Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge (Palgrave Critical University Studies) by Williams

Author:Williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2016-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

4

Disciplines under Attack

From the late nineteenth century onwards, the pursuit of knowledge within universities became professionalized and formally channelled through the development of academic disciplines. The discipline, as both a structural mechanism for organizing academics in the workplace, and a community with knowledge, theories and methods in common, continues to play a significant role in regulating the behaviour and intellectual endeavours of academics. The emergence of the modern disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century created the conditions necessary for academic freedom to become a reality. However, disciplines also curb dissent and encourage conformity to particular norms. In relation to academic freedom, then, disciplines serve as a practical realization of a marketplace of ideas while at the same time imposing limits on what is considered acceptable academic work.

Current arguments against disciplinary structures tend to reject the positive feature of disciplines; that is, their ability to self-regulate and streamline the pursuit of knowledge. At the same time, arguments in favour of interdisciplinarity often replicate a tendency to impose conformity and the promotion of particular norms and values. This chapter explores how disciplinary structures both help and hinder the pursuit of knowledge and the realization of academic freedom. We then consider the attraction for academics of working beyond disciplinary boundaries, while acknowledging how interdisciplinary communities can also act as a mechanism for policing what counts as acceptable contributions to intellectual debate.

Freedom within disciplines

Academic disciplines have become so entwined with the nature of the modern university that evaluating their impact is difficult. Specific publications, forms of teaching, styles of writing, methodological approaches and canons of great works have all grown separately for each discipline. Key figures within each subject area and within each institution act as intellectual gatekeepers to regulate not only who enters the academy and in what capacity but, perhaps more significantly, what counts as a legitimate contribution to new knowledge within each subject area and the precise form such contributions should take. Despite Rauch’s reminder that ‘anyone is entitled to check (criticise) anyone, and no one is immune from being checked by anyone else [ … ] no one’s experience or conclusion is supposed to get special weight by dint of who he happens to be’ (2014, p. 50), the professionalization of academic work was too often concerned with limiting who did get to make such criticisms.

The push to establish disciplinary communities at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries coincided with the heyday of positivism and a deeply held belief that empirical research could uncover truth and drive forward both academic knowledge and social progress. All academic disciplines sought the legitimacy of science. The demand for academic freedom which emerged at this time was firmly connected to the emerging organization of academic work into disciplinary communities.

In 1902, John Dewey argued that disciplinary communities ‘were the guarantee both of the independence of the individual scholar in an increasingly centralized and oligarchic university, and of the integrity of his work. They were an immediate resource counteracting the dangers threatening academic freedom’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.