Freedom versus Accountability in the Academy

the question of freedom of inquiry has been in the air, no doubt, ever since human inquiry began in any systematic way. But institutions of learning face the question in a rather more specific form since, on the one hand, they may claim to be uniquely privileged in possessing such freedom because inquiry itself is their most central function, yet on the other hand, they may be host to constraints on freedom that are necessitated by the institutional protocols that academies, as sites that combine both pedagogy and research, must adopt.

Academic freedom has had a long and complex evolution, and that complexity owes to a wide variety of factors, some from changes of the culture within academic institutions and some from conditions in the mundiality of the world at large—whether political, economic, technological, or ideological—since such institutions are no longer (perhaps never were) sealed as cloisters. Though it might seem that the issues faced by Galileo in Europe were in essence no different from those faced by proponents of Darwin's ideas today in the American heartland, it would be obtuse to consider that essence as something unaffected by the tremendously large changes in the polity, the state, the law, the church, and the mentalities of ordinary people. That much is obvious given the vast distance of time and space between Renaissance Europe and contemporary America. But often the context of discussions of freedom of inquiry can change much more locally and within a very few years, and yet carry a vast conceptual transformation in what the central issues are. I want to focus on one such local and very recent change in American universities, and consider what I believe is a really quite novel development in the entire question of academic freedom. It has been the subject of intense debate on campuses in the past couple of years, with cool heads increasingly gone missing on both sides.

Before I address the dispute itself and come to one large conclusion about it at the end of this short essay, it may be worth first briefly expounding how the dispute has emerged against a background of political developments in the wider social and political context and their curricular and ideological effects on American universities. This story may be utterly familiar, but it bears retelling, if only to put into context the particular cast and character of the contemporary dispute I want to focus on.

________

the creative turmoil of the universities in the 1960s to a considerable extent emerged out of a broadly conceived Left politics among students, initially reacting to the draft and, therefore, highly critical of the government's misadventures in Southeast Asia, but then often going on to derive that criticism from a wider and more fundamental Left critique of capitalism and its effects both on American society and distant nations. Racial politics ran parallel to this mobilization on campuses and, as we know, produced one of the more remarkable pieces of legislation in American history.

I say that it ran "parallel" to the Left politics on campuses initially triggered by the war in Vietnam, but I don't want to give the impression by that term that they were merely contingently or miscellaneously related. An ethos in which racial issues were raised in tandem with conspicuously Left-based mobilizations gave the politics of race a very specific complexion in that decade. Its focus was primarily on a struggle to acquire rights hitherto unpossessed by a group defined upon a racial identity, and that political focus did not get dispersed to a more broadly cultural racial politics as it did in the decades that followed, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, and which came to be described as "identity" politics. This is a point of some significance, and something like this initial restricted political focus dispersing to a broader cultural canvas is also perhaps true of the trajectory of feminist politics from those earlier decades of the 1960s and 1970s to the later decades of the past century.

This is not the occasion to make clear or rigorous what is...