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Can Academic Freedom Work in Military Academies?
The military academy is the perfect proving ground if you want to test the value of academic freedom, say these Air Force officers.
By Jackson A. Niday II and Kathleen Harrington
What place, if any, does academic freedom have at a military academy? In a two-year quest to answer that question for the United States Air Force Academy, we've found two answers compelling. One says that academic freedom has the same place at a military academy as it does at any other school awarding bachelor's degrees. Education is education, goes the argument. If professors at a military school do in fact educate, they must be afforded the same tools and standing as are professors at any other collegiate institution. Nothing less will suffice. The other answer contends that academic freedom has no place at a military academy. Military academies belong to the military. A military runs on stalwart discipline, not unfettered freedom; likewise must its academies. The reasoning of each side has the distinction of being tidy, but both fall victim to the simplistic in pursuit of the simple. The medieval English philosopher William of Ockham taught his pupils to prefer simple answers over complex ones, but simple answers triumph only if they account for all the variables. The two above do not.
Military academies suffer from competing demands. Every military academy houses both Sparta (those who focus on the "military" in "military academy") and Athens (those who focus on the "academy" in "military academy"). Split personalities comprise their collegial bodies, and as in those archetypes of ancient Greece, their personalities may war with one another. On one hand, an academy is defined by limits stemming from military discipline; on the other, by obligations rooted in education. Discipline valorizes efficiency, hierarchy, obedience, standardization, parades, and risk avoidance; education values reflection and questioning, controversy and debate, the courage of independent thought, and the strength to embrace the unknown. The two may inhabit the same campus, but peaceful cohabitation lies upon an everreceding horizon.
We embarked on our project at USAFA in the hope that if Sparta and Athens cannot live in peace, they can at least contract for fewer clashes. Yet drawing up a working treaty has proven more challenging than we anticipated. Our focus has expanded from classrooms to publications and from research to interviews, and we have yet to find wording to satisfy all parties who have interests at stake. But we are confident that the gulf that separates Sparta and Athens can be negotiated and that there is a place for academic freedom at all military academies. Success will require balancing the legitimate claims of both the military and academics. Academic freedom, we hold, is a necessary and exclusive right of the professoriate. However, we also believe that the key to peaceful cohabitation lies in delineating not what military academies owe their faculties, but what they owe their students.
Limits of Military Discipline
In part, military academies are defined by strictures of military discipline. Those constraints emanate from a tight organizational structure supported by severe legal precepts and panoptic internal policing. For an active-duty military, those constraints make sense. The Universal Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)catalogues the legal precepts governing the U.S. military. In brief, the UCMJ has a twofold purpose: it shores up the chain of command and it provides a legal basis for good order and discipline. The advantages of the UCMJ outweigh its disadvantages in a military operation, where a clear and tight chain of command facilitates efficiency and, in turn, effectiveness. But the UCMJ is less useful in an academic forum. What constitutes "command" in a theater of ideas? While hierarchies do exist in academe, are they rigid or fluid? Do good order and discipline look the same in a classroom as they do in a war-fighting situation room?
In our work to define a distinct space for academic freedom at USAFA, we found that the principal obstacles came not from the UCMJ itself, but from the interpretation and application of subordinate regulations. Just as the U.S. Constitution is fleshed out with subordinate laws, so the UCMJ is buttressed by regulations, policing bodies, and surveillance technologies. In addition to the UCMJ's ban on derogatory statements against persons in one's chain of command, a directive known as Air Force Instruction 35-101, Public Affairs Policies and Procedures regulates other public expression by Air Force civilian and military personnel. The directive, along with the UCMJ, forbids personnel from communicating anything that could jeopardize national security. If applied only to legitimate threats to national security, this proscription should rankle no one. Potentially vexing for a college professor, however, is a requirement that speakers and authors submit their ideas and writings to the public affairs office for approval before making them public.
At first blush, this directive seems to pose no threat to academic freedom. Affirming institutional solidarity, offering assistance to all, it promises to help Air Force personnel avoid a gamut of wrongs from foibles to felonies. There are, in fact, provisions allowing scholars to express individual opinions apart from any government agency's sanctions. If the review only verifies that quotations and depictions of policy are accurate, no academician should care. But part of the public affairs charter entrusts the individual judgment of public affairs officers to ensure positive relations between the Air Force and local communities. This ostensibly laudable goal can create a conflict of interest between institutional policing agents on one hand and faculty on the other. The very controversy which an administrator may deem indulgent or unnecessary may for a professor be the life's blood of responsible academic inquiry. Can a behavioral scientist subject the U.S. Department of Defense policy on homosexuality to empirical tests? Can a political scientist examine policy implications of an administration's war doctrine? Can a historian argue for parallels between policies of yesterday and policies of today? Can an applied ethicist answer an interviewer asking for comments on mercy-killing? While a military cannot brook either insubordination or contempt, an institution of higher education cannot exist if it muzzles debate.
Obligation to Educate
Military organizations tend to favor training at the expense of education. At the risk of oversimplification, training focuses on programming discrete, predictable behaviors. Often, the behaviors are complex, even intricate, but on the whole the trainer cares nothing for things like critical thinking, conceptual development, or epiphany. Those aspects of thought fall within the domain of the educator. At its best, the college experience moves students from the high school student's mastery of basics to the college graduate's readiness to question assumptions, explore possibilities, test conventional wisdom, and assume the responsibilities of competent citizenship. An inductee may be trained to follow orders; a student must be educated to discern among orders that may be legal or illegal, sensible or immoral.
No one claims that all of education occurs in college halls. But most people have no qualms about the claim that college prepares minds by introducing them to new experiences, different perspectives, and uncomfortable ambiguities. College graduates pass from being those who amass knowledge to becoming those who decide what constitutes knowledge. As midwives to that transformation, professors must meet qualifications, shoulder duties, encounter risks, and accept certain dangers. In addition to their advanced studies, the one allowance granted professors to fulfill their calling is academic freedom.
The argument most often deployed against this line of thought is that military academies prepare graduates for a single employer for a single mission. While that claim is factual as far as it goes, we believe it doesn't go far enough. Department of Defense personnel do not simply defend the nation; they advance its interests. They do not simply fight wars; they also engage in missions of intervention, peacemaking, peacekeeping, disaster relief, materiel acquisition and distribution, intelligence gathering and assessment, maintenance, research and development, and strategic planning. Appeals to reductive simplicity fall flat. Graduates of military academies must inhabit and master a world riddled with complexity. Training may play a necessary role in enabling them to participate in that world, but in itself it's insufficient.
Graduates of military academies, moreover, will not always live in a military world. Some may occupy that world for twenty-five years, others for fifteen, and still others for but five. Even those who dwell in that world for thirty years eventually leave it. And when a school contracts with students, parents, and citizens to award its graduates bachelor's degrees, it assumes responsibility to prepare those graduates for lifelong learning.
Where Interests Converge
In the end, the strongest argument for why military academies must acknowledge the importance of academic freedom lies in perhaps the most hallowed of military rites of passage. The oaths of office imbue military members with great authority and charge them with tremendous responsibilities. Both officers and enlisted service members take oaths "to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." This oath assumes keen minds; those who take it swear first allegiance to ideals and abstractions. Ideals and abstractions find substance in debates and interpretations. And in order to make prudential choices, citizen-soldiers must judiciously scrutinize debates and interpretations.
But the oaths of officers and of enlisted service members are not the same. Greater burdens are placed on officers and, in turn, on the institutions that prepare a select few to assume the duties of officers. Following their allegiance to the Constitution, enlisted service members swear to "obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice." In contrast, uttering the words which transform them from trainees to officers, USAFA cadets swear "that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the [Constitution]; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter."
The differences are not themselves subtle, nor are their implications for education. Granted, enlistees garner no relief in prosecution from the excuse that they were merely following orders. They are expected to distinguish between legal and illegal orders and to comply only with legal ones. But where the oath of enlistees emphasizes subordinate relationships, the oath of officers emphasizes the promise "to support and defend" with a declaration of "true faith and allegiance." In short, officers' oaths hold them more responsible to think as leaders—to think more critically, more accurately, and more independently.
Preparing officers to think critically, accurately, and independently requires a certain kind of reflective space—space to challenge the status quo, space to make honest mistakes, space to learn from one's errors. Academic freedom provides that space. Some have argued that USAFA is unique, that our school's mission to prepare military officers and its position in the military chain of command make academic freedom problematic. We agree that military academies occupy a unique position. But we contend that rather than being unique in the world of higher education, they are unique in the world of military organizations. Modern militaries live on the proving grounds. They try their recruits by fire, keeping the strong and discarding the weak. They test their weapons in the field, retiring the good and improving the better. Why, then, would they retreat from academic freedom, the proving ground of the intellect?
Jackson A. Niday II is associate professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy. He is an associate editor for the international journal War, Literature, and the Arts. His e-mail address is Jack.Niday@usafa. af.mil. Kathleen Harrington is permanent professor and head of the department of English and fine arts at the United States Air Force Academy. She is an active duty colonel in the United States Air Force. Her e-mail address is Kathleen.Harrington@usafa.af.mil.
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