Morality, Responsibility, and the University: Studies in Academic Ethics

1. Human Rights and Academic Freedom

1 HUMAN RIGHTS AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM Alan Gewirth Universities stand in a double relation to human rights. On the one hand, all university personnel are the subjects or holders of the rights, including such of their corollaries as the right to academic freedom. On the other hand, university administrators have an especially strategic role as respondents or bearers of the duties that are correlative to the rights in university contexts. These include the duty to protect the academic freedom of their teachers and students and also the duties to provide as adequate educational facilities as they can and to refrain from discriminating against any of their would-be members on grounds of race, religion, nationality, or other irrelevant considerations. I. CONFLICTS OF MORAL CRITERIA While many aspects of these rights and duties are now widely accepted by universities and the general public in North America and Western Europe, they raise difficult problems ofinterpretation and application. Some ofthe main problems arise from the incorporation in the Western university of two different and potentially conflicting kinds of moral criteria, each of which derives from the general principle of human rights. First, the university embodies the value of freedom, especially intellectual and academic freedom, and the right to freedom is one of the most basic ofhuman rights. But second, the university also embodies the value ofeducation, and thus ofmoral and intellectual standards ofthe highest possible sort, and the right to education is also an important human right. But there may be conflicts between the maintenance ofmoral and intellectual standards and the protection ofacademic freedom . In the most general terms, these conflicts arise because freedom 8 Human Rights and Academic Freedom I 9 as such is nonrestrictive, whereas moral and intellectual standards are restrictive. In one ofits mainconcepts, freedom consists innoninterference by other persons, but the maintenance of moral and intellectual standards may require interference by other persons. We can see the thrust of these conflicts if we consider such questions as the following. Should university researchers, under postWorld War II conditions, be free to accept government contracts for developing chemical or nuclear weapons? Should universities employ as professors of history Nazis who deny the reality of the Holocaust oras professors ofbiologycreationists who deny the facts ofDarwinian evolution? What if these denials are revealed only after the professors have been previously hired, and even given tenure, on the basis of apparently sound scholarly credentials? In all such cases there appears to be a conflict between the freedom-based rights of professors and the rights of other persons or of the community at large, based on relevant moral and intellectual standards. These conflicts may already be found implicit in the very idea of academic freedom. As we have seen, the concept of freedom involves the absence of external constraints or impediments on conduct, whether physkal or mental. But the concept of the academic involves the presence of constraints, for to be an academic requires acceptance of rigorous intellectual standards that serve to constrict what one is entitled to accept as sound, true, or warranted. Thus the idea of academic freedom involves being at once free and not free, bound and not bound by constraints. It may be possible to avoid a formal contradiction here by appealing to the diverse nature of the constraints from which an academic should respectively be free and not free. Thus we might hold that the academic should be free from nonintellectual constraints , that is, from political and social pressures and other constraints that do not derive from the general requirements or criteria of intellectual teaching and learning. But at the same time the academic should not be free from those intellectual constraints themselves; moreover, the constraints should be self-imposed and thus be matters of rational autonomy. Such a resolution does, I think, have much merit. But carrying it out in practice may raise severe difficulties not only because there may be conflicting interpretations of the relevant intellectual standards or of their applications but also because, even when the standards are agreed upon, their maintenance may lead to significant interference with freedom. Moreover, the resolution still leaves open the question of the relation 10 I ALAN GEWIRTH between academic freedom and moral requirements, especially at the societal level. II. HUMAN RIGHTS In order to deal with such questions, I must move back a few steps to consider the nature of human rights and of academic freedom, as well...