post, an expert on academic freedom and the First Amendment, who is a member of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Formerly a faculty member at UC Berkeley, Post now teaches at Yale University.
The statement reads, in part:
Academic freedom requires that teaching and scholarship be assessed by reference to the professional standards that sustain the University's pursuit and achievement of knowledge. The substance and nature of these standards properly lie within the expertise and authority of the faculty as a body. The competence of the faculty to apply these standards of assessment is recognized in the Standing Orders of the Regents, which establish a system of shared governance between the Administration and the Academic Senate. Academic freedom requires that the Academic Senate be given primary responsibility for applying academic standards, subject to appropriate review by the Administration, and that the Academic Senate exercise its responsibility in full compliance with applicable standards of professional care.
Interest in developing a new policy was stimulated by a controversy in spring 2002 over a course in Palestinian poetics offered by the Berkeley English department. The course, taught by a graduate student, was initially described as one in which conservative thinkers were not welcome to enroll. The course description evoked protest on and off campus, and the department ultimately asked the graduate instructor to revise it. During the controversy, UC president Richard Atkinson asked Post to review the issues of academic freedom and governance raised by the course description. (Post's letter to Atkinson appears as a feature article in the May-June 2003 issue of Academe.)
Post says that almost all academic freedom policies at comparable universities focus on either the rights of individuals or the professional obligations of faculty members, but do not explain the relationship between the two. "The new UC policy is the first adopted by a major university firmly to ground academic freedom in the professional autonomy of the corporate body of the faculty, as envisioned in the founding documents of the AAUP," Post says.
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