Government Relations: No News Equals Good News?

By Mark F. Smith

The 108th Congress may well go down as one of the most unproductive sessions in American history. Its final legacy will include scores of unfinished issues, and the label "can't do" is already being applied to congressional leadership. For colleges and universities, the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA) tops the list of unfinished priorities, although it remains to be seen if this Congress will finish education-related appropriations bills, either.

There is, however, one area in which the lack of congressional accomplishment may turn out to be good news. This Congress saw a host of proposals that threatened academic freedom, but, luckily, most died before enactment. Early in the life of this Congress, both House and Senate members introduced measures extending the scope and time frame of the USA Patriot Act. But by the end of the session, their attention had moved to reorganizing the intelligence agencies in response to several recommendations made in July by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission).

Bills seeking to reauthorize specific sections of the HEA more directly threatened academic freedom in colleges and universities. In October 2003, the House passed the International Studies in Higher Education Act on a voice vote. The bill reauthorizes the international programs under Title VI of the HEA—programs the Association strongly supports. But the act also proposes establishment of an advisory board to make recommendations to Congress and the secretary of education on the effect of Title VI programs on homeland security, international education and affairs, and foreign-language training. The creation of this board would mean that a politically appointed body would review academic curricula on politically motivated grounds—clearly a grave threat to academic freedom.

Another bill reauthorizing portions of the HEA, the College Access and Opportunity Act, includes a section based on the so-called Academic Bill of Rights, which purports to protect students from ideological bias in the classroom. Backers of the bill have brought forth countless anecdotes to show how particular political viewpoints dominate college and university faculty members, leading them to discriminate against a brave cadre of dissenting students. The AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure issued a statement last December that endorsed principles of neutrality and nonindoctrination in the classroom while concluding that the "Academic Bill of Rights is an improper and dangerous method" to implement such principles. The committee added, "Ironically, it also infringes academic freedom in the very act of purporting to protect it."

In 1930, A. O. Lovejoy, the first general secretary of the AAUP, defined academic freedom as the "freedom of the teacher or research worker in higher institutions of learning to investigate and discuss the problems of his science and to express his conclusions, whether through publication or in the instruction of students, without interference from political or ecclesiastical authority, or from the administrative officials of the institution in which he is employed, unless his methods are found by qualified bodies of his own profession to be clearly incompetent or contrary to professional ethics."

Lovejoy's definition clearly expresses the importance, and the limits, of academic freedom for the professor and remains persuasive today throughout U.S. higher education. Yet he does not necessarily speak to policy makers beyond the academy. The job of AAUP members in the coming months is to develop arguments that persuade legislators and other policy makers that academic freedom is vital to students and to society. Although the two bills described above are legislatively dead for the current session of Congress, the issues they raise will come back in the next Congress. And versions of the Academic Bill of Rights are being introduced in state legislatures around the country. We can expect more of them in the next few years.

In 1956, an AAUP special committee assessed the damage of the McCarthy era and wrote, "We ask for the maintenance of academic freedom and of the civil liberties of scholars, not as a special right, but as a means whereby we may make our appointed contribution to the life of the commonwealth." College and university faculty have an important function to perform in modern society, and society as a whole has a stake in the protection of academic freedom. Faculty members must help policy makers understand these facts. Illustrating the importance of academic freedom by citing actual campus experiences would be one step toward that goal.

Mark Smith is AAUP director of government relations.

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