Born Free but in Chains: Academic Freedom and Rights of Governance

By Roger Bowen

Roger Bowen, the AAUP's general secretary, delivered the following address last fall to the Coalition of Faculty Associations of Western New York. The coalition includes faculty organizations at Buffalo State College, Daemen College, D'Youville College, Medaille College, Niagara County Community College, Niagara University, St. Bonaventure University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo, and members of the Buffalo Teachers Federation.

The AAUP's history could be rendered in a series of biographies about academic dissenters who dared to speak truth to power. My remarks here center on a recent dissenter—Neil Rappaport of Bennington College—whose case illuminates especially well the relationship between academic freedom and academic governance. Rappaport, a photography professor, courageously defended faculty rights in 1994 when his institution's president, Elizabeth Coleman, embarked on a trustee-supported slash-and-burn plan to rid the college of nearly 40 percent of its entire faculty. "Financial exigency" had been declared by the Bennington administration but had not been demonstrated to its faculty, nor was it proven to the AAUP investigation team that later recommended placing Bennington on the list of censured administrations. Because Rappaport dared to challenge the president and trustees, he was terminated two years later, primarily on grounds of failing to be "collegial," a criterion for contract renewal at Bennington that had been unhappily foisted on the faculty by its administration. "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down," goes an old Japanese proverb.

Rappaport fits the mold of academic dissenters who refused to bow before arbitrary authority or, as in the case of Bennington, yield to the exercise of naked power. But set aside the adjectives and ask, Is there a difference between power and authority? Power is certainty; authority is probability. Power is sui generis, while authority is derivative and less than total. Democratic citizens, appropriately, mistrust power, especially when it is concentrated, while they accept authority so long as the source from which it is derived, and the use to which it is put, is deemed to be legitimate. Authority that is shared tends to be more trusted.

Rappaport sought to teach the Bennington administration the difference between concentrated power and shared authority. His failure was not because he lacked sufficient will. Rather, it had everything to do with the failure of a particular, essentially authoritarian, model of college governance to respect the basic rights of faculty citizens to participate directly in decisions that affect their professional lives.

Bennington's governance model was authoritarian, evidenced by the absence of a separation of powers between the president and the board of trustees and, no less important for faculty today, an absence of a system of tenure. Bennington's president did not protect the faculty from its trustees, and she showed disdain toward the faculty's academic freedom by not persuading the governing board to substitute real tenure for the "presumptive tenure" then in place at Bennington.

For a president to terminate faculty without according them benefit of due process is an usurpation of the faculty's prerogative and a repudiation of the faculty's expertise. Joan Wallach Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study, chair of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, has said that it is "this very expertise that protects and legitimates critical scholarship and that enables faculty to distinguish between good and bad scholarship, to decide when the boundaries of reasonable thought and good professional practice have been breached. The faculty's role in governance," she concluded, "is the foundation of academic freedom."

I must disagree with my colleague and friend, Joan Scott, on this point. I think the truth is exactly the opposite, namely, it is academic freedom that is the foundation of the faculty's role in governance. Academic freedom is a "first principle," which may explain why John Dewey and Arthur Lovejoy first created Committee A in 1915 upon the founding of the AAUP, and the next year the annual meeting established Committee T on College and University Government. After all, in the absence of an institutional endorsement of academic freedom, shared governance is meaningless because the only "sharing" that will occur is what a college or university administration will permit.

Academic freedom is a grundnorm, not unlike natural rights or human rights. Upon the notion of natural rights to life and liberty, after all, democratic structures were built in America, just as academic freedom served as the foundation for constructing college and university governance in America. Hence, we in the U.S. academy insist on having a system of shared governance precisely because we recognize that it is one way—indeed, the only way-in a democratic society to protect academic freedom.

Shared governance, then, is the practical mechanism employed to ensure the protection of academic freedom or, as the AAUP's statement On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom states, "A governance system is merely a structure that allocates authority . . . [and] "is no guarantee that academic freedom will flourish." A shared governance system recognizes that faculty members alone have the expertise necessary to make decisions about curriculum, colleagues, and course content. Governance cannot be shared unless this first postulate—the inviolability of academic freedom—is accepted by the other governing authorities—the governing board and the administration. Shared governance is at least an implicit recognition—and should be an explicit one as well—by the other power holders that only academics can authoritatively set the academic agenda for a college or a university. Trustees and administrations cede this authority to the academic professionals in recognition of the faculty's expertise, which is possible only because faculty members enjoy the freedom to search for truth and to expound upon it.

The institution of tenure gives concrete form to this first principle known as academic freedom and thereby acts as the assurance that the decisions the faculty make regarding the academic program are protected from meddling by bureaucrats within the academy—chancellors, presidents, trustees, and regents—and by self-declared experts outside the academy—politicians, political parties, and the public generally.

The Bennington case shows that so-called presumptive tenure is inadequate protection, yet it is certainly arguable whether real tenure would have protected the Bennington faculty from the purge that beset them ten years ago. As Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago from 1929 until 1951, wrote in Academe in 1950, "Tenure is valuable, for, like an insurance policy, it is a provision for unpleasant contingencies. Like an insurance policy, it cannot provide for all contingencies, and, in the worst, it is quickly swept away. Runaway inflation or general bankruptcy will wipe out the protection of insurance; mass hysteria will do the same to tenure."

Hutchins was writing about the imposition of loyalty oaths on faculty in the University of California system during that period of rabid anticommunism called McCarthyism. He defined the university then as "a center for independent thought" that because of McCarthyism was losing its definition—its soul, if you will—because of its financial dependence on legislators who were using the power of the purse to force universities to demand that faculty take the loyalty oath.

"The difficulty," Hutchins wrote, "is money. Universities always need money. How can they get more except by being responsible to public whims? How can they get it if they are independent?" How, in other words, can centers of independent thinking be what they ought to be if their independence is compromised by dependency on public wealth? The sad answer to this question, Hutchins wrote, was "to ingratiate themselves with the public" by requiring faculty to take a loyalty oath which was, he said, "ruinous to a university." Or, in the case of Bennington, the president ingratiates herself with the trustees, with effects no less ruinous.

Of course, no loyalty oaths were demanded of the Bennington faculty in 1994. Bennington is, after all, private and not dependent on the public purse. But the problem for Bennington, in the view of the administration and the trustees, nonetheless was, à la Hutchins, "money."

Money, or the scarcity of it, has always been a problem for the academy, but in recent years it has taken on greater importance. As education has been devalued into a mere commodity, seen more as a product with commercial value than as a process that makes individuals more fully human and communities more democratic, financial support for colleges and universities is seen less as a civic responsibility and more as an investment that requires a return. For some, the return is trained graduates who can operate effectively in the corporate world; for others, it may be a contract for a campus construction project in exchange for a donation, or for legislative support for an increased appropriation.

Regardless, as the ivory tower has morphed into a business enterprise, the college is expected by its financial supporters to balance its books even at the cost of treating faculty as expendable human capital. Such reasoning is as cold as the hard cash that shapes corporate values, or as Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press wrote in the September 2, 2004, issue of Village Voice, "Money has restructured the U.S. academy in its own image, and money is a blunt instrument."

How does, or how can academic governance work in such a corporatist environment, where cash is king and faculty are yeomen at best, serfs at worst? The answer may be surprising, yet may portend a possible solution to the problems the academy faces today. The answer, paradoxically, means transforming a weakness inherent in faculty behavior into a strength that can be used against its opponent. What is this weakness? It is the faculty's tendency toward solitary living and work habits that combine to foster an outlook suspicious of administrative authority.

The nature of faculty work predisposes us to be largely self-governing and to practice the virtue of self-reliance. In fact, most of the faculty member's work life proceeds without regard to administration, trustee, or public policies. As faculty enter the academy, the "licensing" of the faculty member, as it were, the getting of the PhD, happens largely out of range of the administration. A candidate does the work her dissertation committee requests and that she has chosen to do. It is solitary work, for the most part; the future faculty member generally works alone as she begins writing the dissertation.

Once licensed, a pro forma bestowal of the degree by an administration that necessarily entrusts the senior faculty to make the judgment about competence in subject matter, the new faculty member goes alone into the job market and finds a job. He then develops new courses to teach, again, largely alone. Without prompting, urging, or outside force, he does the work that tradition, colleagues, and students expect. The faculty member then teaches and assigns grades, alone, and, when left alone for short periods by students, conducts research for publication, usually alone and without assistance. If the new faculty member makes it to tenure—one of the loneliest moments in the professor's life—the faculty member will quite naturally have cultivated a strong sense of self-reliance, a quality that easily translates into a preference for self-government or faculty autonomy within the university collective.

To be sure, once tenured she will likely be expected to be more social, serve on college or university committees, be a presence on campus, flower and bloom into a department or campus leader. Or if she, after years of acting alone, is incapable of becoming more social, she gets the tacit "bye" from colleagues and administrators who accept her inclination to solitariness. Every campus has its faculty "hermits," and we think no less of them for prizing their solitude, as we see them walking alone to the library or the research lab, entering or exiting from their offices, driving off campus, alone. Campus culture indulges the loners.

Perhaps this characterization is too existential. But as a campus president, I often had occasion to observe that the faculty did not really need me, or any administrator for that matter. Professors live, work, and act alone largely; and even when I saw them interacting with other members of their disciplinary tribe—the academic department—I could not help but notice how solitary most faculty members seemed. As a faculty member once upon a time, I had little consciousness of this inclination among my colleagues. In retrospect, however, I realize that my lifestyle and behavior probably fit the mold I am describing.

If you grant me this much, also grant that these self-reliant, independent, autonomous, and solitary workers known as faculty naturally tend to favor self-government, if, that is, they abide the notion of government at all. Government, or administration, is alien in that it is largely peripheral to the core of the faculty member's existence. Order for many faculty, writ small, means attentiveness from students in class, papers handed in on schedule (although student scofflaws are frequently tolerated), a research agenda, and bookshelves enough to handle the tomes collected over a career.

Faculty members do not really need administrators most of the time. The exceptional moments when they do, however, are significant. Administrators are needed to interpret and sometimes enforce rules made generations ago by the faculty themselves; administrators are needed sometimes to mediate in disputes among faculty, departments, and schools within the university; and they are needed to serve as a fair and impartial distributor of resources. That's not much. In fact, as president, I sometimes wondered if I shouldn't be doing more to assist faculty, but when I tried, I was usually reminded that my help was unnecessary.

Let me use this admission as segue for addressing what the administration's responsibilities in governance should be. I just identified the major ones, vis-à-vis the faculty. But there are others in the modern university that implicitly recognize the faculty as a self-governing body. Administrators have to be externally oriented—toward legislators, alumni, donors, the press, and the public—in order to protect solitary faculty from the torment of dealing with outsiders. Administrations must also keep careful track of revenue and expenditures, again in order to save faculty from the burden of accounting. And the administration should defend faculty from governing board intrusions, student rebelliousness, and public assaults on academic freedom and tenure.

This listing of the various stations and their duties can be summarized: faculty members are the ones who "do education"; the other components of the university are bureaucrats, learners, and governors. If the governors appreciate that the faculty are instinctively self-governing, that the faculty give students a structure and an opportunity to learn, and that administrators act faithfully as stewards of faculty values and institutional resources, then governance works.

I am guessing that Neil Rappaport would agree with this description of proper governance. Clearly, Elizabeth Coleman did not. She arrogated the faculty's right to set the academic curriculum, and she conspired with the college trustees to terminate faculty members with presumptive tenure. She also purposely divided the faculty by creating a Faculty Review Committee, with members of her own choosing, to sit in judgment—or to ratify the president's judgment—over those faculty members whose jobs were earmarked for termination.

It fascinates yet distresses me that some faculty members chose to side with the president and the trustees against their colleagues, and even defended the purge of long-serving faculty to the AAUP investigating committee when it visited Bennington in 1994. That the college was facing serious financial difficulties is not in doubt. It may even be granted that the president and the trustees genuinely believed that Bennington's very survival depended on their taking drastic action. But it must also be granted that, as a consequence, in the words of the AAUP investigating committee, "Academic freedom is insecure and academic tenure is nonexistent today at Bennington College."

That the president abandoned shared governance, ran roughshod over tenure and academic freedom, and terminated certain faculty may not be reason for surprise. But that she was able to enlist some faculty to join in the slaughter, and to convince others that the purge was justified, is reason for deep concern. Why did some faculty sell out?

One reason is suggested by psychoanalyst and social theorist Erich Fromm in his classic 1941 study of Nazism, Escape from Freedom. Fromm reports that with the advent of capitalism, "The individual became more alone, isolated, became an instrument in the hands of overwhelmingly strong forces outside of himself; he became an 'individual,' but a bewildered and insecure individual." Isolated, insecure individuals, Fromm tells us, will abandon the freedoms they have in favor of the security promised by their enslavers, hence, "escape from freedom." Add to that thesis the existential reality of faculty—their loneliness and isolation—and the declaration of financial exigency where the details are kept hidden. It then comes as little surprise that some faculty joined forces with the enemies of academic freedom, abandoning all claims to the freedom that comes with self-government, and contributed to what the AAUP investigating committee called the "oppressive climate" at Bennington College.

Rappaport's opposition to the trustee-administration coup d'état is a powerful reminder that at critical junctures some individuals choose freedom over servitude, elect activity over passivity, and give substance to Fromm's notion that "the self is as strong as it is active." That is the real lesson that Rappaport's stand teaches, that shared governance can work only when faculty members insist on and secure the right to be represented by no one other than themselves in institutional governance. If I am correct, and the faculty existence is one that lends itself to self-governance, then faculty today must strive to leverage their self-reliant, solitary natures and come together and organize. They must assert their academic freedom and rights of shared governance and demonstrate to authoritarian institutions that they will not yield.

A human is "by nature a political animal," wrote philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously, meaning that humans naturally organize themselves politically. But this eighteenth-century citizen of Geneva could well have been thinking of today's American academics when he wrote, equally famously, that the human "was born free but everywhere he is in chains." The challenge for American academics today is to free ourselves from our natural inclination for solitude and translate our preference for self-government into political organizing for genuine shared governance. Once attained, then what chains we wear then will be only the ones we place on ourselves. And that is as it should be.

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