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From the General Secretary: Give More, Interfere Less
By Roger Bowen
In “Citizen Trusteeship and the New Accountability,” Tom Ingram and Martin Payson of the Association of Governing Boards (AGB) warn about the danger that “additional regulation or governmental intrusion” poses to the tradition of citizen trustees, who represent the “people” rather than the state. Published in the AGB’s 2004 annual report, the essay asserts that “for public and independent higher education boards to ignore the New Accountability [read: Big Government] is to invite the worst kind of governmental micromanagement.”
Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), warns about the growing “federalization” of higher education. The specter for Ekman is the same one that haunts the AGB: a more intrusive federal government that relies on “heavy handed and expensive” regulatory instruments that tend to “politicize” the institutions they regulate and to be monolithic in viewpoint.
The AAUP shares concerns similar to those of the AGB and the CIC but for somewhat different reasons. The AAUP’s immediate worry is that a number of state governments, as well as the federal government, are considering legislation that attempts to impose ideological balance in the professoriate—and in the name of academic freedom. This legislation, known as the “Academic Bill of Rights,” gives new meaning to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s totalitarian desideratum of “forcing people to be free,” where the freedom to think and teach is constrained by the intellectual thinness of American partisan politics. The legislation’s intent is to ensure that more faculty members with conservative beliefs will teach in the academy than now do. The impetus for such “balance” comes from an organization headed by conservative activist David Horowitz. It has received an additional boost from recent research that alleges gross underrepresentation of conservatives in certain disciplines within the professoriate. The Academic Bill of Rights is, in effect, an affirmative action program designed by the historical opponents of affirmative action in the areas of gender and ethnicity. It seeks to use the power of the government to enforce ideological balance in the profession. It’s a demand for more “big government” from those who say they favor limited government.
The AGB on behalf of trustees, the CIC on behalf of independent colleges, and the AAUP on behalf of the professoriate make a different argument: the government should keep its hands off the academy, or at least keep some distance. The AGB does not want the government to micromanage university affairs, the CIC opposes federal regulation whenever effective nongovernmental options exist, and the AAUP insists that academic freedom will be threatened if legislation dictates hiring practices based on the professor’s putative ideology.
Our three very different higher education associations share in common a passion for defending the autonomy of the academy from interference by government. We in the academy have traditionally, and capably, policed our own institutions of higher learning and kept them relatively free from government intervention. We’ve been able to do so because, historically, Americans have favored a system of higher education that encourages all who enter the university gates to follow ideas to their logical conclusions, even if they offend conventional wisdom, cultural biases, or partisan political views. While the academy is not free of dogmatists, it nonetheless rejects dogmatism because it represents the end of thinking.
Are the three higher education associations being unrealistic in opposing governmental interference? After all, how can we lobby for increased government investment in higher education, as we have done, without conceding to government a right to help set policy? What standards other than the tradition of higher education’s autonomy can be invoked in asking government to pay more but interfere less? One answer, certainly, is that the public good, and hence government, is best served by an enlightened citizenry led by college and university graduates.
Another answer, the best perhaps because it captures a uniquely American philosophical tradition, was offered by a Supreme Court Justice who wrote in defense of academic freedom: “A university ceases to be true to its own nature if it becomes the tool of Church or State or any sectional interest.” The Justice further warned that “to impose any straitjacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation.” Such a straitjacket is legislation that requires that faculty be hired not on the basis of their expertise, intelligence, com- petence in subject matter, and passion for intellectual discourse, but instead on that of their political party preference. That smacks of Iraqi universities under Saddam Hussein, Soviet universities under Stalin, or Chinese universities today. If this were to happen, the AGB, the CIC, and the AAUP would find themselves discarded into the dustbins of history along with all the free thinkers who make the American academy the center of creativity it is today.
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