Academic Freedom: What, Where, When, How?

• Share

(3 of 4)

When parents howled in protest, President Henry bounced the professor (now a teacher in a San Francisco prep school) without a hearing on the ground that his views were "contrary to commonly accepted standards of morality." The academic senate unanimously voted to reprimand Koch—but not to fire him. A.A.U.P. censured Illinois on the ground that Koch got no due process. Committee A's investigators also pictured a great university as ideally "an enlightened and lively center of investigation and controversy," and urged that Illinois be scolded for trying to hold a professor to "commonly accepted" morality.

Citizen v. Scholar. A.A.U.P.'s rating of professorial freedom to teach and discuss politics is well up from the McCarthy era, but the association's respected president, Princeton Economist Fritz Machlup, questions some limitations left over from then. In relating national loyalty to scholarly integrity, he wants to keep clear the distinction between citizenship and scholarship. As citizens, professors must obey the law like everyone else, but as scholars, "professors have only one obligation: to search for truth and speak the truth as they see it."

How about the accepted view that a Communist professor is automatically dishonest and thus unfit to teach? "The fundamental principle of American justice," says Machlup, is "that guilt is personal and cannot be proved by opinion or association; we cannot make party membership a decisive criterion." If the Communist is demonstrably dishonest, he must go. Then, suppose he honestly preaches totalitarianism? "If we silence him," says Machlup, "then we have actually abrogated freedom of speech, whereas he has merely talked about doing so."

Not all scholars insist on carrying the ideal of freedom this far. In 1953, Yale's President A. Whitney Griswold argued in a landmark statement that a professor must have both "integrity and independence" and the "affirmative obligation of being diligent and loyal in citizenship." Captive scholarship was just as far from his mind as from Machlup's, but he meant to make it clear that professors must defend the country in time of danger.

Fashions in Courage. In academic freedom, there seem to be fashions in courage, based inversely on how bad things get. So it goes in the South, which last year accounted for 23 of the A.A.U.P.'s 55 outstanding cases of academic freedom. This year the ratio is significantly down: 18 out of 68. But things are still not all rosy, particularly at Negro colleges, where state officials have hounded integrationist teachers and students.

One reason for progress is the power of the A.A.U.P. blacklist to keep away potential professors just when the South is crying for them. Another reason is the lesson of Ole Miss, where Classicist William Willis reports that segregationist "screaming" no longer scares anyone. "The faculty speaks much more freely now than it did last September," says Willis. "Oh, students still report professors to the local Citizens Council. But all we get are a few harassing phone calls." The point is clear: "A substantial portion of the faculty found that by exercising academic freedom, they have it."