Academic Freedom as a “Canonical Value”

Robert M. O’Neil Academic Freedom as a “Canonical Value” THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY— ONE THAT I DID NOT CHOOSE BUT AM HAPPY to accept—assumes that academic freedom is indeed a “canonical value,” at least within the higher education community. That does seem to be the case these days. But it has not always been so. One pointed statement should illustrate the contrast: “Academic Freedom”—that is the inalienable right of every college instructor to make a fool of himself and his college by intemperate, sensational prattle about every subject under heaven . . . and still keep on the payroll or be reft therefrom only by elaborate process, is cried to all the winds by the organized dons (quoted in Metzger, 1993:16). W hat might on first reading appear to be the ranting of an angry legislator or a disgruntled graduate was in fact a 1916 editorial in the New York Times. The catalyst for so strikingly uncongenial a view of faculty interests was the founding of the American Association of University Professors and the issuance in 1915 of the first of several major state­ ments by that organization. Had the Times’ somewhat dyspeptic view of academic freedom been tested among its readers, there would surely have been widespread concurrence, for at that time the principles and protections for which the fledging AAUP was arguing enjoyed little acceptance, even among the governing boards and administrators of the nation’s major universities. social researchVol 76 : No 2 : Summer 200 9 437 Faculty tenure was unknown at that time, and most safeguards today’s college teachers take for granted existed only on the most sensitive and caring of university campuses. The focus of this essay is a perplexing question—how in somewhat less than a century not only the professoriate but broad segments of our society have come to accept and support principles of free inquiry and due process in the academic world, the more remarkable because they have no precise parallels in any other learned profession or occupation. Indeed, the recognition and acceptance of academic freedom are surprisingly recent developments. As Professor Ellen Schreclcer has graphically reminded us over the years, and as I am keenly aware from growing up in Cambridge in the 1940s and covering McCarthy trials for the Harvard Crimson, the climate was strikingly unsympathetic as recently as a half century ago (Schreclcer, 1986). Somehow, as the 50s yielded to the 60s and 70s, that climate changed dramatically; despite occasional pockets of hostility, academic freedom fares reasonably well these days. One need only contrast the fortunes of outspoken professors in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with the fates of their McCarthy-era predecessors to appreciate the metamor­ phosis. Thus, as Michigan Senator Carl Levin ventured upon the unseal­ ing a half century later of interviews with potential McCarthy witnesses who were never publicly interrogated, a resurgence of those terrible times seemed unlikely if not impossible. “There’s a greater awareness,” he explained, “of McCarthyism and the tactics that can be used by those who are trying to quiet dissenters.” And, he added in a similarly hope­ ful vein, “there’s greater resistance against those who would try to still voices that they disagree with” (Welna, 2003). Senator Levin knows whereof he speaks, since he was an under­ graduate at Ann Arbor during the purge of three senior Michigan professors who refused to expose the political affiliations of suspected colleagues—a grievous injustice for which later regents and presidents have publicly atoned through a generously supported annual lecture series. While others have a less sanguine view of the contrast between those times and present days, the Levin view has considerable force. 438 social research One need cite only two among many available indicia of a more accepting climate in the twenty-first century—the failure of any state to enact any form of the so-called Academic Bill of Rights despite serious consideration in several capitols (American Association of University Professors), and the fact that none other than Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly has on three occasions spoken strongly in support of academic freedom (Fox News Transcript). Surely things in the early...