What Does “Academic Freedom” Mean?

This plenary address from the AAUP’s annual meeting says it’s time to clear away the obfuscating rhetoric and emphasize the urgency of this basic democratic principle.

By Michael Bérubé;

In the past year, I’ve come to realize that few people know what academic freedom is or why it matters. Perhaps that’s not surprising at a time when all too few Americans know what the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is or why it matters. But what I’m going to argue is not only that academic freedom is under attack, but also that we are now dealing with a coordinated program of obfuscation about what academic freedom means. I’ll make the obvious argument first. Academic freedom is under attack for much the same reasons that liberalism itself is under attack. American universities tend to be somewhat left of the center of the American mainstream, particularly regarding cultural issues having to do with gender roles and sexuality: the combination of a largely liberal, secular professoriate and a student body that is mostly younger than twenty-five tends to give rise to a campus population that, by and large, does not see gay marriage as a serious threat to the Republic.

Since September 11, 2001—again, for obvious reasons—many forms of mainstream liberalism have been denounced as anti-American. A cottage industry of popular right-wing books has equated liberalism with treason (Ann Coulter), with mental disorders (Michael Savage), and with fascism ( Jonah Goldberg). Coulter’s book also mounts a vigorous defense of Joe McCarthy, and columnist Michelle Malkin has written a book defending the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In such a climate, it is not surprising to see attacks on one of the few remaining institutions in American life that is often—though not completely—dominated by liberals.

The principle of academic freedom developed by the AAUP stipulates that “teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties.” It insists that professors should have intellectual autonomy from legislatures, trustees, alumni, parents, and ecclesiastical authorities with regard to their teaching and research. In this respect, it is a legacy of the Enlightenment, which sought—successfully, in those nations most influenced by the Enlightenment—to free scientists and humanists from the dictates of church and state. It is precisely that autonomy from legislative and religious oversight that helped to fuel the extraordinary scientific and intellectual efflorescence in the West over the past two centuries; it has also served as one of the cornerstones of the free and open society, in contrast to societies in which certain forms of research will not be pursued if they displease the general secretary or the council of clerics. But today, the paradox of efforts to legislate “academic bills of rights” based on the work of David Horowitz, former New Leftist turned conservative firebrand, is this: they claim to defend academic freedom precisely by promising to give the state direct oversight of course curricula, of departmental hiring practices, and of the intellectual direction of academic fields. In other words, by violating the very principle they claim to defend.

Freedom from Liberals

In Pennsylvania, where I teach, the House Select Committee on Academic Freedom held four hearings last year, most of which were uneventful; one of the Democrats on the committee even described them as a “colossal waste of time.” But some of the testimony from the activist right was noteworthy. In November 2005, for example, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) president Stephen Balch testified that because of the number of faculty members at state-funded universities in Pennsylvania who identify with “a particular political group,” state legislatures should make sure that no “advocacy” exists. I want to call attention to the evidentiary standard here: a preponderance of registered Democrats among the faculty, in and of itself, is grounds for state action. According to the NAS transcript of Balch’s testimony, the state of Pennsylvania must pursue “intellectual diversity” in hiring—meaning, of course, a redress of the shortage of conservatives in academe. The legislature, Balch argued,

should expect to see the problem of intellectual pluralism addressed with the same vigor that the state’s universities are already addressing what they take to be the problem of a lack of ethnic and gender diversity….

The legislature must expect a full accounting of progress made toward these goals each time the state’s universities seek new statutory authority and renewed financial support. If a good-faith effort is being made to overcome these problems, it should leave the remedial specifics to the universities’ own decision making. If a good-faith effort isn’t made, it should urge governing boards to seek new leadership as a condition of full support. Failing even in that, it might, as a last resort, consider a full-scale organizational overhaul, to design governance systems and institutional arrangements better able to meet the obligations that go with academic freedom.

Full-scale organizational overhaul: what can that mean? I don’t know, but it sounds kind of intrusive.

Note that Balch explicitly draws on the history of affirmative action and employment discrimination law to argue that universities should make “good-faith” efforts to hire people more to his ideological liking. This theme is common in right-wing attacks on universities, especially among those critics who have become alarmed that affirmative action has gone too far, insofar as fully 5 percent of all doctorates are now awarded to black people. In 2002, attorney Kenneth Lee, a member of the far-right Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, made the case in so many words. “The simple logic underlying much of contemporary civilrights law,” said Lee, “applies equally to conservative Republicans, who appear to face clear practices of discrimination in American academia that are statistically even starker than previous blackballings by race.” (Emphasis added.)

According to Lee, conservative scholars have it worse than African Americans did under segregation and Jim Crow. Conservative is indeed the new black. It is a fantastic and deeply offensive claim in and of itself, but it becomes all the more offensive if you go back and look at the history of conservatives’ opposition to affirmative action programs in American higher education. It makes sense, however, if it is understood as part of a campaign in which accusations of professors’ “liberal bias” are twinned with defenses of students’ freedom of speech in such a way that “academic freedom” is confusingly redefined as “freedom from the preponderance of liberal professors.”

Muddled Reasoning

Two more kinds of confusion lie behind the attacks on academic freedom. The first is that most critics of universities don’t seem to distinguish between unconscious liberal bias and conscious, articulate liberal convictions. But the language of bias is not well suited to the work of, say, a researcher who has spent decades investigating American drug policy or conflicts in the Middle East and who has come to conclusions that amount to more or less “liberal” critiques of current policies. Such conclusions are not bias; rather, they are legitimate, well-founded beliefs, and of course they should be presented—ideally, along with legitimate competing beliefs—in college classrooms.

Recently, I was asked by a member of the Penn State College Republicans whether I taught “both sides” in my graduate seminar on disability studies. In response, I mentioned the debate over the ethics of selective abortion of fetuses who have disabilities and briefly sketched out four or five positions on the question. My point, of course, was that just as it is a mistake to think that there are two sides to every question, it is also a mistake—and a pernicious one, encouraged by Horowitz, Balch, and company—to think that there are only two sides to every question. But some of our students now enter the classroom with this idea; it comes from mass-media simulacra of “debate.” There is one side, and then there is the other side. That constitutes balance, and anything else is bias.

A second confusion has to do with “accountability.” The argument goes like this: we pay the bills for these proselytizing faculty liberals, so we should have some say over what they teach and how they teach it. Public universities should be accountable to the public. At first blush, the argument sounds kind of reasonable. The taxes of the people of Pennsylvania support Penn State, and I take the mission of the public university seriously. But let’s look more closely at that funding, and at what forms of “accountability” are appropriate to an educational institution. Only twenty years ago, 45 percent of Penn State’s budget was provided by public funds; back then, in-state tuition was $2,562. Our level of state support is now down to 10 percent, and, not coincidentally, in-state tuition is $11,508. So perhaps it’s worth pointing out that state support has declined as state demands for accountability have increased; or, to put it more dramatically, I sometimes find myself faced with people who say, in effect, “I pay 10 percent of your salary, and that gives me the right to screen 100 percent of your thoughts.”

Now, Penn State as an institution is accountable for that 10 percent of its budget. We should—and we do—make every effort to ensure that our funds are spent responsibly, and I think everyone who’s dealt with a university purchasing system will know what I’m talking about. But that does not mean that legislators and taxpayers have the right, or the ability, to determine the direction of academic fields of research. And I say this with all due respect to my fellow citizens: you have every right to know that your money is not being wasted. But you do not have the right to suggest that the biology department should make room for promoters of intelligent design; or that the astronomy department should take stock of the fact that many people believe more in astrology than in cosmology; or that the history department should concentrate more on great leaders and less on broad social movements. The people who teach these subjects in public universities actually do have expertise in their fields, an expertise they have accumulated throughout their lives. And this is why we believe that decisions about academic affairs should be conducted by means of peer review rather than by plebiscite.

It’s a difficult contradiction to grasp. On the one hand, professors at public universities should be accountable and accessible to the public; on the other hand, they should determine the intellectual direction of their fields without regard to public opinion or political fashion. This is precisely why academic creates and sustains educational institutions that are independent of demographic variables. From Maine to California, the content of a public university education should not depend on whether 60 percent of the population doubts evolution or whether 40 percent of the population of a state believes in angels—and, more to the point, the content of a university education should be independent of whatever political party is in power at any one moment in history. Would I say this if Feingold Democrats were in power in every state house from sea to shining sea? Absolutely. Legislative interference by Democrats would violate the principle of academic freedom just as surely as would interference by Republicans, though I suppose the interference would take a somewhat different form. And don’t even get me started about those Greens.

No Shades of Gray

To understand what’s at stake in this principle, we have to make an important distinction between substantive liberalism and procedural liberalism. For one of the things at stake here is the very ideal of independent intellectual inquiry, the kind of inquiry whose outcomes cannot be known in advance and cannot be measured in terms of efficiency or productivity. It is not a mystery why some of our critics loathe liberal campuses: radical-right attacks on academe are attacks not simply on the substance of liberalism (in the form of specific fiscal Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society), but also on procedural liberalism, on the idea that no one political faction should control every facet of a society.

There is a sense in which traditional conservatives are procedural liberals, as are liberals themselves; but members of the radical right and the radical left are not. The radical right’s contempt for procedural liberalism, with its checks, balances, and guarantees that minority reports will be incorporated into the body politic, can be seen in recent defenses of the theory that the president has the power to set aside certain laws and provisions of the Constitution at will, and in the religious right’s increasingly venomous and hallucinatory attacks on a judicial branch whose members were mostly appointed by Republicans.

What animates the radical right is not any specific liberal issue at all. Rather, it’s the existence of areas of political and intellectual independence that do not answer directly and favorably to the state. So, for example, when in April 2005 Alabama state representative Gerald Allen proposed a bill that would have prevented Alabama’s public libraries from buying books by gay authors or involving gay characters, he wasn’t actually acting as a conservative. Real conservatives don’t do that. He was behaving like a member of the radical right. Indeed, his original intent was to strip libraries of all such works, from Shakespeare to Alice Walker. As he put it, “I don’t look at it as censorship. I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children.” Thankfully, relatively few public officials see it as their job to protect the children of America from the heritage of Western culture.

But some do, and that’s why academic freedom is so important. It may not be written into the Bill of Rights—the real one, the one in the Constitution. It is far younger than the rights enumerated there and more fragile. But together with freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances, and freedom of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, academic freedom is an aspect of procedural liberalism that is one of the cornerstones of a free society. If you believe in the ideals of the open society and the intellectual legacies of the Enlightenment, you should believe in the ideal of professors’ intellectual independence from the state—and you should believe that it is an ideal worth defending.

Michael Bérubé is Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the Executive Committee of the AAUP Council. His most recent book is What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education. His e-mail address is mfb12@psu.edu.

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