May-June 2007

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From the Executive Director: Good Principles, Sound Practices

By Ernst Benjamin

Before I flunked retirement by accepting the Council’s invitation to return to the AAUP staff to assist with operational issues, I had enjoyed AAUP assignments as a consultant both to Committee A and the collective bargaining program. Now I’m immersed in administration: software malfunctions, membership processing, and accounting. As those who have suffered the effects of our lapses know, these problems aren’t unimportant. We must get them fixed. So in reflecting here on our larger responsibilities, I’m minded to focus on how AAUP principles depend on specific practices.

In the early 1970s, many administrators, including Richard Chait, complained that faculty unions would bargain away tenure. Some twenty-five years later, when many of us had bargained to reinforce tenure, Chait argued that, though tenure might be appropriate in elite institutions, it should be modified or replaced at those less prestigious public institutions where, often through bargaining, tenure still prevails.

Such critics of tenure contend that the specific due process procedures that compose the tenure system are not essential to academic freedom. The AAUP’s founding 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure argues conversely that academic freedom depends not only on an understanding of its principles but on “a group of practical proposals.” These included collegial review, tenure, and dismissal only following demonstration of specific charges before a faculty selected committee.

Although contemporary critics of the academy like to cite the 1915 Declaration, they often neglect this need for collegial governance and due process procedures. Those who urge legislative or even governing board intervention seem to ignore the Declaration’s assertion that disciplinary action regarding utterances of opinion “can not with safety be taken by bodies not composed of members of the academic profession.” The intervention of “lay governing boards” in such instances converts the university “from a place dedicated to openness of mind, in which the conclusions expressed are the tested conclusions of trained scholars, into a place barred against the access of new light.” It is, however, “not the absolute freedom of utterance of the individual scholar, but the absolute freedom of thought, of inquiry, of discussion, and of teaching, of the academic profession.”

This observation, appreciated by some critics for limiting academic expression to professional expression, also provides the foundation of the declaration’s argument for peer hearings by tenured faculty who are unconstrained by the threats from which they safeguard their colleagues. However, collegial review must be balanced with criteria precise enough to be enforced but flexible enough to allow departmental diversity and academic judgment. Such balanced procedures better protect individual academic freedom and faculty diversity than the legislation of external review some critics seek.

The Declaration also cautions that classroom utterances “are often designed to provoke opposition or arouse debate,” that “sensational newspapers have often quoted and garbled such remarks,” and that classroom presentations are “privileged rather than public utterances.” Recently, an administrator at the City University of New York argued that his decision whether to concur in “outcry” from student, alumni, or community member might be a matter of his academic judgment and not of academic freedom. In contrast, the 1915 Declaration assigned faculty hearing bodies the responsibility to “determine in what cases the question of academic freedom is actually involved.” The same administrator replied to the AAUP’s concern to protect academic freedom for contingent appointees by suggesting that the AAUP does not distinguish between academic freedom and labor relations matters like job security for adjunct teachers; in fact, our linkage of academic freedom to tenure long precedes academic bargaining.

In the tradition of Madison, Tocqueville and Mill, the authors of the Declaration understood that the need for collegial review and due process are most required when public “outcry” may influence decision-making. Regarding “the existence in a democracy of an overwhelming and concentrated public opinion” as a “most serious difficulty,” the authors urged that the university should be “an inviolable refuge” from the “tyranny of public opinion.” The due process protections of both the tenure system and peer review, whether instituted by regulation or contract, are essential to preserve the quality of inquiry and expression this inviolable refuge makes possible.