Academic Freedom: Public Knowledge and the Structural Transformation of the University

Craig Calhoun Academic Freedom: Public Knowledge and the Structural Transformation of the University HIGH IDEALS AND HEROIC STORIES OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM INSPIRE US. We honor individuals who spoke up even when there were reasons to be silent, and we honor a university that sheltered them. The New School played a distinctive role at a crucial time and it is right to honor it on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the University in Exile. But I want to challenge us not to let either the heroic stories of the past or the history of terrible abuses narrow our understanding of academic freedom and the issues faced in contemporary universities. W hen we think of academic freedom we are apt to think of individu­ als with something to say and political repression of their speech. But academic freedom is not ju st a matter of free speech and individual rights. It is a matter of institutions and public purposes. Those who value intellectual discovery and expression, intellec­ tual contributions to a vibrant public sphere, freedom of conscience, and a sense of professional responsibility face challenges not just from individual acts of outright repression but from broad transformations of higher education. The very structure of academic institutions has changed dramatically, not least as the place of the liberal arts has dwin­ dled within many. Costs have escalated and sources of funding shifted. social research Vol 76 : No 2 : Summer 2009 561 Scale has grown enormously and come with internal fragmentation and inequality. Academic freedom is challenged by regimes of intel­ lectual property rights, by contractions in academic labor markets, and a growing reliance on insecure appointments. It is challenged by difficulties in sustaining collegial self-governance, including not just growth in administrative power but also mismatches between formal structures of departments and schools and shifting fields of intellec­ tual competence, mutual information, and correction. It is challenged by weakened connection between those who would speak small truths to specialist colleagues and those who would speak larger truths to power and the public. We need, in other words, to be vigilant both for outright repression and for more insidious ways in which the vibrant intellectual life so important to national and international culture and to democracy can be undermined. And we need to look also to positive freedom, not only absence of restrictions. The history of the New School is helpful to us in this regard, for the New School had in a sense two different moments of origin. And the two distinct founding moments of the New School suggest something of the breadth needed to consider academic freedom adequately today. Ignoring chronology, we may start with the second founding moment of the New School. In 1933 the University in Exile was created as a semi-autonomous division of the New School. It was created specifi­ cally to employ German professors and other refugees from National Socialism and developing conflicts in Europe. There was a question of who would pay, and the Rockefeller Foundation provided crucial support. The University in Exile was quickly accredited by the state of New York and grew into the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science. In the process one might say that it made the New School into a full-fledged university. Contrary to popular mythology, the New School did not play a central role in the relocation of the Frankfurt School to America, but it did become home to a wide variety of other leading European intel­ lectuals and through them helped introduce different traditions of European thought to the United States. The range of luminaries was 562 social research startling, from Alfred Schütz and Hans Jonas to Hannah Arendt. It also became a major meeting place for intellectuals in transit, displaced by war or repression, seeking new opportunities in hard times, or simply traveling. At least temporarily, New School members also included Roman Jacobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others who remind us that mid-twentieth-century European repression and devastation was not limited to Germany. We are tempted to tell the story of academic freedom over­ whelmingly in terms appropriate to the 1930s refugees from National Socialist repression...