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Academic Freedom and Outside Speakers
By Eric Combest
On September 25, the AAUP hosted a meeting of higher education organizations to discuss the Association’s 2005 statement Academic Freedom and Outside Speakers. AAUP staff and leaders joined several university presidents and leading officials of eight higher education organizations, including the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, for a full day of discussion in Washington, D.C.
The informal gathering allowed a candid exchange of views on the principles of academic freedom at the heart of the statement, which concerns cancellation by administrators of controversial speaker invitations. Several such cancellations involving the political activist and documentary filmmaker Michael Moore occurred prior to the 2004 presidential election, generating the impetus for the AAUP statement. A generous grant from the Open Society Institute provided the funding for the meeting.
The 2005 statement, published in the March–April 2006 issue of Academe, reiterates a long-held Association position that “colleges and universities should respect the prerogatives of campus organizations to select outside speakers whom they wish to hear” and responds specifically to recent administrative actions that attempt to justify the rescission of invitations to certain speakers on grounds of safety concerns and political partisanship. Meeting participants agreed on the core principle that, in the words of the statement, “the freedom to hear is an essential condition of a university community and an inseparable part of academic freedom.” Participants expressed interest, however, in having a briefer statement that distills the basic points of agreement on core principles among the organizations represented at the meeting. The authors of the 2005 statement, Robert Post of Yale University and Mary Heen of the University of Richmond, agreed to draft a more accessible summary of it to meet this need, with the hope that the other higher education associations would recommend it to their members. Post is a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure; Heen is the AAUP’s general counsel.
Although participants tended to agree on the core principles of academic freedom regarding outside speaker invitations, many expressed frustration at the difficulty of explaining and defending these principles to constituencies, such as state legislatures and alumni organizations, that can pressure university administrations to cancel invitations. Others pointed out that faculty and student groups who issue potentially controversial speaker invitations do not always adequately support administrators who face the task of enforcing principles of academic freedom and who often do so at the risk of losing funding, donor gifts, and even their jobs. Higher education representatives expressed interest in having AAUP assistance in developing ways to respond constructively to outside interest groups and to educating those within institutions about the rights and responsibilities associated with the freedom to issue speaker invitations.
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