Academic Freedom: What, Where, When, How?

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

—Bacon

All Freedom is academic.

—Pogo

The faith of the U.S. university is that free trade in ideas leads to knowledge and wisdom. That this concept is flourishing was clear at the recent 49th annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors in San Francisco. Yet academic freedom remains a vexed issue because the ideals work out in practice as a tough position on the part of the professors: that colleges shall not fire professors who profess to be seeking truth, even when the professor's "truth" diametrically opposes everyone else's.

This sort of freedom goes well beyond every man's constitutional right of free speech, and is too lofty to be confused, as it commonly is by whiny teachers or muddled newspapers, with lesser liberties of the profession. Academic freedom cannot properly be employed to license oddball behavior, or give special sanction to a teacher's statements when made off campus or outside his field. It does not excuse incompetence, or exempt professors from criticism.

Yet these distinctions make the central concept all the stronger. Columbia's Physicist Isidor I. Rabi defines academic freedom as "the right to knowledge and the free use thereof." It is every professor's responsibility "to discover, speak and teach the truth, however difficult and unpopular this may be to others," says the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina. "One cannot search for the truth with a closed mind or without the right to question and doubt at every step," says University of Chicago President George Beadle, who in his time has found a lot of truth.

Pressure & Conformity. Academic freedom has two historic liens on it in the U.S. Most U.S. colleges were founded by churches, and dogma long kept a restraining hand on evidential inquiry. Then came state universities, dominated by legislatures and Governors, who control the purse strings. Vulnerable to doctrinal or political pressures, professors have been fired for views on everything from slavery and secession to Darwin and free silver to sex and Cuba.

This outside pressure creates an inside pressure: academic conformity among thousands of bystanding professors. Historian Russell Kirk has denounced the academic community's "voluntary conformity to pragmatic smugness and the popular shibboleths of the day." In the words of a Stanford professor, "No one wants the boat rocked, and freedom with responsibility usually means keeping your mouth shut."

The average U.S. professor is no Socrates. In the face of possible wrath or ridicule, he tends to retreat to "safe" positions. By such faculty flinching, everyone is cheated. Who knows what the world loses, wrote John Stuart Mill, in "the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral"—or subversive or even Philistine?