What Is and Is Not “Academic Freedom”

The Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci argued that the strongest ideologies are ideas taken for granted. He called such ideas “hegemonic,” to express their unquestioned dominance, their “rulership” over thought and the possibilities of action. In contemporary America, “freedom” is a hegemonic idea in Gramsci’s sense. Its influence is the greater because its meanings are protean, its boundaries fluid, its applications fluidly indiscriminate. All American wars since 1917, not only this administration’s “war on terror,” have been justified by the defense of “freedom.” At the personal level, freedom of choice, identity, opinion—and many other, rapidly multiplying freedoms—are widely understood as essential to personhood and dignity.

The ubiquity of “freedom” encourages its indiscriminate evocation, another sign of its hegemonic status. Consider the very frequent conflation of “free speech” and “academic freedom.” The constitution guarantees freedom of speech as a citizen right. It has nothing to do with “expressive individualism” and does not embrace liberty of expression on occasions of one’s choosing, as a matter of right, regardless of prudence, propriety and judgment. Academic freedom is a very different kind of “freedom” from both its political and personal counterparts. Rather, academic freedom is a privilege, redolent of the old European sense of freedom. Thus cities, guilds, aristocratic orders, or churches might enjoy exemptions, “liberties,” from taxes, military service, or the jurisdiction of a monarch.

There is a “natural”—that is, a hegemonic—tendency to think of academic freedom on the one hand, and political and personal freedoms on the other, as expressions of a single underlying notion of “freedom.” However, academic freedom is descended from undemocratic, illiberal settings. Medieval universities sometimes enjoyed partial immunity from theological orthodoxy. Most relevantly, “academic freedom” in the golden age of the great German universities was a codified set of exemptions and privileges in a highly authoritarian political regime. German professors were civil servants exempt from limits and restrictions applicable to higher bureaucrats, free to teach and do research by the highest standards of scholarship and science. They enjoyed lehrfreiheit, the freedom to teach.

In exchange for this privilege, professors were expected to be conventionally loyal to the political regime. The system involved a trade-off between professional and political freedom.

In America, “academic freedom” is not so clearly institutionalized. It consists of professors’ authority over curricula, research, appointments, scholarly and scientific publication, the award of degrees, and related matters. It is regulated by practice and custom, not by university administration and trustees, governments, private wealth, pressure groups, or public opinion. Indeed, academic freedom in America developed to protect professors against all of these. (A superbly written account of the German idea of academic freedom and its American variant is Academic Freedom in the Age of the University, by Walter P. Metzger, professor emeritus of history at Columbia, on which this article in part relies). Academic freedom is not, in principle, a democratic or egalitarian idea. It claims the right of professional self-government without the formal sanction of government, as in the cases of medicine and law. It is customary, not contractual. It works, in part, because universities not respecting academic freedom will rapidly lose gifted faculty to other universities which do respect it.

Academic freedom in America exists in a democratic polity and culture to which it adjusts not only for practical reasons, but because professors as citizens are, on the whole, sincerely democratic. From early twentieth-century Progressivism on, American universities sought to be of public service. The idea of “public service,” however sincere, is often animated by ideas of the public good that are highly contested.

Progressivism—with its preference for reform guided by expertise, rather than political parties or popular will—is prototypic. The New Deal, the Cold War, the “war on poverty” in the 1960s, the renaissance of free market economics since Reagan’s presidency, and, most recently, the call to provide intellectual resources for the validation and affirmation of racial, ethnic and gender identities—all have had an impact on the research priorities and curriculum of universities.

These circumstances make it more difficult to distinguish the core of academic freedom from the universities’ usefulness to causes, goals, and interests about which citizens may passionately disagree. Thus, “academic freedom” becomes susceptible to the rhetoric and passions of political disagreements in the polity because some of its activity is not remote from public contention. This is perhaps a price worth paying for the sake of “public service.” Sometimes, perhaps often, it is not a price worth paying, as Jacques Barzun, one of Columbia’s most distinguished humanists, has eloquently maintained, because it excessively distracts universities from their core functions.

At one extreme, the American university is vulnerable, in times of crisis to the kind of attack articulated by a leader of the student “strike” and building occupations at Columbia in April 1968: “...[T]he capitalist university serves the function of production, technology, ideology and personnel for business, government, and military. ... ‘[S]aving’ the university implies capitulation to the liberal mythology about free and open inquiry at a university and its value neutrality.” With a change of inflection to account for current concerns with the politics of identity, we hear the resonance of this perspective today.

“Academic freedom” need not, and should not, imply that scholarship and science do not reflect social pressures and respond to interests, some more than others. It does mean, at its noblest and best—all ideals are subject to abuse and mediocrity—that what constitutes knowledge meets available criteria of excellence and originality in professional terms, as determined by those with specialized knowledge, and the authority to make these judgments, always subject to challenge and to new knowledge.

“Academic freedom” is not the ideology of an intellectual sanctuary, a sacral space removed from the mundane. Any such claim, particularly in American conditions, is absurd on its face and renders the universities susceptible to the kind of peremptory contempt expressed by some in the Columbia crisis of 1968. Rather, “academic freedom” is constantly and tensely negotiated and renegotiated with practical interests and ideal passions, seeking a space for knowledge of the sort that universities create. Of course—of course!—not all knowledge of value is created by universities. However, the kind of knowledge that universities create and teach is indispensable, and it requires the undemocratic practice of academic freedom.

The author is a Columbia College professor of Sociology.