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* Academic Freedom * Wilson Smith Thomas Bender context Academic freedom is at the core of academe. It is, however, a modern and always evolving concept. It emerged with the creation of research universities in nineteenth-century Europe and America that were grounded on the principle, never fully realized, of free inquiry. In the United States this primary idea was formally institutionalized in the “Statement of Principles” written upon the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915 and periodically updated (1). The date is important: already, even before the United States had entered World War I, the founders anticipated the pressure that wartime puts on free speech in general. Professors had in the 1890s experienced a different sort of academic freedom cases, which were typically conflicts between trustees and the faculty. The long-term result was a wall (again, not always impermeable) between the trustees and the evaluation of the professional work of the faculty, which came to be lodged within a system of professional disciplines and peer review. The Cold War, which in some ways had begun in 1917, produced a number of twentieth-century academic freedom cases that resulted from government restraint on the speech and associations of teachers. Academic freedom for teachers is distinct from but related to the First Amendment rights of citizens. Academic freedom is a professional privilege, based upon competence certified by disciplinary peers, while the free speech right protected by the First Amendment is a broad right of citizenship (11). Over the course of time, but certainly not in a straight line, the Supreme Court established academic freedom as a “special concern of the first amendment,” in the phrasing of Justice William Brennan (9). The first use of the phrase “academic freedom” in a Supreme Court decision had appeared in a dissent in 1952; by 1967 academic freedom found powerful statement in Brennan’s majority opinion (5, 7, 9). Moreover, as Brennan’s comment suggests, in the United States academic freedom tends to blend into the more fundamental right of free speech and assembly in a democracy. This is clear in the eloquent statement of Grenville Clark speaking for Harvard, but as he wrote—in the midst of the McCarthy era of repression—the institution found it impossible to live fully up to the ideal (2). Still, Clark rightly argued that universities exist to make possible “the search for truth by a free and uncoerced body of students and teachers. . . . Teachers have rights as citizens to speak and write as men of independence, the students also have rights to be taught by men of independent mind.” And this, he adds, is an “American idea” (3). As Justice Brennan later made plain, these basic rights are all the more important in periods when they are most under pressure; it is precisely then that free political discussion is most indispensable, to ordinary citizens no less than to teachers (III, 3). Three decades after Brennan’s opinion, Walter Metzger measured the many uncertain steps taken since the 1950s toward a stronger legal position for academic freedom. His remarkably analytical, heavily documented essay charted for the first time two different and “pivotal” developments: “professional” academic freedom since 1915 and “constitutional” academic freedom shaped by the Supreme and lower courts after World War II (11). Aside from Brennan-like judgments on academic freedom, however, there was on this issue, even in a litigious society, an American space between courts and professors. This “distancing of the courts,” Metzger suggested in one of his footnotes, “may be attributed to their natural impulse to refer to their own interpretive traditions in the area of free speech and to the meager edification provided by the AAUP in certain areas, such as freedom of scientific inquiry.”^^1 On other matters, first and foremost access, the Court showed no such hesitation, being pressed by the civil rights movement and presidential fiats of the 1960s. These movements altered the Court’s reluctance to consider contemporary “classroom” cases (IX, Context). Closer attention to civil rights in an unanticipated way promoted the image of a distinct professorial occupation. Despite their abiding dependence upon legal support for professional academic freedom, scholar-scientists, while they themselves live as citizens under the law, do not live for the law. Their occupational ideal is not above the law, it is essentially beyond it. They attempt to work in a realm of earnest but changeable ideas joining empirical open inquiry. Thus they look to institutional administrators and boards of control...

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