The authors locate contemporary fissures in academic freedom in two interrelated macro-societal developments that intensified across the second half of the twentieth century:
In this article, we locate contemporary fissures in academic freedom in two interrelated macro-societal developments which escalated across the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. These consist of
The article is divided into two parts. In part one, we present a sociocultural argument about why massification and standardization—acting and intensifying in concert—come to evince threats to academic freedom in the contemporary period. Massification involves a demographic increase in the number of students and faculty, but this is coupled with a strengthening political linkage between higher education and society as the former makes greater demands upon the state. By turn, standardization empowers higher education actors with ministerial voice and authority. In part two, we invoke history to illuminate modern patterns, specifically the Christian church as a growing institution in early medieval society. Comparison of contemporary threats to academic freedom and the early Catholic church serves to reveal similarities in how contests in social exchange are waged. This historical comparison is apposite for its having linked moral judgment and punitive action. Devious as infringement upon academic freedom may sometimes seem in the contemporary period, the behavior is noteworthy for its own conformity with well-worn, if also schismatic, practices. Because the stakes are high for the future of academic life, the transformative potential of this behavior warrants analysis. We conclude by suggesting what institutions of higher education can do, amidst their newly created church-like authority, to preserve academic freedom as a principle of academic work.
Trow advanced a developmental theory that all problems in higher education have their sources in growth.
Trow enumerated the consequences for higher education that evolution through these periods entailed. He predicted a remarkable transformation. Growth has affected and continues to affect education organization and processes, implicating everyone from students, faculty, administrations, and governing boards to the public at large. Trow did not, however, anticipate the effects of “growth” on academic freedom, a void which this article seeks to fill.
Massification of higher education has been accompanied by democratization in wider society. In his time, Trow foresaw this marriage-in-the-making, and his view of the union was sanguine. Growth entailed individual and consequent collective opportunity, greater equality, freer access to social and economic rights, and improved life chances. Massification over the second half of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century has entailed significant benefits, chief among them greater opportunity and access to higher education, not only for students who are typically cast as the principals of access and opportunity, but also for the increased number of faculty produced to teach them.
Massification has reciprocally facilitated and conditioned another major historical change in institutions of higher education: their standardization, or comparative isomorphism of structure and content. Here we draw on arguments developed by Meyer and his colleagues.
The university has ascended to become a global institution that operates in conjunction with what is termed “the global knowledge society”—a world society predicated on and explainable by the vast organizational, research, and curricular expansion of higher education.
Research, instruction, and curricula become rationalized; “nature is tamed and demystified through the extraordinary development, expansion, and authority of science.”
Everything can be researched, theorized, and taught. But the university is global society’s source not only of explanation. As an all-knowing vessel of truth, the university comes to operate as a claims-maker of right and wrong, good and evil, desirable and undesirable. This creates empowered actors—faculty and students—“who have unprecedented authority to be and do things, both within the university and wider society.
This constellation of developments casts the university as a “cultural canopy,” and not merely an entity for economic development.
Importantly, Meyer and his colleagues conceive of this power as quasi-religious. Like the premodern church, the modern university makes the same promise: “to explain the fundamental nature of being by interpreting local facts in the light of transcendent truths.”
By this thesis, organizational variation, within and between systems of higher education, exerts little decisive influence on institutional behavior. So rationalized, the university is isomorphic.
Through its sense-making in all realms, the university links people and places to a universal cosmos.
From this account the modern university is understood as the cultural linchpin in which everyone can access universal truths and apply them in the name of progress. As the university is implicated in the solution to all types of problems, faculty and students have become more empowered to turn knowledge into action. The university is not merely part of a society, but the prism through which are shaped people’s worldviews and resultant behaviors. In “unlocking secrets of the universe” and promulgating “divine truths,” the university in modern society parallels the premodern church.
Like Trow on massification, Meyer and his colleagues take a generally sanguine, if not also awestruck, view of standardization. Consideration of the effects of the university’s “new role” are, however, not complete. When the university becomes a church, it gains enormous power to control. Indeed, it assumes the power to excommunicate, chiefly dissidents and blasphemers.
Massification and standardization have brought forth serious problems not pursued by Trow, Meyer and his colleagues, and other scholars of global change in higher education.
It is important to keep terms straight.
As used by Meyer and his colleagues in their argument,
Finally,
While we refer to conditions of discourse consistent with the social-institutional goals of higher education as rational, this does not imply that all exchange takes place free from disagreement and argument. To the contrary, argument is integral to the process by which knowledge is discerned, advanced, and shared. A well-developed sense of citizenship—a notion that a group of people, however disparate and disagreeing, have something fundamentally in common—typically confers civility. Attributes of civility include an ability to deal with conflict and the idea that members of a group seek to accomplish goals together. Inability to deal with conflict about speech and writing from within the academy arguably comes from a decline in the idea of citizenship.
The influx of students and faculty members has resulted in episodic conflict in rational terms of discourse. Massification enables anonymity as well as apathy in members of higher education institutions. Put differently, largeness of scale compromises informal social control,
Concomitantly, conflict in terms of discourse emanates from divergent goals among competing groups. While the university may be said to be isomorphic in structure and curricular content, this does not mean that all players are of one mind. By default, massification results in pluralization: it is variety on social, economic, and political dimensions.
Trow explained that as systems of higher education expand, they place greater demands upon the state. These demands, as well as increased participation in higher education, give the public a greater stake in the workings of higher education. An increasing plurality lays larger claims on institutions:
As a system grows it emerges from the obscurity of the relatively small elite system with its relatively modest demands on national resources, and becomes an increasingly substantial competitor for public expenditures … And as it does, higher education comes increasingly to the attention of larger numbers of people, both in government and in the general public, who have other … ideas about where public funds should be spent, and, if given to higher education, how they should be spent.
Claims on higher education are increasingly made not only in the interests in the distribution of monies, but also on what higher education can and should do for oneself and others:
Higher education enters into the standard of living of growing sectors of the population. Sending one’s sons and daughters to … university increasingly becomes one of the decencies of life rather than an extraordinary privilege reserved for people of high status or extraordinary ability. Giving one’s children a higher education begins to resemble the acquisition of an automobile or washing machine, one of the symbols of increasing affluence—and there can be little doubt that the populations of advanced industrial societies have the settled expectation of a rising standard of living. But in addition … college or university is already, and will increasingly be, a symbol of rising social status.
Higher education institutions thus become increasingly large loci of change. This involves not only personal transformation that was a major goal of elite education, but also social transformation. It is, then, no coincidence that colleges and universities have been enveloped in social and political movements of the broader society as massification has taken deeper root.
The massification in the U.S. that began following World War Two made enrollments and corresponding faculty hiring burgeon in the 1960s.
These episodes are characterized by conflict between students and faculty, between faculty themselves, and between and among administrations, students, and faculty. The episodes are marked by interaction between higher education and discord in broader society. Historically, the subjects of race and gender are central to each of the conflicts, but the conflicts are not limited to them. For example, in the first episode, opposition to the Vietnam War was enmeshed in the conflict. Students refused to attend classes, occupied buildings, spit on faculty, and, along with subsets of faculty members, called on the firing of untenured as well as tenured faculty members who would not sign-on to the anti-war movement.
The episodes of conflict involve a presentation of interests that some groups seek to have legitimated by institutions of higher education. In each of the episodes, institutions have responded by introducing, or redoubling, plans to address interests of aggrieved parties, such as by creating new programs, departments, or policies.
By Meyer et al.’s account, the moral authority achieved by the university was not instantaneous. It began in the eighteenth century, but has intensified since the mid-twentieth century. It is arguably at an apex in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. To consider its most trenchant consequences, then, is to focus most especially on the present-day period and its predicaments, to which the discussion now turns.
We define moralism in higher education as the evaluation of academic work (and authors) which is based on personal feelings and emotions, even to a point where some critics speak of a “weaponization of emotions.”
What is the empirical evidence of moralism’s ascent in higher education? We list examples below: Moralism is central to “trigger warnings” and endemic in “safe spaces” and “free speech zones” on campus which announce: “careful, utterances might hurt you if unregulated.” Moralism is manifest in the numerous disinvitations of campus speakers whose views on past subjects offend groups of students and/or faculty members. Silencing speech in academic venues in these instances takes the form of “deplatforming.” Moralism is on fulsome display in the experience of the sociologist Patricia Adler in teaching a course in her area of expertise, where students, fellow faculty members, and administrators rushed to judgment about pedagogy on what some take to be controversial subjects. Moralism is found in banning texts such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Moralism, if only by definition, forms the basis of advocacy and “social justice” rhetoric in teaching. Such rhetoric announces to students a preferential ideology, potentially associated with favoritism in classroom discussion and in the assessment of student work, which precludes consideration of dissent. Advocacy and social justice rhetoric in the classroom may be defended by some faculty members as within the purview of their academic freedom, but this constitutes a misunderstanding of academic freedom. Moralism is key to proposals for faculty member boards to vet colleagues’ work, past and present, for traces of racism. Moralism has extended the meaning of retraction. Retraction usually consists of withdrawal of published work because of mistakes or malfeasance (such as plagiarism or falsification of data). In efforts to protect themselves from condemnation by affiliation with their authors’ failure to voice accepted ideological precepts, editors are susceptible to issuing retractions of contracts as well as newly published work. Moralism is pervasive in deliberations about faculty appointment, tenure, and promotion to the point it precludes honest evaluation of academic work. Moralism undergirds new vetting procedures for hiring faculty members wherein institutions require candidates to submit statements that explain efforts they have allegedly undertaken on behalf of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” In the 1950s the University of California (UC) introduced a loyalty oath that required employees to swear they were not a member of the Communist Party. Now, on at least eight of the UC campuses and at other institutions, applicants for faculty positions must profess their commitment to particular social goals—a political litmus test. Moralism forms a basis of abusing university policies to falsely report and attempt to punish those whose points of view or academic voting behavior are deemed by those offended as worthy of official sanction. Offices of Equal Employment Opportunity and similar offices of diversity and inclusion are sometimes invoked, including Title IX regulations. Moralism is central to faculty and student shunning behavior that is directed toward faculty members (and students) who elect not to sign petitions on behalf of “social justice” causes, many of which concern divisive social problems at a given time in society at large. People who refrain from signing petitions may do so for any variety of reasons (even when they may agree personally with a given cause), including a belief that it is incompatible with their academic role.
Central to moralists is
Moralism is, furthermore, associated with what has been termed “identity politics.” In general, identity politics encompass “groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity [who] … promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger … group.”
Particularly in the early twenty-first century, identity politics are tied to “social justice,” which, while possessing various meanings, we may infer involves a correction of past wrongs against specific groups in society. Patai and Koertge contend that social justice, fitted to a politics of identity, has emerged as one of U.S. higher education’s primary aims.
Identity politics are predicated on a heightened subjectivity, because wrongs committed toward a group themselves form the basis of feeling and political expression. The rise of identity politics and social justice activism in academic institutions is based in control of language, which promotes the interests of specific groups and suppresses debate and dissent.
Moralism as measure of a political correctness can be successful because it operates as its own measure of morality. Situating oneself as arbiter of what is morally correct constitutes its own defense; critics can be cast as morally inferior without due consideration of the ideas presented. Calls for “logic, dispassion, and due process” can be tagged as “elitist” constructs—morally unjust—defended by people who are interested in maintaining control over the discourse called “logic, dispassion, and due process.”
Several behavioral patterns accompany the moralism that envelopes U.S. higher education presently. One is
The popularization of shaming may hinder people’s willingness to question prevalent convention, yet to “kick against the pricks” is consistent with, indeed necessary to, a scholarly role.
Finally, moralism has a penchant for creating all-encompassing categories whereby perceived infractions, large and small, against assumed codes are subsumed under one censorious label. Deliberate clumping of non sequiturs for the purpose of controlling discourse specifically within academic settings erodes the ability of all parties, perhaps especially students, to learn how to discern differences among and between gradations in arguments. For moralists, there is the right and the wrong side. Populations grouped within the latter tend to be fitted into one undifferentiated category (e.g., “racist,” “misogynistic,” “ableist”), and there is an unbridgeable gap lying between them and those who are “morally enlightened.”
We meet with a major paradox: the more a higher education system expands and standardizes, even for beneficent causes, the more at risk it is of destabilizing its foundation—rational exchange. In a climate of moralism, intellectual inquisitiveness matters less than moral purity.
That some universities have gone to the length of crafting and endorsing a statement that seeks to reaffirm principles of academic freedom is its own evidence of forces prevailing against it. The University of Chicago’s “Statement of Principles” is a case in point, which seeks to teach what some might have simply assumed:
For members of the University community, as for the University itself, the proper response to ideas they find offensive, unwarranted or dangerous is not interference, obstruction, or suppression. It is, instead, to engage in robust counter-speech that challenges the merits of those ideas and exposes them for what they are. To this end, the University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.
A statement sent by a dean of students to incoming freshmen at the same institution is also noteworthy for its attempt to teach what might not be known:
Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called “trigger warnings,” we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has concluded about one-third of colleges and universities surveyed maintain speech codes “that clearly and substantially restrict freedom of speech,” and that over half of these institutions had formal speech codes “vaguely worded in a way that could too easily be used to suppress protected speech, and are unconstitutional at public universities”
Moral authority and moralism are seemingly at odds: the right (i.e., “correct”) on the one hand, the righteous on the other. According to arguments set forth by Meyer et al., moral authority arises centrally from Weberian-like rationalization. It is based in an achieved supremacy of reason, logic, and science. By contrast, moralism is centered on emotion. It is rooted not in the universalistic application of evaluative criteria, but rather in the particularistic while also compromising rational principles of due process and organized skepticism.
Indeed, the former makes possible the latter. Massification weakens social control within the university. It thereby also erodes the idea of citizenship and terms on which people engage in exchange and disagreement. In principle and in reality, massification is pluralizing: it is a source of diverse and divergent goals.
Because it is pluralizing, massification, as we have explained, makes greater connection to and demands upon the state. Accordingly, universities become loci of change. That is, universities become
This helps to explain moralism’s timing of appearance in the university’s life course. As argued, while Frank and Meyer locate the beginning of mass education in the eighteenth century,
For this reason, the university becomes especially “actionable” in conjunction with the wider society in the current epoch. Societal disturbances and social movements, such as those involving race and gender, activate the university as moral agent to weigh-in, not only with expertise, but with judgments and proclamations about the “right way to live” inside universities and well outside their borders. Moral authority is exercised, but this historically located positioning also disposes the university and its actors to moralism. It is for the present-day university a tenuous and fraught position. Ironically, it places the future of the university—vested as it is with a power never before realized—in question.
The university has achieved a monopoly of power and practice not unlike the premodern church. In so many words, it tells people what to think. In all monopolies of practice—like the full-fledged professions in their time—there is abuse. We entrust lawyers, doctors, and indeed priests for our proper care. It is foolhardy to believe they always carry out their duties well; so, too, with the university and its actors. Rationality, reason, logic, and due process succumb to expedient and emotive issuances. While moral authority is normative, we need not assert it is even empirically modal. The work of law, medicine, ministry, and education is riddled with litigation—moral authority run amok. Moral authority is an ideal. Ideals possess commanding attention; the behavior of “moral actors,” however, is always problematic.
A Western historical event that may serve as counterpart to the developments seen in higher education is the Catholic church’s regulation of correct belief in the early medieval era (ca. 400–600 CE), when it began to gain adherents in large numbers, experiencing its own kind of massification and standardization. That Meyer et al. see the isomorphic university as a modern surrogate to the church when the latter came to own the monopoly on explaining the human relationship with the divine invites comparison between the two institutions. There is much that can be said about the homogeneity and reach of texts, practices, and administrative hierarchies that defined the church at this time. What we stress is that along with moral authority came moralism, and the church used similar behavioral tactics then, which are employed at universities today, to expose perceived threats and silence inimical ideas as well as the people who voiced them. The comparison is particularly apt because the church’s tactics at this time were overwhelmingly behavioral and rhetorical (as opposed to physically coercive), with an outpouring of religious treatises, classification of and guidebooks to heresy, and persuasion from pulpits.
We identify seven points of similarity between the church’s attitude toward those thought to espouse incorrect beliefs and the moral-based critiques of ideas coming out of institutions of higher education. First is the assumption that if an idea is deemed wrong, it can actually infect and harm the larger public, and that is why it must be vigorously purged and silenced. Second, aside from the notion that thoughts require censoring, their authors have to be likewise denounced, disciplined, and, if necessary, exiled from the community (excommunication). The church sought to expel malefactors, and this action protected others from influence and contagion that could spread from ideas or from the people who proposed them.
Fifth, the church’s position vis-à-vis heresy was static, meaning that while church writers were consumed with articulating the lines between correct and incorrect beliefs, for those who had crossed the line into defined heretical territory, little attention was henceforth paid to the gravity of their offense relative to other heretical ideas, and they were often lumped together through fabricated accusations.
Sixth, Christianity is a text-centered religion, and while scripture always retained its privileged position, martyrdom accounts were also highly prized and read aloud during services. The suffering of Jesus as seen in the gospels and consequent physical suffering of early believers meant that the foundational discourse of Christianity was about persecution, suffering, injustice, and death at the hands of a hegemonic polity, which for early Christians was the Roman empire. Because Christianity’s identity centered on future triumph over unjust suffering projected into the next world, Christianity on this side of the final judgment had somehow to keep suffering at its center, even after the persecutions stopped, and then after Christianity became the sole religion of the imperial court, and then even when it was the majority religion of the West in the sixth century, CE.
Early Christianity’s narrative is about unjust exclusion, condemnation, and bodily suffering. In present-day higher education, exclusion and suffering have likewise emerged as a core narrative. It is true that Christians were subjected to arrest, torture, and execution. There is a persistence of discrimination, lack of opportunity, racism, and gender inequality in higher education. The growth of universities, the emergence of new fields, the critique of old paradigms, and the willingness, if slow, of universities to change have sought to offer relief and remedy to endemic social problems. However one may assess the progress made by institutions in vanquishing racism and inequality in higher education, we point out that, similar to a religion predicated on exclusion that suddenly finds itself a central player in the game, moralist academic discourse faces a nettlesome strategic problem now and in the future:
Seventh, where Trow attributed the source of serious problems in higher education to growth, so it was with the early church. Christianity’s growth into a popular religion by the end of the fourth century and the dominant one by the sixth entailed two key consequences. One, it was not exclusive like before and membership was therefore no longer exceptional. The occasion of the first brought about the second: as Christians began to look a lot like everyone else, some adherents began searching for ways to distinguish themselves as better and more disciplined believers who demonstrated their “specialness” through purity.
Moral exclusivity is an effective mantle to wear in the current push for differentiation in an increasingly populous landscape where higher education is more accessible, increasingly the norm, and, in several ways, more standardized. In a realm where ideas are supposed to face empirical, factual, and rigorous scrutiny, moral purity tests can short-circuit other avenues of inquiry and become the fastest and easiest route to dominance.
Books and ideas have often been blamed for compromising social well-being. Subjecting human creative works to moral scrutiny and censorship is as old as Western philosophical discourse. Is there anything new about the contention that criteria for evaluating writing, speech, and behavior in the academy are becoming increasingly moral? We identify this as unprecedented terrain for higher education, although comparison with the early medieval Catholic church demonstrates that the phenomenon described is itself not unique. Present-day attacks on academic freedom come from the perceived moral failure of ideas or stances, but the culpability identified in them is conflated with those defending them. Individuals and groups are deemed morally culpable, requiring condemnation, penance, and reform. Not adopting specific moralizing positions renders people fundamentally flawed because they do not understand how the world is and the ways it must be remedied. The idea and its creator both merit excoriation.
McCarthyism has served as a paradigmatic example when people think about threats to academic freedom in the U.S. in particular, but the present circumstances are different. People accused of communist sympathies were labeled with terms such as “godless,” but the danger they were thought to pose was more political than moral—a fifth column serving foreign interests, an enemy of the democratic way of life.
Schrecker’s seminal volume on McCarthyism and the universities draws a key distinction between sources of threat and inaction. It is true that significant portions of faculty were complacent in the face of charges levied against colleagues, but only a very small fraction of faculty in this period, it is believed, supported efforts to dismiss academics with communist sympathies. The protagonists of the academic freedom battles of the 1940s and 1950s almost uniformly reserve their bitterest condemnation for those of their colleagues who failed to support them, those colleagues whose “speed of flight” … “was hotter than their love of liberty.” Congressional committees, boards of trustees, academic administrators all behaved as they were expected to behave. They were the enemy … It was the behavior of their fellow academics, especially the self-professed liberals among them, that really rankled. In most cases, it was not so much what these people did that upset the blacklisted professors as it was what they did not do. They did not organize; they did not protest; they did not do anything that reversed the tide of dismissals.”
It is important to underscore that harassment and action against faculty under McCarthyism came most frequently from
What is evident now should also be differentiated from invective, which has a well-documented history in Western politics and education. The number and variety of insults traded among scholars since scholarship began are legion.
The goal in current criticism is different and the stakes are higher. Criticisms constitute invitations to public shaming, and the tone has no mirth to it. Previously, an individual’s peccadilloes, and it did not matter if they were true or not, reflected solely upon the person indulging in them. The focus on individual weakness rather than general wrongdoing created space for humor. As for the contemporary moral critique, it is not supposed to be humorous. Accusations of harboring sympathy for those who advocate intolerance, oppression, and violence have wider implications because they affect and threaten everyone, not just the lives of the “morally right” people who claim they defend good values. The gravity of the offense renders the “guilty” a danger to society, as opposed to those subjected to scholarly invective in the past who, while objects of critique, were understood as fundamentally harmless persons.
Because massification offers greater access and opportunity to people to participate in higher education and benefit from rewards it confers, massification itself becomes infused with moral implication. Standardization of higher education further fuels its power. In the present account, institutions of higher education have become church-like. Anything that a society cloaks in potent moral beliefs is challenging for its members to criticize, even when something such as massification and fulsome curricula are said to work on behalf of liberal ideals and to take place in institutions that have, in their time, championed the principles of academic freedom.
Not all students, faculty members, and administrators demonstrate behavior patterns discussed herein, and thus it is inaccurate to assert that all new players by way of massification reject or lack understanding of institutional terms of discourse. Rather, ours has been a probabilistic generalization: as massification and standardization intensify, contests in terms of discourse become more likely on the one hand and more emotionally laden on the other.
The argument presented in this article suggests that moralism most likely resides in those national contexts of higher education that have standardized in the course of forming part of the “global knowledge society.” This would encompass higher education in North America, Western, Central, and increasingly Eastern Europe, many parts of Asia, and parts of the Middle East. By the same token, the argument suggests that moralism is least likely in those national contexts whose higher education institutions have yet to fully standardize and remain, for now, disattenuated from the global knowledge society. At present, this would include institutions in several parts of Africa, in some parts of Asia, and throughout most of Latin America.
Put differently, where higher education becomes most isomorphic, threats to academic freedom will originate with greater frequency from within institutions of higher education. Unbridled moral authority of universities is associated with unchecked moralism within them. By contrast, where higher education is less standardized, and thus less possessing of moral authority, threats to academic freedom will, on balance, originate principally from outside institutions.
While moralism portends righteousness, there is, ultimately, no “salvation.” Those who espouse a moralism can never exhaust injustice and suffering on which the rhetoric depends. It is an empty cause invested with ample feeling. To the extent that moralism possesses power, moralism is a power that exacts censorship, canceling, silencing, inhibiting, restraining. Moralism calls forth more irony still: for all its cloaking in virtue—martyrs doing good on behalf of us all—its practices facilitate a community’s self-destruction. As the global university has arguably arrived at the apex in its moral authority, it has simultaneously established conditions for its own wrecking.
Moralists in higher education merely help to ensure higher education’s obsolescence. If institutions of higher education seek to advance knowledge on behalf of an authentically higher learning, they can carry out their functions on the basis of rational thought and exchange. If deterioration of the terms of exchange has, as we have argued, imperiled academic freedom, the way toward its protection is found in higher education’s own take on reformation, and that is a return to education’s primary mission and greatest purposive endeavor: to educate. For whatever may be taught to and among people in institutions of higher education, the terms of exchange are the most preeminently crucial. Everything else is dependent on them.
As set forth in AAUP’s famous “Statement of Principles,” academic freedom specifies: Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject. College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations … they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution
Academic freedom, as promulgated by the AAUP, extends to the governance of institutions in which one is a faculty member:
Scholars in a discipline are acquainted with the discipline from within; their views on what students should learn in it, and on which faculty members should be appointed and promoted, are therefore more likely to produce better teaching and research in the discipline than are the views of trustees or administrators … experienced faculty committees—whether constituted to address curricular, personnel, or other matters—must be free to bring to bear on the issues at hand not merely their own disciplinary competencies, but also their first-hand understanding of what constitutes good teaching and research generally, and of the climate in which those endeavors can best be conducted.
National mores render uneven the stakes in assaults on academic freedom. Unlike many higher education systems of Europe, for example, academic freedom in the U.S. is not clearly established in law or federal legislation; it has no substantial presence in either. Professors have highly ambiguous legal recourse for alleged violations of their academic freedom. Rather than codified in law, academic freedom in the U.S. “floats in the law.”
While the AAUP was founded to promote and protect academic freedom, the policies it advocates are ultimately advisory. Even U.S. colleges and universities themselves have but nebulous and inconsistent bodies and procedures for handling cases involving violations of academic freedom. Consequently, threats to academic freedom are problematic and potentially highly consequential. They can directly compromise, and indeed alter, the academic profession, institutions of higher education, and the conditions under which science and scholarship advance.
The authors thank Peter O’Connell for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this article, and the anonymous reviewers for their incisive suggestions.
We observe a definition of academic freedom as promulgated by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which was founded in the early twentieth century to promote and protect this principle of academic work. See this article’s
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Ibid., p. 43.
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Ibid.
Ibid., p. 92.
Ibid., p. 132; see also Evan Schofer, Francisco O. Ramirez, and John W. Meyer. 2021. “The Societal Consequences of Higher Education.”
Meyer and Jepperson. 2000.
Frank and Meyer. 2020.
E.g., Brendan Cantwell, Simon Marginson, and Anna Smolentseva. 2018.
E.g., J. Scott Long and Mary Frank Fox. 1995. Scientific Careers: Universalism and Particularism.
Max Weber. 1927.
Meyer and Jepperson. 2000.
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Ibid., p. 127.
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Ellen Schrecker. 2021.
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Allan Bloom. 1987.
Hunter. 1991.
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Colleen Flaherty. April 14, 2014. “Trigger Unhappy.”
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E.g., Brett Tomlinson. July 13, 2020. “Faculty Propose an Anti-Racism Agenda.”
E.g., Josh Blackman. May 5, 2021. “Random House Cancels Historian’s Book Contract for Not Writing About Black Historians.” The Volokh Conspiracy.
Joseph C. Hermanowicz. 2021. “Honest Evaluation in the Academy.”
Michael Price. 2020. “‘Diversity Statements’ Divide Mathematicians.”
American Association of University Professors. 2015. “The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX.” In
Kalven Committee. 1967. “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action.”
Orlando Patterson. 2006. “Being and Blackness: A Review of
Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge. 2003.
Furedi. 2017.
cf. Jennifer Schuessler. 2020. “An Open Letter on Free Expression Draws a Counterblast.”
Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. 2014. “Microaggression and Moral Cultures.”
Campbell and Manning. 2016. Campus Culture Wars and the Sociology of Morality.
Laura Kipnis. 2017.
Shils. 1983. The Academic Ethic.
University of Chicago. 2015.
John Ellison. August, 2016.
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. 2019. “Spotlight on Speech Codes 2018: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses.”
Merton. [1942] 1973. “The Normative Structure of Science”.
Frank and Meyer. 2020.
E.g., Mar Marcos. 2013. “Anti-Pelagian Legislation in Context.” In
Brent Shaw. 2011.
Averil Cameron. 2003. “How to Read Heresiology.”
Ibid., p. 477.
Peter Brown. 1988.
Albert Fried. 1997.
Ellen Schrecker. 1986.
Ibid., p. 308.
E.g., David Rutherford. 2005.
cf. Evan Schofer, Julia C. Lerch, and John W. Meyer. 2022. “Illiberal Reactions to Higher Education.”
American Association of University Professors. 2015. “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure with 1970 Interpretive Comments.” In
American Association of University Professors. 2015. “On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom.” In
Peter Byrne. 1989. Academic Freedom: A ‘Special Concern of the First Amendment.’
Stanley Fish. 2014.