Published Fall 2006
 
The Obligations of Academic Freedom
Many academics, including myself, rise to defend "academic freedom" in response to claims that professoriate is too "liberal". The concept of "academic freedom," however, seems to mean many things to many people, and there is often a lack of appreciation about why it is necessary and what it ought to entail.
Conservative critics currently argue that American academics in the humanities and social sciences are dedicated to a model of pedagogy as indoctrination. I think the critics exaggerate how widespread that viewpoint is, but they have a point, namely, the extent to which a loose and implicit application of the work of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault has influenced the intellectual outlook of many academics, especially in the humanities. Loosely Gramscian ideas of political struggle helped to turn the attention of many American intellectuals to civic and cultural institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, believing such institutions could be used to transform language, consciousness, and everyday practice in pursuit of social transformation. Gramsci's view of politics as a "war of position" over the content of common sense, or ordinary truth (and thus of the everyday consciousness of most people), seemed to many intellectuals to be more readily available in the 1980s than mass parties or mass action. Moreover, there seemed to be a distinctive and familiar role for intellectuals to play in such wars of position, as expert, critic, political vanguard, and avant-garde savant.
This view combined readily with Michel Foucault's argument that knowledge produced through and within institutions was a source of social power, and with his emphasis on the role of discourse. Many academics, including those who had no particular brief for left-wing politics, accepted these ideas and believed that an academic was always and inevitably "political" in his or her professional work.
An emphasis on the interrelationship of speech, institutional life, mass culture, and consciousness also functioned as an alibi that could help to explain the gap between intellectual sensibilities and mass sensibilities. On those occasions when academic intellectuals on the left took their own point-of-view on political or social issues as obviously virtuous but uncomfortably noted that there was considerable evidence that large national or regional pluralities or majorities did not share these views, they could attribute the gap to the controlling power of mass culture or key social institutions, including the university. This made the work of politics into the transformation of social institutions and cultural life, and it explained cases of political failure or shortfall by viewing those institutions as being as-yet insufficiently transformed or still captive to hegemony.
One of the almost-funny ironies of the debate about academic politicization is that this entire composite posture is now far more characteristic of the conservative critics than it is of the allegedly left-leaning professoriate. Many of those on the cultural right now beating the war-drums against academia believe, explicitly or implicitly, that social institutions directly reproduce forms of consciousness and create socially powerful forms of "truth." They call for the same exemption that some left-wing intellectuals called upon in the 1980s and 1990s, believing that the only people who are not a product of such indoctrination are their own constituencies and organizations. For many conservative critics, "the wisdom of crowds" is wise if it matches their own agenda. When it does not, it is the product of the liberal media, of left-wing professors, of the sociological domination of "blue-state" elites, or some other intervening force.
My main response to these "power/knowledge" arguments is similar to that of Michael Bérubé. I would argue in favor of a procedurally liberal and Habermasian conception of knowledge and communicative action, academic and otherwise, and I believe that knowledge has a value that is substantially independent from its instrumental relationship to social power. I also assume that most people under most circumstances are evaluating what they hear and see with a kind of everyday critical intelligence and reasoned pursuit of their own interests. This defense doesn't require stupidity about the cultural priors of students or audiences, just humility about the complexity of everyday life and individual consciousness. This view accepts that there are no strictly apolitical or disinterested positions.
Academics should still aspire to be fair. Who would disagree? Fair, open, pluralistic, able to see and teach and think about many ways of seeing and understanding, a commitment to procedural liberalism: these all seem like virtues which ought to be native to academic life, well described in Bérubé's recent writing. Most, even those I might criticize as overly "politicized", would agree that they have an obligation to be fair, balanced, open-minded, exploratory in their scholarship and teaching.
The best defense of academic freedom, in many ways, is not that it is a right, but that it is the key to the productivity and usefulness of higher education. Innovation and creativity within universities is strongly enhanced by the general provision of autonomy to individual faculty members. Centralized hierarchies tend to suppress or discourage innovation, originality and independent critical thought. One of the odder ironies of the debate about academic freedom is that some of the critics who posture as conservatives end up favoring, with varying degrees of explicitness, much more centralized systems of organizational control. A few may deny that this is their intent, but this is what talk of standardized testing and assessment measures, more top-heavy supervision of professorial labor, regularized national curricula, and accountability to legislatures for the content of scholarship amounts to, central planning.
It is difficult to imagine that these critics have a global overview of higher education. One of the extraordinary successes of American universities is precisely their diversity within and across institutions, a by-product of their relative lack of central management as a whole and individually. In some ways, the university that some critics of American higher education seem to pine for is the cynical, underfunded, centralized form of public university that dominates Western Europe. Decentralization and autonomy encourages innovation and productivity in both teaching and scholarship, and it can also foster transparency, a virtue for many institutions besides academic ones. Another advantage is that it saves money and retains talent and that it has practical managerial virtues. In the best-case scenario, departments and their individual faculty organize the work of teaching, without having to wait for a lumbering upper bureaucracy. If curricular planning and the coordination of research became far more of a centralized, hierarchical affair, it would require the massive expansion of administrative staff on the curricular side. (Or a reduction of overall services offered.) Many U.S. universities and colleges get by with a relatively small hierarchy centered on a provost or dean of the faculty, and otherwise supervise curricular affairs indirectly through department chairs, who often are given relatively minimal additional compensation for their administrative work. Autonomy is also an important incentive for some of the most dynamic faculty to continue teaching and producing scholarship, a substitute for compensation levels which are often low in comparison to professions that require similar amounts of training and apprenticeship.
This perspective recasts academic freedom as a pre-condition of productivity, a professional mode of organizing labor, and less as an extension of a civil right. Understanding academic freedom in these terms also provides important boundaries. Professional practice undertaken to enhance the mission of an institution extends only as far as it is productive or generative.
Academic freedom in this sense is less an accomplished goal that needs to be defended against attack and more of promise or potential in many American universities and colleges. It is defensible because it promotes innovation in teaching and scholarship, encourages original thought, fosters transparency and openness by assuring the job security of faculty, and helps to circulate and disseminate knowledge. In practice, many individual academics and institutions fall short of these goals.
In particular, the system of tenure, allegedly the cornerstone of academic freedom, often acts perversely in the opposite direction. The tenure system sometimes suppresses rather than enhances autonomy and freedom among graduate students and junior faculty during their most crucial period of professionalization. Moving outside of established consensus views of topics and methodologies as a junior scholar creates a very serious risk to an academic career. Junior scholars are encouraged to be original but often only within very narrow paradigmatic definitions of originality. While both academics and non-academics have heard tenure "horror stories" in which clearly qualified candidates have been punished for perceived non-conformity or unorthodoxy, the real problem is subtler. Senior scholars who break cover and exhibit open brutality towards junior faculty are at least slightly unusual. More important by far are the small, pervasive, and sometimes unconscious ways that tenured scholars are able to direct or channel the intellectual labor of untenured scholars.
Mark Bauerlein has call this a problem of "groupthink," but he mischaracterizes it as a narrow consensus about political convictions. It is true that groupthink can include political elements, but more often than not, it represents an implicit and relatively narrow agreement on a range of methodological, intellectual, canonical, and scholarly postures and procedures that define and bound a discipline or subject field, practices which are infrequently defended in affirmative, deliberate, well-reasoned terms but which are simply assumed or implied as necessary orthodoxies. Groupthink does not usually involve direct sanction. It is registered through a thousand tiny cuts: in anonymous peer review, in tribalized declarations of canonical orthodoxy in conferences and workshops, in the petty cut-and-thrust of graduate school one-upmanship that is often cued or choreographed by faculty, in sly asides, in sentiments attributed to "the discipline" to which the speaker professes personal but helpless disagreement, in private evaluations of job candidacies, in footnotes and marginalia. Ultimately, for many academics, groupthink becomes an entirely internalized sense of vague paranoia, a sense that scholarly work is always being surveilled or scrutinized. (Yet another irony: this is where the efforts of some conservative critics to monitor teaching and scholarship hardly help to move academia towards a culture of openness, but instead neatly reinforce panoptic pressures.)
Because this pattern of inhibition is what surrounds academic professionalization, tenure does not necessarily produce a condition of freedom from groupthink. This is both because many academics find it difficult to shake off their training, and because many of these subtle devices lose little of their potency in the later life of professors. Freedom from arbitrary termination for one's ideas or views is an important precondition of autonomy, but it does not magically undo earlier training. Moreover, it can be very easy to make a professor a pariah as retaliation for his or her participation in open debates about intellectual or professional issues.
Tenure is sometimes criticized for the extent to which it is seen to protect "deadwood" faculty. That is a serious concern, but in some ways, the far more extraordinary thing is that so many tenured faculty continue to work very hard at their teaching, scholarship and service. In theory, they have no reason to do so unless they are attempting to break through into the rarified realm of "star" professors. This is the effective side of academic professionalization: many faculty continue to care about accruing reputation capital and about the health and welfare of their institutions and profession even after their job security is assured. However, this is why many faculty also hesitate to pursue work that is speculative or idiosyncratic: few of them want to be loners or outliers, scorned by colleagues. Those who were personally and professionally comfortable dissenting from consensus are often screened out or discouraged by the process of academic training and tenuring.
As an additional problem, tenure also tends to discourage mobility between institutions. Most universities and colleges prefer to hire junior candidates because their risk exposure is lower (you can still deny them tenure if you don't like them) and because they're cheaper. The less mobility, the higher the risk that idiosyncratic intellectual behavior is going to leave an academic suffering through two or three decades of pariah status within a single institution, with little ability to have a fresh start elsewhere. This is substantially a problem of culture or habitus: it cannot be readily addressed by building a better system for granting tenure, nor even by dispensing with tenure altogether. Some kind of protection from dismissal for new ideas or approaches is a basic condition of academic freedom, but American academics also need to develop a consistent taste for innovation and individuality.
This connects in turn to another concern of the critics, namely, the alleged lack of sociological and intellectual pluralism among academics. Here, too, I think they have a point. Academic institutions frequently value diversity highly in terms of ethnicity and gender, but it can fairly be said that they do not often seek pluralism in other domains, such as political convictions, professional style, social background, and so on. This is a more complex problem than the critics let on, in that academia is not uniformly composed from a left-leaning blue-state urbanite bourgeoisie. It might be that the humanities and some of the social sciences tend to resemble this caricature, but the faculties of many professional schools such as business, law and medicine are quite different.
Some conservative critics seem to think, strangely, that academia should somehow exactly mirror the national society in its political composition. We do not expect that of any profession, career or institution: part of valuing pluralism is understanding that different talents and life experiences incline people in different directions. We don't expect the Los Angeles Lakers to field a team which reflects the national height distribution, or that has a sufficient number of overweight people on it. A large majority of Americans identify one of their top anxieties as public speaking: how odd it would be if we expected teaching professionals to mirror this tendency. Now it is true that the "mirroring" argument is sometimes used on the left as a defense of seeking ethnic, racial or gender diversity. It is a bad argument in that case as well.
The value of a greater intellectual (or of racial and ethnic) diversity to academia is not that it helps academic professionals vanish, Zelig-like, into the wider society. It is that academic freedom, the capacity to innovate and learn, is enhanced by the active presence of a wider range of approaches and perspectives, by heterogeneity in experience and outlook. Intellectual and pedagogical projects that are never challenged on their most basic terms and assumptions slide readily into accelerating error and smugness. Skepticism is necessary for the production of knowledge, and American academics generally need to develop a greater taste for unpredictable or unfamiliar forms of skepticism, for the unanticipated question, for disciplinary and philosophical heterogeneity. That very much includes political or social commitments among faculty. A self-consciously conservative form of historical scholarship ought to be a welcome intellectual challenge in a department that is strongly skewed to a left-wing perspective. An English department given to historicist literary analysis should welcome a dedicated close reader who shuns historicism. An anthropology department heavily slanted towards cultural anthropologists should welcome a critic of cultural anthropology who comes from within the larger discipline. To the extent to which intellectual pluralism is not actively sought, academic freedom's productive potential is unmet.
The other major problem with American academia with regard to academic freedom is its collective reluctance to embrace open-access models of scholarly dissemination and equally, transparent circulation of information about courses and teaching. There are important exceptions. Many scientists have begun to move towards open-access models of publication, for example. MIT has established an important benchmark for the dissemination of curricular work with its Open Courseware program. On the whole, however, it can often be striking how disengaged or apathetic U.S. faculty are towards open-access publication, or how frequently they mistake it for a narrowly technological process of digitization.
Digital media may be a material precondition of open-access, allowing academics to abandon a necessary reliance on expensive forms of publication that required making concessions to publishers that allowed them to recoup profit. However, the vast majority of scholarly publishing is done not to earn money (no one would begrudge an academic author royalties for a book which has a sufficiently large audience as to interest a mainstream publisher). Academics primarily gain reputation capital from their scholarly publication or research. Reputation capital is accumulated most readily when work can circulate most freely, when it can be read by anyone desiring to read it, taught by anyone desiring to teach it, cited and quoted without restriction save the constraints of academic honesty.
In this sense, open-access is overwhelmingly in the best interest of academics. Nothing is gained through reliance on publishers who restrict access to journals, for example. The major thing that makes a journal prestigious is peer review, which is, once again, largely something done on a volunteer basis in return for reputation capital. Peer review is completely mobile to an open-access environment. The major expense in open-access is up-front, in the design of a standard interface and a model for portability of information, which universities themselves could readily subsidize. JSTOR has been a relatively successful example of this, but even JSTOR has an unnecessary delay in making material available in order to encourage the purchase of journal subscriptions.
It is not just that this approach makes good sense in terms of self-interest. It is also that it is the precondition of a more serious long-term commitment to academic freedom. Sometimes groupthink is defended through closely matching scholarly publications with audiences who are always already prepared to reproduce the discourse of the academic author. Among the faculty who most strenuously object to open-access models of scholarly publication, there is at least one important subset whose objection is ultimately motivated by antipathy towards the wider circulation of their scholarly work. Open-access does not imply that specialists must cease producing specialized knowledge, but it does threaten disciplinary work whose aura of specialization is generated through barriers to wider circulation, where the scholarship in question could be, ought to be, speaking to a wider range of audiences and open to a wider range of skeptical readings. Defending academic autonomy without favoring open-access circulation is a contradiction in terms.
The challenge to live up to the terms and possibilities of academic freedom is not just for academics alone, or a special burden for "liberal professors". It applies with equal force to many conservative critics of U.S. universities: they too are increasingly trapped in their own forms of groupthink, their own closed loops of authentication. Calling for pluralism takes a positive commitment to its pursuit in polemics and pedagogy alike.
Works Cited
Mark Bauerlein, "Liberal Groupthink is Anti-Intellectual", Chronicle of Higher Education. November 12, 2004, B 6-7.
Michael Berube, What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and 'Bias' in Higher Education. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
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