Free Speech and Academic Freedom Are Different

Free speech and academic freedom are often conflated as if they are identical or so overlap that their differences are not important. This misunderstanding is prominent in discussions of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit as it has been on previous occasions.

The right to free speech is a constitutional guarantee to citizens. Academic freedom is not a constitutional right. It is a set of privileges enjoyed by university faculties and the practices, formal and informal, associated with them. These involve authority over curricula, research, appointments, some scholarly and scientific publications, award of degrees, and related matters. Academic freedom is regulated by the practices of universities and professional standards, not by governments, private wealth, pressure groups, or public opinion. Corresponding to it are the indispensable freedoms of students to learn, less well codified in custom and practice.

No question of free speech is involved in Ahmadinejad’s visit. Were he not invited—as he was not, last year—neither his right of free speech as a visitor nor the rights of Columbia students to hear him would have been compromised, any more than my rights are injured if this were not printed.

Ahmadinejad was invited by the School of International and Public Affairs. SIPA’s educational purposes would have been enhanced by a coherent encounter between the president of Iran and its faculty and students knowledgeable in Iranian history, culture, and politics, with members of that school in attendance and able to submit questions. Such an event would be clearly within the terms of academic freedom and conducted for educational purposes, since SIPA’s mission includes training in the hard realities of international politics. Others at Columbia would certainly have benefited from watching and hearing it.

Instead, we had an ill-organized spectacle, largely cast in terms of a public debate within the free speech paradigm. Its tone was set by University President Lee Bollinger’s taking the role of Emile Zola defending Dreyfus or that of Justice Jackson in a latter-day version of Judgment at Nuremberg, and addressing a range of serious political questions in a peremptory manner perhaps appropriate in a rough-and-tumble town hall debate.

As an exercise of academic freedom, the occasion failed. The dominant tone of my discussions with colleagues at this and other universities has been embarrassment. Given the global scope of which Columbia is rightly proud and our location in New York, there will be other occasions similar to Ahmadinejad’s visit. Let us learn from this occasion to do better—much better—in the future.

The author is a sociology professor.