Education: What Is Academic Freedom?

Is academic freedom in the U.S. really in danger? Absolutely, says rising young (36) Historian Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind)—but not alone for the reasons that most teachers seem to think. In his latest book, Academic Freedom (Henry Regnery; $3.75), Kirk points an accusing finger at the teaching profession itself. Some of freedom's most earnest champions, he writes, are actually gnawing away its roots.

One reason for this. Kirk holds, is that many a teacher does not begin to understand the true basis of academic freedom. It is not, as Philosopher Sidney Hook insists, a gift from the community, nor is it justified simply because it benefits society. "Academic freedom, in short, belongs to that category of rights called 'natural rights,' and is expressed in custom, not in statute." Plato's Academy "was not founded by the community, nor did it owe its primary allegiance to the community. It was instituted by private persons ... to enable them to pursue the Truth without being servants of an evanescent community. And this idea of intellectual freedom, the freedom of the Academy, has ever since been the model for all men trained in the classical disciplines."

Bearers of the Word. In their own way, the medieval universities carried on the tradition. Like Plato's Academy, they were free "because their allegiance was to the Truth, as it was given to them to perceive it, and not to the community." Far from smothering discussion, the Christian framework of these universities "encouraged disputation of a heat and intensity almost unknown in universities nowadays . . . They were free, these Schoolmen, free from external interference and free from a stifling internal conformity, because the whole purpose of the universities was the search after an enduring truth, beside which worldly aggrandizement was as nothing."

Today, says Kirk, the ancient notion that teachers are Bearers of the Word, servants only of the Truth, has fallen into disrepute. In place of Truth "derived from apprehension of an order more than natural or material," such scholars as John Dewey and Sidney Hook "early became attached to democracy as an ideal, and in time made democracy into an abstraction and an absolute, for lack of any other god."

But the new slogan, "Education for democracy," is a barren one, for democracy can work for evil as well as good. "Democracy is ... simply a means to certain ends . . . And those ends, Justice and Freedom, are in large measure the products of religious faith, of the religious conviction that the human person has dignity and rights because divine wisdom so ordained ... I do not think that academic freedom could long prosper under King Demos, if Democracy should succeed in casting off its religious sanctions."