Who's Afraid of Academic Freedom? by Akeel Bilgrami

Author:Akeel Bilgrami
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: EDU040000, Education/Philosophy & Social Aspects, EDU015000, Education/Higher
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

IS FACULTY GOVERNANCE A THREAT TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM?

It may well be a measure of the fragility of academic freedom that it can be threatened on many fronts. In 1957 Justice Frankfurter recognized that academic freedom (the ardor and fearlessness of scholars) is both fragile and indispensable for fruitful academic labor and needs to be protected from government intervention in the intellectual life of the university. In 1967 the Kalven committee recognized that academic freedom (the ardor and fearlessness of scholars) is both fragile and indispensable for fruitful intellectual labor and needs to be protected from institutional or administrative intervention in the intellectual life of a university. Recently there has been a new development at the University of Chicago in which the administration (the president, provost, and all the deans, with the support of some members of the faculty) has argued that academic freedom is fragile and indispensable for fruitful academic labor and needs to be protected from faculty intervention in the intellectual life of the university.

That last threat to academic freedom, whether real or imagined, needs to be examined in more detail. So does the solution offered by those who fear the threat. Their proposed remedy for the threat being that at the University of Chicago, faculty ruling bodies should have jurisdiction and decision-making powers (a vote) only over the educational and teaching activities of the university; and that the administration and ultimately the board of trustees (typically but not necessarily in nonbinding consultation with individual faculty or faculty ruling bodies) should have jurisdiction and decision-making powers over the research activities of the university (including decisions about the creation of research centers and research institutes and the development of new directions of inquiry).

There is little doubt that from an ultimate corporation point of view the board of trustees has final authority over what happens at the university and probably has the legal authority, if the trustees were so inclined, to close down the current departments and end all student admissions, teaching, and degree granting at the University of Chicago and to turn the institution into a research institute of applied microbiology, translational medicine, brain science, molecular engineering, economics, public policy and school reform. Yet it should be pointed out as well that it is the delegation of authority over the intellectual life of the institution to the faculty and the understandings, values, and norms that insulate the faculty from top-down management of intellectual life that characterize the academic culture of the great universities of our land.

On the surface at least it may seem ironic to try to preserve the academic freedom of the faculty by restricting their role in decision making about the evolution of the intellectual life of the university. Recall Alexander Bickel’s observation (discussed previously) that “only in a university can inquiry and teaching constitute one creative whole.” At the University of Chicago these days the administrative leaders of the university appear to be intent on splitting those functions apart. And the faculty itself (at least those who

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.