Searching for Utopia by Gray Hanna Holborn;

Author:Gray, Hanna Holborn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

is not just whether free speech is repressed, important and basic as that is, or whether individuals suffer in their careers for expressing controversial views. It is whether and how universities bring knowledge, diverse perspectives, and competing analyses into the public sphere. Doing this may well depend on freedom from censorship and repression, but it also depends on a variety of intellectual choices and institutional conditions. The defense of academic freedom needs to be based on the effectiveness of academia itself in capitalizing on freedom and other conditions to deliver knowledge as a public good.18

“Academic freedom” is too often invoked quite carelessly, as though any strong criticism of or extreme attack on views advocated by members of the academic community could be inter-preted as an assault on academic freedom or the indicator of a new “McCarthyism.” Those distortions diminish the central core of what we should understand by academic freedom, appearing to defend claims of privilege and sanctuary rather than to arm the nexus of rights and responsibilities and of institutional conditions that academic freedom entails, and ultimately make its defense more difficult when the threat is real or could become so.

The issue of preserving academic freedom for institution and individual alike is closely tied to that of taking institutional positions on social and political matters. Clearly universities can and should speak out on questions that, when they become questions also of public policy, go directly to their essential purposes and conditions. These may include (and indeed have included) a variety of issues related to admissions policies, appointments procedures, research funding and regulation, financial aid, and, most important, the sustenance of academic freedom for their members; in short, those areas over which the greatest possible control is needed for universities in pursuit of their special missions. Of course there may be considerable disagreement over the particulars of such questions within a given institution, but there is broad agreement that public advocacy on behalf of the university's closest interests as an educational entity is appropriate. The difficult problems arise when the university is asked to adopt policies or to take positions in order to give voice and authority to the views of a group advocating that the university declare itself and act as a moral force engaged with the larger world in matters of urgency. In these cases, the questions do not emerge from the special function of universities; they are ones for all citizens and ones on which individuals, in their capacity as citizens, will disagree. Universities do have the responsibility to provide a space of openness and freedom in which those disagreements can be examined and argued and matters of public policy analyzed and discussed, but to take an institutional position on such questions would imply a claim to speak on behalf of all its members in matters of political and social consequence. To accept that claim would be to lessen the freedom of the university community's individual members as well as to assert a role for the university that would soon erode its autonomy.

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