Introduction: Academic Freedom and the Origins of the Research University

Jonathan Veitch Introduction: Academic Freedom and the Origins of the Research University THIS GROUP OF PAPERS OPENED A LIVELY AND STIMULATING DISCUSSION of the meaning and history of academic freedom, revealing it to be a subject far more vexed and far less understood than is usually assumed to be the case. By way of providing some context for these papers, I would like to point out one theme that is often overlooked when speak­ ing of academic freedom. W hen academ ic freedom is invoked, at least in the public mind, and probably w ithin the academy itself, it tends to focus on m ajor scandals and controversies, invoking M anichaean strug­ gles against the forces of darkness. Those titanic struggles m ask a much more prosaic and insidious struggle to preserve academic freedom in the midst of the overweening demands of the m arket­ place. So thorough is the m arket suzerainty that it is hardly recog­ nized as a struggle at all. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the force of the m arket is better understood abstractly than it is in the thousands o f compromises we make with it every day. Those broader environm ental challenges were articulated m ost m em orably and m ost effectively by Clark Kerr in The Uses of the University. For Kerr, these challenges were m anifold. To begin with, there was the problem of scale. The very size of the univer­ social research Vol 76 : No 2 : Summer 2 009 413 sity has, he contends, made it ungovernable in fundamental ways and, as such, made it susceptible to a variety o f constituencies: trustees, foundations, governm ent, industry, alum ni, faculty, the public. Kerr called them “veto groups,” which for good or ill needed to be satisfied. The very perm eability and responsiveness of the American university to these outsized forces, which was the secret of its incredible success over the past 50 years, has also been the source of its greatest risk, as these various groups made instrumentalizing demands on the university that were often at odds with its mission. It is true that A m erican universities have always form ed partnerships with outside entities: with agriculture in the case of land grants, with m edicine, the military, the labor m arket, indus­ try. W hat is new, according to Kerr, is “the scope and intensity of these com m itm ents, which threaten to undermine any meaningful integrity to the university as an internal system of rules (written or unwritten), common aspirations, community, checks and balances.” And although Kerr does not address academic freedom per se, it is im plicit in his account of the university’s susceptibility to external forces and its corresponding failure to preserve its internal systems of rules and common aspirations—in short, its inability to preserve its integrity. If that was true in 1963, it is all the more true now, as David Kirk has recently shown in his analysis of m arket pressures, as they engender everything from profit-sensitive internal accounting mechanisms, known as revenue-center management, which act to undermine any notion of an academic commons, to controversies over distance learning, to university industry partnerships that allow corporations a first look at research developed in the univer­ sity laboratories. But even those controversies obscure what I think is the much more common occurrence in the academy today. In my experience as a form er dean of a small, tuition-dependent liberal arts college 414 social research is any guide, these kinds o f m arket challenges track down to the m ost m inute and m undane levels, affecting everything from the recruitm ent of students to curricular requirem ents to the culture of student life, resulting in the pursuit of wealthy customers who can pay full freight with fewer demands made on them in the classroom or out of it. And as if this were not enough, the high principles of the university are marshaled in service of a fundraising pitch that have come to thoroughly monopolize the time o f deans and presi­ dents. Under these circum stances, academic freedom—the freedom...