The Axis of Power and Academic Freedom

The relationship between power and the exercise of academic freedom is well recognized and long-standing. The founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915 grew out of a need to protect the professoriate in the country’s higher education system from the “whims of those who ran the institutions that employed them.”¹ The 1940 “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure” spells out the academic rights of faculty with “regard to speech in the classroom, extramural speech, and research” to safeguard these freedoms, given the professoriate’s position of asymmetrical power against political (coercion by the state) and economic (donors and other forces contributing to the corporatization of higher education) forces influencing educational institutions.² This guarantee of academic freedom in theory is meant to hold regardless of the pressures brought to bear upon the individual faculty member for her or his deviation from an accepted and widely held perspective. When the guarantee fails, as it has in several instances over the years—for example, in the famous cases of Angela Davis (1970), Bruce Franklin (1972), Norman Finkelstein (2007), and, most recently, Steven Salaita (2014)—we are reminded of the many factors that affect the translation of theory to practice. Yet, despite clear evidence of the impediments to realizing academic freedom in the fullest sense of the term, there appears to be reluctance by individuals and groups in power to acknowledge power as a crucial dimension in the exercise of academic freedom. The ideal or theoretical concept of academic freedom assumes center stage, and the messiness of power dynamics goes unacknowledged. This essay focuses on the operation of power in the domain of academic freedom.

In the wider context of human rights, Abdullahi An-Na’im reminds us of a similar blatant disconnect between theory and practice. He observes that in 1948, the year of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), “The same European powers which upheld human rights for their citizens under national constitutions, and proclaimed the Universal Declaration for all of humanity, were at the time denying African societies their most basic human rights under colonial rule.”³ An-Na’im does not, however, dismiss the UDHR; rather, he sees it as a desirable ideal that African societies must work toward through careful attention to their particular colonial histories and specific internal exigencies. Critical human rights scholars such as An-Na’im and Samera Esmeir, to name two, insist that trumpeting theoretical and juridical ideals without consideration for the dynamics of power that regulate the realization of these ideals is meaningless.

The same caution applies to academic freedom. Angela Davis’s critique in 1969 of academic freedom as an “empty concept” and a “real farce” if “divorced from freedom of political action” foregrounds the necessity of putting theory into practice and ensuring that academic freedom means also the pursuit of political power by those who are currently denied it. She strongly objected to the “exploit[ing]” of academic freedom by individuals like Arthur Jensen in order to promote notions like the “genetic inferiority of black people.”⁴ Davis declared that the board members of the Regents of the California University system were “‘unscrupulous demagogues who were intent upon maintaining the ‘prevailing oppressions.’”⁵ The Board of Regents denied her reappointment, going against the recommendations of her department and the chancellor, not least for her challenge to the theoretical concept of academic freedom.

Steven Salaita’s recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education calls out the many ways in which power operates in the university, and how the direct wielding of power by administrators and trustees resulted in his being fired by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He asserts that critical thinking, the vaunted skill that institutions of higher learning claim to be cultivating in their students, “must endow a reflexive desire to identify and understand the disguises of power.” He observes that he is “merely a symbol of the stark imperatives of the wealthy and the well connected,” and he reminds his readers that all members of the academe are “merely buying...