Is academic freedom a philosophical concept tied to larger concepts of individual dignity and autonomy, or is it a guild concept developed in an effort to insulate the enterprise from the threat of a hostile takeover? I come down on the side of guild concept. Academic freedom is not a subset of freedom in general, and one cannot reason from a theoretical account of freedom to what one is free to do in a university setting. Academic freedom, to put it simply and starkly, is freedom for academics — that is, for those engaged in a certain task.
It is the nature of that task and not any large abstraction like freedom or freedom of speech that determines the range of permissible and prescribed behavior. You start with the idea of pursuing a line of inquiry to whatever conclusion it brings you, and then you ask for the freedom to engage in that pursuit without interference from external forces that would tie you to the agendas of another enterprise. The freedom you ask for is not added on to the project; it is constitutive of it, for you can’t follow where an inquiry takes you if obstacles are constantly put in your way. When all is said and done, academic freedom is just a fancy name for being allowed to do your job, and it is only because that job has the peculiar feature of not having a pre-stipulated goal that those who do it must be granted a degree of latitude and flexibility not granted to the practitioners of other professions, who must be responsive to the customer or to the bottom line or to the electorate or to the global economy. (That’s why there’s no such thing as “corporate-manager freedom” or “shoe-salesman freedom” or “dermatologist freedom.”)
If you think of academic freedom in this way — as a logical extension of a particular task and not as a free-standing value — you will be able to defend it both from those who see it as an unwarranted indulgence of pampered professors and from those pampered professors who would extend it into a general principle that allows them to say and do, or not do, whatever they like. To those who regard academic freedom as an unwarranted indulgence you can say, No, it’s not an indulgence, it’s a necessary condition for engaging in this enterprise, and if you want this enterprise to flourish, you must grant it. To those professors who turn freedom into license by using the classroom as a partisan pulpit, or by teaching materials unrelated to the course description, or by coming to class unprepared or not at all, you can say, Look, it’s freedom to do the job, not freedom to change it or shirk it.
This is what it means to say that academic freedom is not a general freedom like the freedoms guaranteed you by the Constitution and the First Amendment; it is task-specific and task-limited. You might have the general freedom as a teacher at a public institution not to be dismissed because of your religious views, but you could be denied promotion because your department decided that an interest in theology — a perfectly respectable academic topic — did not fit in with its long-range plans. And while your department might be free to make that decision, the dean is also free to decide that a department that so decides is not one she wants to encourage; she might deny it faculty lines or move to take away its graduate program. Of course a dean who does that risks incurring the displeasure of a provost or a president who is free to replace her on the spot. Administrators have no academic freedom; they serve at will. And while faculty members do not serve at will — as long as they have tenure, that is — the limited freedom they enjoy in the classroom and in research does not protect them from being disciplined or even fired if they fail to carry out the ordinary duties of their positions.
In short, both the nature and quantity of your freedom vary with the professional context in which you might seek to exercise it. What then is left of academic freedom as a rallying cry? Not much.
It’s not a grand philosophical concept; it’s not even a legal concept apart from the contract you enter into when you accept employment. If that contract lists areas in which you are free to make responsible academic choices concerning the subject matter and organization of a course, you might be able to sue for breach of contract if the administration steps in and tells you that this is the textbook you must use. But if the course were a large multisectioned course with a prescribed syllabus and required texts, you’d probably lose, and even if you won, what would be affirmed is not your freedom, but your rights under contract.
In the end, I’m not sure that there’s much use to the term “academic freedom,” and too often I have seen it used or invoked as an excuse for irresponsibility. One could reply that academic freedom has a rhetorical use; it’s a flag that we can wave around in the hope that it will stop some hostile adversary force — a legislature, a board of trustees, a moral majority — in its tracks. I guess that’s OK so long as we don’t take the huffing and puffing too seriously and begin to believe that it is academic freedom — rather than professional independence or better working conditions — that we are defending. In saying that, I don’t mean to deny that politics threatens academic freedom both from the outside and the inside: from the outside when the academic enterprise is in danger of being hijacked, and from the inside when the academic enterprise is in danger of being hijacked. But of course what is being threatened from either direction is not freedom per se or even freedom of thought; what is being threatened is the enterprise itself, which cannot be identified with freedom, but which needs freedom of a certain kind — freedom from external impositions — as a condition of its exercise.
The trouble with the term “academic freedom” is that the emphasis almost always falls on the “freedom” part rather than the “academic” part, with the result that the concept is made to seem much grander than it is. The word “freedom” is just too big — it conjures up images of the last scene in a bad Mel Gibson movie. Invoking academic freedom carries with it the danger of thinking that we are doing something noble and even vaguely religious, when in fact what we are doing, or should be interested in doing, is no more — or less — than our academic jobs.
Stanley Fish is a university professor and professor of law at Florida International University, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His book Save the World on Your Own Time has just been published by Oxford University Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 2, Page B10
