From the General Secretary: Academic Freedom Undermined: Self-Censorship
By Roger Bowen
Recently, I met a Chinese scholar from the Higher Education Research Institute in Shanghai, who was visiting the United States. He proudly boasted that the "teacher of the teacher who was his teacher" had studied with John Dewey, founding president of the AAUP. In China, as in much of Asia, one establishes one's bona fides through lineage of discipleship.
The professor was well informed about the AAUP's mission and knew that the defense of academic freedom distinguishes us from the other higher education associations he was visiting during his stay in Washington. He told me that academic freedom in China is problematic—even though President Hu Jintao, he assured me, strongly supports academic freedom. He said the problem arises because faculty self-censor to avoid alienating the Chinese state, headed by the same President Hu, which is the faculty's main employer and funding source.
I shared with him the letter I had written to his nation's president just a day earlier. It slammed the Chinese government for convicting a professor for writing about official corruption at the village level. My visitor assured me that President Hu would take my criticism seriously and perhaps, he added, even write me about my concerns. (Four months have passed without a letter from President Hu.)
He asked me if American professors, like their Chinese counterparts, practice self-censorship to protect their research funding and jobs. If so, he wondered, does the AAUP see self-censorship as a violation of academic freedom? His concern about faculty self-censorship no doubt reflects the intrusiveness of the state in the workings of the Chinese academy. Academic freedom in China, he implied, amounts only to the freedom to profess and conduct research that the state allows. That chilling admission so occupied my consciousness that I suspect I was less than completely responsive to his question about self-censorship among U.S. faculty.
I should have admitted that the sort of institutional autonomy that once protected American faculty from external political influence and internal political self-censorship is today being slowly undermined. I should have pointed to the Orwellian "academic bills of rights" under consideration by more than a dozen state legislatures to impose a politically partisan "balance" of views in the social sciences and humanities. I should have mentioned the USA Patriot Act and its insidious rules permitting investigations of library users. I should have noted the campus presidents who refused to permit filmmaker Michael Moore to speak on campus prior to the presidential election, the Solomon Amendment that forces universities to permit military recruitment on campus lest they lose federal support, and so on.
I should also have cited the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, which asserts that students' confidence in faculty "will be impaired if there is a suspicion on the part of the student that [a] teacher is not expressing himself fully or frankly," or that "college and university teachers in general are a repressed and intimidated class who dare not speak with the candor and courage which youth always demands in those whom it is to esteem."
I might also have added that declining state support has forced higher education to depend on private investments, that the culture of business is slowly replacing the academic culture, and that private interests have rationally concluded that universities can be profitably used to promote their own narrow concerns rather than the cause of education. Higher education loses its autonomy—and therefore its ability to protect academic freedom—as the payers call the tune. The pipers—our faculty and administrators—too often play as they are told, instinctively out of self-preservation or overtly as an act of obedience.
Had I offered such admissions, I am certain the good professor would have observed that American academics in some respects have it worse than his Chinese colleagues. Chinese scholars must contend only with an intrusive state, while U.S. scholars must deal with a state that intrudes despite decreasing its financial support, and a private sphere that intervenes because it has resources and uses them to buy access to brains in the postindustrial knowledge economy. "There may not be an AAUP in China," I can imagine him intoning, "but if there were, it would have only one enemy. You, poor folks, must deal with two enemies."
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