From the General Secretary: Preaching to the Choir?
By Roger W. Bowen
About a hundred years ago, scholars and philosophers such as Columbia University’s John Dewey and Johns Hopkins University’s Arthur Lovejoy canonized a nineteenth-century German notion, Lehrfreiheit, or academic freedom, and it slowly developed into the grundnorm of American higher education. Academic freedom is the principle that lets faculty speak and write the truth as they know it, without interference from the university, the state, or the public.
Yet while American faculty members today repeatedly preach the virtues of academic freedom, I have to ask why the professoriate has not also been teaching these same virtues to that segment of the public to which it has easy, indeed, unrestricted access—students.
An admission: I taught college students for a quarter century but not once that I can recall did I ever explain to my students why academic freedom is at the heart of the teaching and learning experience. Shame on me and more shame on the million or so college and university faculty today who neglect to teach this central principle to their students.
In my current work, I have cited more often than I can recount several U.S. Supreme Court cases that have placed the principle of academic freedom squarely within American jurisprudence. But to whom do I cite such cases as Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), Regents of the University of Michigan v. Ewing (1985), and University of Wisconsin v. Southworth (2000)? To faculty, and only to faculty, as if students do not need to know.
That the academic freedom of individual public-sector professors is legally protected by the First Amendment is most boldly stated by the Supreme Court in its Keyishian ruling: “Our nation is deeply committed to safe-guarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”
“Transcendent value to all of us,” not just professors, yet I neglected my professorial responsibilities when, year after year, I said nothing to my students to inform them that they, too, have a stake in the protection of academic freedom. My Lehrfreiheit is also their freedom to learn. I would like to think that by having invited dissent, debate, and civil disagreement in the classroom I was teaching academic freedom by example. Perhaps. But I recall once taking a strong stand against my college’s decision to permit the Central Intelligence Agency to recruit on campus and being met with as much silence from normally outspoken students as noise from outraged students (and a few faculty colleagues), who claimed that my stand insulted their patriotism or stifled the CIA’s speech rights.
In retrospect, that was a teachable moment that I missed. I should have quoted the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, written jointly by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges and Universities, to remind the more timid students that “the common good depends upon the free search for truth and its exposition” and that “academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning.” I should also have instructed my students that the 1940 Statement warns scholars that “the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for their institution.”
A thorough discussion of such notions might well have given the timid students the courage to speak up and given the outspoken students reason to reflect on the rights of both teachers and students to engage in the search for truth. Academic freedom, after all, is as much a paean for civility and intellectual openness as it is a protection for the academic speech of faculty.
The meaning of academic freedom is a lesson that should be taught at the outset of every semester, in every classroom, and at every college and university, both because it is a good unto itself and because it is useful. It is useful to acculturating America’s next generation of leaders to the liberal temperament of educational exchange and for reminding faculty members themselves that the exercise of their academic freedom rights carries attendant responsibilities and, as the 1940 Statement makes clear, has an impact on the public’s perception of professors.
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