AFA DIALOGUE

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Academic Freedom Revisited

Preamble

We live in an historical moment in which the friction between people of different convictions has been freshly fanned into flame in the oddly-named “United” States. This phenomenon is old and cyclical. Things have changed since November 8, and issues are emerging at the intersection of academic freedom and academic integrity against the context, as I would frame it, of power in tension with knowledge and free inquiry.

The Freedom of Speech Clause in the US Constitution was necessitated by the tension between individual rights and the power of governments and mobs to impose their will. At the time of the founding of the US, individual rights, and even "freedom of conscience," were relatively new and controversial ideas. Many societies past and present do not recognize or grant freedom of speech or even of conscience.¹ The Framers understood freedom of speech to be a necessary concomitant to democracy, and one of the main principles that distinguish totalitarian and democratic societies.

Academic freedom is an extension of free speech, applied to the Academy--to scholarship and teaching. Academic freedom’s partner is professional ethics, or academic integrity.² It is necessitated by the frequent and perhaps inevitable tension that exists between knowledge and power. The tension between, on the one hand, those who wield political power and, on the other, the intellectuals and scholars of a society is a dominant theme in the entire history of the literature of what we call “Western Civilization.”³ As the result of the historical processes of “The Enlightenment," it was recognized that knowledge can only be effectively pursued without the interference of power politics (including religious power politics), as the heresy trial of Galileo painfully demonstrated. Out of this grew the notion of academic freedom, and tenure, its necessary concomitant. Tenure exists to protect scholars from being removed or punished by those in power because their findings are inconvenient for those in power. History is littered with the corpses of scholars who spoke the truth to power and were tortured and killed for it. That is why tenure is important.

Definition

Article 9: Academic Freedom of the AFA/District Contract states, in part, “All faculty members shall be free to pursue instruction, grading, scholarship, policy discussions, and public discourse in an environment free of intimidation and censorship. The merit of academic ideas, theories, arguments, and views shall be measured solely against the standards of relevant academic and professional disciplines. With the exercise of academic freedom come corresponding responsibilities.”⁴ Notice that the standards of measurement are those of relevant academic and professional disciplines, NOT the doctrines and policies of the regime in power, nor the popular opinions of mass culture. Corresponding responsibilities include respecting students’ freedom, sensitivity to diversity, and intellectual honesty. The latter includes conveying diversity of opinion where it authentically reflects inner-disciplinary discourse--in other words, not giving only one view of a topic when there is more than one expert view within the discipline; distinguishing the instructor’s view from disciplinary consensus, if there is a difference; and admitting when conclusions are tenuous. For more on this, refer to the Code of Professional Ethics and Article 9 of the Contract.

FAFA (Frequently Articulated False Assumptions)

I will now highlight a few cases that frequently come up. These examples are actual cases that have been presented to me. I’m not making these up.

Neutrality

“Faculty are required by professional ethics to remain neutral about politics and religion in the classroom.” I have received such complaints about faculty, alleging extremity both to the right and to the left. This complaint usually comes from people with conservative sensibilities, but also occasionally from the other side, too. The strategy of invoking neutrality seems to be that it is a way to silence an instructor who is teaching things a student doesn’t like,⁵ while ostensibly invoking a principle of fairness. This was the idea invoked by the two students who “red starred” faculty back in 2004.⁶

Neutrality is not required of any college instructor on any particular topic. And it shouldn’t be. Notice that “neutrality” is not mentioned in the Code of Professional Ethics or in the Contract. Faculty do have an obligation to represent the conclusions, views, and various expert opinions in their discipline. In fact, faculty are experts in their disciplines, and arguably have a duty to give an expert opinion on topics in which they have expertise. Instructors should be sensitive to all forms of diversity, including ideological diversity. But instructors are under no obligation to affirm or support anyone’s ideology in particular. Above all, instructors are, or should be, models of critical thinking (called out by both the Code and the Contract), and critical thinking is not neutral. It demands that judgments be made based on the validity of arguments and all the available evidence. If I were to investigate the charge that an instructor was “far left,” I would only be interested in knowing a) whether the views they espoused were based on good evidence, and b) that they did not abuse anyone in the process of espousing. Whether the views were “left” or “right” would be irrelevant. The truth is neither left nor right, as my first Hebrew professor used to say.⁷ In critical thinking textbooks, “The Middle Way Fallacy” is actually a thing. Because something may be parsed as being in the middle of a spectrum doesn’t mean it is true. It isn't better just because it’s in the middle.

Stick to the Topic

“My English instructor is a flaming liberal, and I’m tired of hearing her talk about politics. It’s an English class! She should stick to the subject.” I have also received complaints like this for History, Humanities, and other disciplines. Whether political discourse is appropriate for an English class is a curricular matter that is within the professional judgment of the instructor, and no one else. As long as the instructor’s syllabus and class material, including lectures, abide by the Course Outline of Record, which is publically available, then academic freedom applies. English is a not a topic but a discipline, devoted to the skilled practice of critical and creative reading, thinking, and writing in the English language. Politics is certainly something people read, think, and write about critically and creatively, so it’s absolutely appropriate for an instructor to transform political texts and issues into curriculum. Faculty absolutely have that right. It might seem like it makes sense to stand at a distance and say, “that’s an English class, not political science, so they shouldn’t say that about the President.” But that is really not how it works at all. Academic freedom, like free speech, certainly has limits (the old example--yelling “fire” in a mall), but academic freedom is precisely meant to protect faculty from being punished for the content of their opinions, and it guarantees the right to express those opinions openly. Of course an instructor has academic responsibility as well. A history instructor, for example, may deny the Holocaust, invoking academic freedom. But their professional responsibility would be to clearly differentiate their view from a disciplinary consensus, and communicate that to students. The same applies to a biology instructor espousing “intelligent design.” Instructors have responsibility to represent the evidence and conclusions of their discipline as a ballast to academic freedom.

Naughty Words

“Uuuum! My teacher dropped the “F Bomb!” Consider this: the legal status of certain words was a raging controversy in this country in the 1960s, as history buffs and the getting-old may remember. It even went to the Supreme Court, which made a ruling about standards of obscenity grounded in community consensus. Look around at our community. We are a college situated in Sonoma County, California, United States. Our governing laws (e.g. FERPA) and policies are predicated on this being an adult world. People not yet graduated from high school or under 18 are made to understand this, and concurrently enrolled students (that is, high school students who also take college classes) and their parents sign an acknowledgement to that effect. In the culture around us, YouTube, HBO, R-Rated Movies (anyone 17 years old and up can buy a ticket at any public theatre without parental permission), all of which are imbibed by most of our students, are representative of the community culture in an adult context. Our culture is loaded with “F Bombs” and every other form of language which some find offensive. Does academic freedom cover such words? It seems obvious to me the answer is yes. Is it wise to be restrained and sensitive about their use? Of course. Saying "fuck" in a classroom is not a crime. But doing it too often is probably not a best practice

Teach The Controversy

This seems to be brought up only by those with an ideological axe to grind. As with other things I have discussed, there is a true principle lurking here: Some things are controversial among discipline experts. But most of the time, in my experience, "teach the controversy" is brought up by people with an ideological commitment that is contrary to a disciplinary consensus. It doesn’t end up on the syllabus. The supreme example is Evolution. Just because millions of American citizens polled deny it, that doesn’t make it controversial within the scientific disciplines that produce knowledge about it. And the discipline experts, that is the faculty, particularly in Life Sciences and Anthropology, are the best to judge whether there is an authentic scientific controversy to be taught. In the present situation, human impact on climate change will be on the same shelf. I wouldn’t be surprised to see demands that the point of view that climate change is a hoax be given equal time in ecology and meteorology classes. We’ll see. If discipline experts don’t judge the hoax hypothesis to be credible, professional ethics makes no demands that they should teach it as an option. In fact, it just might be the case that doing so—teaching the hoax—would violate professional ethics unless one could justify it with real evidence.

Bullying

Bullying is real, and it can go both ways in a classroom (or a chatroom). Faculty should treat students with respect, and not squelch their expressions or personal identity. All this should be obvious. If I knew that an instructor was silencing students with different political opinions, or that an instructor was inciting violence or verbal abuse of a student with a different view, I would want to put a stop to that right away. But in today’s climate, which is sometimes characterized by hypersensitivity to micro-aggressions, sometimes good, intellectually honest college teaching is mistakenly called bullying. An instructor expressing views that some students don’t like is not bullying. A rational demonstration that a cherished belief is contrary to all evidence might be unpleasant, but it is not bullying unless it is accompanied by personal insults and threats. Higher education should bring students, as well as instructors, to encounter different views than their own comfortable cherished ones, and challenge them to rethink and reevaluate their opinions. On the other hand, if students want to express political or other opinions in class that are not on the syllabus and that the instructor judges to be off topic, the instructor has the right, arguably the duty, to close the subject respectfully.

Final Remark

As a student of the history of religion and politics, I find that the fascination of these times is this: The regime now in power in these United States is led by a person whose habitual public discourse is riddled with threats against those who disagree with and challenge him. His speech is rife with references to suing critics and celebrating punching protestors in the face. Democracy operates by open debate and free criticism. It is predicated on the recognition that there is a plurality of views, that it takes a plurality of minds to discover the truth or the best course of action, and that the process only happens well when informed minds speak freely. The impulse to silence and vilify all critics and detractors is the totalitarian impulse. Official commitments to freedom of speech and academic freedom are made for exactly times like these, when it is inconvenient for the regime. It is most important right now that we understand our right to academic freedom and use it.