[The Montana Professor 17.1, Fall 2006 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Anne D. Neal
President, American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA)
aneal@goacta.org
Last March, I participated in a conference at Montana State University-Bozeman entitled "Without Interference"?: Academic Freedom in the 21st Century."/1/ That title, of course, begged many questions. What counts as interference? Can outside involvement sometimes come to the aid, even to the rescue of academic freedom? If trustees, alumni, legislators, or the public were to become aware that there were serious inadequacies at a university--low standards, disjointed curricula, or racial, sexual, or ideological discrimination--should they not "interfere"? Does academic freedom require that they remain silent--even when it is academic freedom that may be at risk? The phrase "without interference" simply reinforces the tendency in academe to confuse academic freedom with institutional autonomy, and to confuse both with an immunity to accountability and even to criticism. Far from interfering with academic freedom, outside input in the form of criticism, commentary, study, debate, and even, on occasion, legislative attention, can be crucial to protecting it.
In fact, the original formulation of academic freedom did include a recognition of the academy's obligation toward the public it serves. In its founding statement, the 1915 "Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure," the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) outlines a concept of academic freedom that defends the scholar's right to pursue the truth but stipulates that this pursuit must always be conducted in accordance with professional standards. While "[u]niversity teachers should be understood to be, with respect to the conclusions reached and expressed by them, no more subject to the control of the trustees, than are the judges subject to the control of the President, with respect to their decisions," it says, academic freedom does not imply "that individual teachers should be exempt from all restraints as to the matter or manner of their utterances, either within or without the university." "The liberty of the scholar within the university to set forth his conclusions, be they what they may, is conditioned by their being conclusions gained by a scholar's method and held in a scholar's spirit...." And, "there may, undoubtedly, arise occasional cases in which the aberrations of individuals may require to be checked by definite disciplinary action."/2/ Thus, academic freedom is the freedom of higher educational institutions to run themselves according to scholarly standards of integrity. It entails deep respect for teachers' and scholars' expertise, but also underscores the obligation of institutions to ensure that all faculty members are doing their jobs properly. It is a disciplinary directive, not a declaration of freedom from accountability. In short: "academic freedom" does not mean "anything goes." But you wouldn't know this from the way the phrase is often used in academic circles. In much contemporary commentary on academic freedom--as in the conference title--the concept of "without interference" signals a belief that accountability to the public, or even accountability to one another, undermines academic freedom.
Confusion on this point originates, sadly, within the AAUP itself, which regularly departs from its own stated principles. Take recent scandals over professors who teach unfounded conspiracy theories about U.S. Government involvement in 9/11. In his public comments on these cases, AAUP General Secretary Roger Bowen has oscillated rather wildly between a traditional conception of academic freedom and a misconception of academic freedom as freedom from accountability. When the news broke that University of Wisconsin lecturer Kevin Barrett planned to teach his bizarre conspiracy theory about 9/11 in his fall course on Islam, Bowen issued a statement clearly indicating that faculty have no business using the classroom to promote ideas that cannot stand up to scholarly scrutiny: "With academic freedom comes academic responsibility," he told the press. "And that requires [faculty members] to teach the truth of their discipline, and the truth does not include conspiracy theories, or flat earth theories, or Holocaust denial theories."/3/ But, when the news broke that University of New Hampshire (UNH) professor William Woodward presents those same ideas to his students, Bowen did an abrupt about-face. His defense of Woodward's academic freedom amounts to a scathing critique of those who would dare question whether UNH is meeting its obligation to ensure that all faculty members teach and research in accordance with the highest professional standards: "That some legislators apparently believe they have an obligation to criticize the content of faculty classroom instruction is of enormous concern to the AAUP. The U.S. Supreme Court has held repeatedly that academic freedom is a First Amendment right of professors and at least six federal appellate courts have followed Supreme Court rulings," Bowen opined, voicing the popular misconception that criticism of academics somehow violates their constitutional rights. He continued:
So long as the faculty member teaches within his or her discipline and is careful to teach the truth as set by the highest standards of scholarship within their (sic) discipline, they and their universities should not be subjected to political intrusions. This rule applies even in highly charged times like today. Professors outside the classroom should speak truth to power as their conscience dictates and inside the classroom they should speak the truths of their discipline. Based on the press reports I have read, it appears that Professor Woodward exemplifies both these professional desiderata./4/
In a dizzying display of non-sequitur, Bowen both acknowledges academics' responsibility to police themselves and refuses to recognize evidence in the case of Professor Woodward that they have not done so. The very classroom content that Bowen rejected as unprofessional when commenting on Kevin Barrett's case is, in the case of William Woodward, now exemplary.
With the AAUP so muddled on this point, we should not be surprised to see others equally confused. Indeed, when legislators and elected officials have suggested that such conspiracy theories have no place in responsible classrooms, university administrators have essentially responded that academic freedom means "anything goes." Kevin Reilly, the leader of the University of Wisconsin System, has insisted that while he does not "find Mr. Barrett's arguments about 9/11 at all credible," a "core part of a university's mission is to be a forum for the free exchange of ideas, even when many of us find some of those ideas ridiculous or offensive."/5/ Similarly, acting UNH president Bonnie Newman told the media that even though September 11 is known to be the work of terrorists, the university encourages "the open inquiry of ideas."/6/ Invocation of "academic freedom" in these instances suggests that the concept exempts professors even from professional standards--an example of how distorted the concept of "academic freedom without interference" has become. In effect, "without interference" quickly becomes "without responsibility."
In a recent Inside Higher Ed column, University of Tennessee professor John Friedl recounts tales of professors who think their academic freedom exempts them from basic, reasonable professional directives--about how often they must assign graded work, for instance, or about what they must include on their syllabi in order meet the pedagogical requirements of accrediting bodies./7/
Such interpretive abuse is patently wrong, not to mention intellectually dishonest, twisting the very concept that is supposed to guard against academic dishonesty. In cases such as these, academics damage their own cause when they either refuse to enforce professional norms or invoke academic freedom to ignore public calls for explanation, improvement, and accountability. As University of California professor and former chair of the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure David Hollinger observes, "The learned community owes it to itself, as well as to the society which it serves, to make sure things are done professionally. That community must not neglect this responsibility, as it is sometimes tempted to do, for fear of being seen as someone else's agents."/8/ As Hollinger points out, it's one thing to uphold the idea that academic freedom involves an understanding of the university as independent of governmental policing; it's quite another to suggest that academic freedom insulates academics from ever being questioned, challenged, criticized, or called to account. And yet, this distinction drops out of the academic consciousness routinely, and it does so quite often for precisely the reason Hollinger intuits--that academics tend to regard outside input as a politically motivated attack on their autonomy, and thus tend to respond to that input by defensively circling the wagons. In the process, they compromise their professionalism, undermine the legitimacy of academic freedom as an institutional modus operandi, and fail to live up to what the AAUP's classic statement defines as their essential "duty...to the wider public to which the institution itself is morally amenable."/9/
The academic response to ACTA's 2001 report, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It, is a case in point. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, ACTA issued a report documenting the divide between mainstream American responses and those of American academics./10/ The report contained a number of statements showing a tendency to blame the victim rather than the terrorists, such as, "Why should we support the United States, whose hands in history are soaked with blood?" and "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote." And the report noted that while 92% of Americans favored responding to the attacks with military force, a very different set of attitudes prevailed on American campuses: "While America's elected officials from both parties and media commentators from across the spectrum condemned the attacks and followed the President in calling evil by its rightful name, many faculty demurred," the report began: "Some refused to make judgments. Many invoked tolerance and diversity as antidotes to evil. Some even pointed accusatory fingers, not at the terrorists, but at America itself." The report offered some provisional explanations for why this might be, mentioning moral relativism, a degraded curriculum, political correctness and a campus atmosphere increasingly unfriendly to the free exchange of ideas. But most of the report simply consisted of professors' own words. After a brief commentary, ACTA devoted the bulk of the report to quotations taken from faculty members' public comments about the 9/11 attacks--essentially allowing the comments to speak for themselves./11/
The reaction to the report was electric. The Wall Street Journal and a column in the Washington Post both praised the report, the former urging an end to the "fog of political doublethink and victimology" and the latter condemning the "tidal wave of leftist insanity that has washed over the professoriate for the past three decades."/12/ But defenders of the academic status quo vehemently criticized the report and portrayed it as a new, resurgent McCarthyism designed to suppress political dissent on campus and beyond./13/ Many commentators found such criticism bizarre and overblown: "Some are proclaiming a new era of McCarthyism and censorship," noted University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds. "Such proclamations ring hollow: so far, no one has suffered anything worse than public criticism for making anti-American statements, and surely criticism does not count as censorship. If it does, all the 'critical theorists' of academia, who criticize everything about American society, would constitute America's foremost censors."/14/
ACTA's report explicitly and repeatedly defended both the academic freedom and the expressive rights of faculty, but with a cautionary note. "[W]hile professors should be passionately defended in their right to academic freedom, that does not exempt them from criticism," the report noted./15/ "Let us be clear. This is not an argument for limiting free speech on college campuses.... But academic freedom does not mean freedom from criticism. If some faculty, are inclined to criticize America, it seems only reasonable to insist that colleges and universities transmit our history and heritage to the next generation so that students can decide for themselves."/16/ While the report pointedly noted campus ambivalence to the 9/11 attacks in contrast to general public condemnation, it never suggested that faculty should not have the right to make such comments, and it never suggested that faculty who do make such comments should be punished in any way. Indeed, ACTA's concluding plea was positively uncontroversial--or should have been: "It is urgent that students and professors who support the war against terrorism, as well as those who are opposed, not be intimidated. If both sides are heard, students and all of us benefit."/17/ That such a basic endorsement of free exchange could be characterized as McCarthyite by academics raises serious and disturbing questions about the academy's actual embrace of the free exchange of ideas. As the National Association of Scholars wondered, "what should one make of those professors who now shrilly hurl charges of 'McCarthyism' when intellectually discomforted by their critics? Historically, this term has denoted reckless calumnies, name-calling, or guilt-by-association aimed at ruining reputations. How perverse, then, that the charge of McCarthyism is now itself being leveled for that very same purpose."/18/
What's even more perverse is how the false equation between the ACTA report and McCarthyism has been allowed to persist; indeed, far from dropping a maliciously illogical comparison, ACTA's critics have since used that comparison to anchor a new and equally fallacious set of claims about what has happened to American academic freedom in the wake of 9/11. In 2001, ACTA's critics claimed that the Defending Civilization report revealed McCarthyite impulses at ACTA; now they argue that ACTA's report signals the broader, much more threatening McCarthyite intentions of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" and even of the U.S. government itself.
This is the basic argument of the new anthology, Academic Freedom after September 11, which emerged from a conference on academic freedom held at Berkeley in 2004./19/ In distinct contrast to another new publication entitled Academic Freedom at the Dawn of a New Century,/20/ where academic freedom is found alive and well, the anthology, edited by University of California history professor Beshara Doumani declares that academic freedom has "suffered serious setbacks after September 11, 2001,"/21/ that the government laid the groundwork for this with the Patriot Act, that private funding organizations such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations have chilled dissent by requiring grant recipients to sign contracts declaring their distance from terrorist causes, and that the most "pernicious" threat to academic freedom comes from "well-funded and politically connected private advocacy organizations that mobilize politicians, donors, alumni, and the local and national press."/22/ These groups, Doumani claims, lie at the heart of the contemporary threat to academic freedom: "In contrast to the McCarthy era, private groups--not the government--are playing the lead role in the campaigns to quarantine dissent, to dominate the framing of public discourse, and to rechannel the flow of knowledge production."/23/
ACTA's report is Exhibit A in Doumani's discussion of just how "radical right-wing groups"--a description that sinks any claim of political neutrality or scholarly disinterest Doumani might wish to make--"are using sophisticated techniques of intimidation, ranging from posting lists...on the Internet to coordinating attacks on specific scholars, course offerings, and programs of study."/24/ Doumani positions ACTA as a leader in a brutally intolerant campaign to impose a repressive agenda on America. "[T]he true 'Axis of Evil' for ACTA and similar private advocacy groups," says Doumani, "is not the foreign one composed of the 'rogue' states of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that President Bush outlined in his famous post-9/11 State of the Union address. Rather, it is a domestic one: the liberal government that taxes the self-reliant and spends on the socially undeserving; the liberal media and the entertainment industry, which lie and spread moral corruption everywhere; and the liberal universities that brainwash our young and fill them with hatred for their own country and for Western civilization as a whole."/25/
Remarkably, Doumani argues that in simply exercising its constitutional right to advocate its views, it is ACTA, and not the academics cited in ACTA's report, that finds fault with America. Even more remarkably, Doumani suggests that ACTA's "repressive" tactics are embodied in its focus on informing and persuading trustees and alumni. Doumani even treats ACTA's general disfavoring of legislative solutions as proof of bad, rather than good, faith:
ACTA operatives eschew the push for legislating political orthodoxy in favor of exerting pressure through the administrative structures of universities. This long-term strategy seeks to turn back the clock to the time when conditions of "at-will" employment prevailed in institutions of higher education. Ironically, these conditions, often characterized by politically motivated, heavy-handed interference from above, gave impetus to the first major statement on academic freedom in 1915.... At stake is academics' hard-earned right to regulate the production of knowledge according to their own professional norms./26/
Thus does ACTA's scrupulous and traditional defense of academic freedom get cast as an attack upon it; thus, too, does the real attack on academic freedom--the one coming from inside the academy--get cast as academic freedom's noble defense.
The inflammatory quality of these references both heightens and conceals the illogic involved in equating criticism and censorship. ACTA has never interfered with anyone's right to speak. It has never urged any sort of censure or punishment of academics who express dissident views. To the contrary, it has issued public statements defending the academic due process rights of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill and others who have expressed extreme views./27/ But the false analogy between censorship and outside input of the sort offered by ACTA's report, between McCarthyism and legitimate public expression, seeks to hide these crucial facts. And in this concealment lurks the real threat to academic freedom: academics' own effort to redefine academic freedom so that it becomes synonymous with freedom from accountability. Under cover of false comparisons between McCarthyism and public engagement with what academics do, say, and teach, a significant group in the academy is seeking to define the public's call for a free exchange of ideas about higher education as a threatening form of "interference." By calling those who defend a traditional conception of academic freedom censors, they seek to discount and ignore their critics. Along the way, they devalue and discredit academic freedom itself.
As overbroad conceptions of academic freedom become increasingly common, so the academy becomes an increasingly hospitable environment for those who regard the American public with contempt. Underneath all the fancy rhetoric about institutional autonomy and faculty self-governance lies a deeply entrenched belief that academics should not have to answer to the people. Gone is respect for their "duty...to the wider public" and in its place is an arrogant notion that the public's intelligence, politics, and beliefs are beneath those of the professoriate, whose own intelligence, politics, and beliefs are above criticism and beyond reproach.
This perspective was vividly on display last fall when various elite college faculties, as well as the AAUP, submitted briefs opposing the Solomon Amendment, which renders universities ineligible for certain federal funds when they fail to provide equal access to military recruiters./28/ These briefs consistently invoked academic freedom and faculty autonomy--not as a foundation for the objective search for truth--but as a foundation for espousing a particular political viewpoint. The argument on behalf of law schools' wish to bar military recruiters was that compelling them to admit recruiters interfered with their right to protest the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy with regard to homosexuals in uniform--even though no one had forbidden them to protest as much as they wished.
Under cover of a flawed argument about expressive rights and academic freedom, law schools placed their own political prerogatives ahead of students' consciences and careers. In their wish to bar recruiters while still collecting federal funds, they flaunted their failure to comprehend what institutional autonomy and academic freedom are. To the schools involved in Rumsfeld v. FAIR, taking an ideological stand mattered more than ensuring that students had the freedom to decide for themselves what they believe and for whom they are willing to work. In other words, the responsibilities that come with academic freedom--the duty to the wider public, the duty not to indoctrinate students, the duty to ensure that standards of professional conduct are internally maintained and enforced--all evaporated before the powerful compulsion to turn institutions of higher learning into ideological advocates.
Instructively, a unanimous Supreme Court found that law schools' arguments were arrogant and fanciful; justices from left, right, and center concurred that requiring colleges and universities receiving federal funds to allow military recruiters on campus had nothing to do with academic freedom, freedom of association, or faculty governance. "The Solomon Amendment neither limits what law schools may say nor requires them to say anything," the Court wrote. "Law schools remain free under the statute to express whatever views they may have on the military's congressionally mandated employment policy, all the while retaining eligibility for federal funds."/29/ The court was unequivocally clear. And yet the AAUP--the organization most closely identified with the defense of academic freedom--remains confused on this point. Shortly after the ruling, AAUP General Secretary Roger Bowen wrote that "it should not be the case that a victory for the Department of Defense is a defeat for academic freedom, but such is the outcome of Rumsfeld v. FAIR."/30/ By requiring equal, rather than adequate, access for military recruitment, Bowen maintained, the Solomon Amendment discriminates against the viewpoints of faculty who oppose "don't ask, don't tell." Faculty academic freedom, according to this logic, includes the right to deny students equal access to military recruiters until "such time as the U.S. military changes its anti-discrimination policies to accord with the more enlightened view of the academy." In short, Bowen suggests that in holding colleges and universities to the letter of the law, the Court is violating the academy's putative right to be a "more enlightened" law unto itself.
For some time, honest observers inside academe have acknowledged a disturbing trend. In 1991, Yale president Benno Schmidt observed that "The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and liberate the mind."/31/ Also at that time, Harvard president Derek Bok noted that "what universities can and must resist are deliberate, overt attempts to impose orthodoxy and suppress dissent.... In recent years, the threat of orthodoxy has come primarily from within rather than outside the university."/32/ Fifteen years later, the campus climate remains troubling.
In 2004, ACTA commissioned the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut to study students' perceptions of their academic experience./33/ We found that 49 percent of students at the country's top fifty colleges and universities say their professors frequently inject political comments into their courses, even if they have nothing to do with the subject, and that 29 percent felt they had to agree with professors' political views to get a good grade. Forty-eight percent of students felt campus panels and lecture series on political issues were "totally one-sided," while 46 percent said professors "used the classroom to present their personal political views." And yet universities are not attempting to track how bad the abuse of the classroom is: 83% of those surveyed said student evaluation forms did not ask about a professor's social, political, or religious bias.
ACTA's study of student perceptions is consistent with the documented partisan activities that have become commonplace on campus. Colleges and universities across the country routinely disinvite politically incorrect speakers; mount one-sided panels, teach-ins, and conferences; permit politicized instruction; enforce speech codes and ignore campus newspaper theft. When criticized for such doctrinaire behavior, schools defend themselves as law schools did when they sought to bar military recruiters--by invoking academic freedom./34/
The enormous intellectual and pedagogical autonomy that faculties possess in the name of academic freedom rests on the condition that colleges and universities make academic decisions on academic grounds--not on partisan or prejudicial ones. Academic freedom is a trust, a compact that entails both a right and a responsibility--or, to use the AAUP's terms, "corresponding duties" and "correlative obligations." As the AAUP stated in its 1915 Declaration of Principles,
The university teacher, in giving instruction upon controversial matters, while he is under no obligation to hide his own opinion under a mountain of equivocal verbiage, should, if he is fit for his position...set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue; and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently./35/
In its original formulation, academic freedom applies both to professors' freedom to teach, research, and speak; and to students' freedom to learn about controversial issues.
But the AAUP's founding conception of academic freedom is out of favor today. The disinterested search for truth has been supplanted by the belief that there is no truth; the impartial educator has become a politicized "change agent." A perfect case in point is the University of California--home of former AAUP Academic Freedom Committee chair Hollinger--which abandoned prohibitions against using the classroom as a "platform for propaganda." The president of the university explained in a letter to the Academic Senate that the regulation was outdated./36/
Meanwhile, when a clear-cut violation of academic freedom came along in the form of a professor denied promotion for expressing his views, the AAUP was nowhere to be found. It took the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and other groups to defend CUNY Brooklyn professor Robert K.C. Johnson against attempts to punish him for publicly criticizing a one-sided panel and questioning faculty hiring practices./37/ Although punishing a professor for his extramural utterances clearly contravenes the AAUP's 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the AAUP failed to speak up in defense of a professor whose views clashed with that organization's own increasingly activist stances. To appreciate how the AAUP has allowed partisanship to cloud its commitment to principle, one need only consult the report the AAUP issued last summer. Entitled "Americans' Views of Political Bias in the Academy and Academic Freedom," the report sought "to assess the extent to which conservative critiques of the professoriate inform American public opinion, as well as to understand how Americans feel about academic freedom and tenure." While the AAUP sought to put the best face on the results, the study found that 58.4 percent of the American public has only some or no confidence in American colleges and universities; 60.2 percent believes higher education is suffering from low educational standards; 45.7 percent says political bias is either a very serious problem or the biggest problem facing higher ed. And, in the face of these perceived deficiencies, a whopping 82 percent wants to modify or eliminate higher education's most valued privilege--tenure./38/
As these examples indicate, the AAUP has drifted rather far from its own founding ideals. If we are to have a meaningful dialogue about academic freedom today--and if we are to protect academic freedom for the future--we must first recognize that the AAUP should be regarded neither as the main arbiter of academic freedom nor as its most trustworthy protector. We must recognize that, following the AAUP's lead, numerous academics are abusing the concept of academic freedom, interpreting it to make it mean whatever they want it to mean. We must recognize that the debate surrounding academic freedom is riddled with confusion on the part of academics and non-academics alike, and that some of the foremost self-styled defenders of academic freedom are defending it in bad faith. And we must also recognize that under such circumstances, outside input is an essential and salutary thing. When universities fail to abide by professional standards, when faculty members put personal, social, and political agendas ahead of a fundamental commitment to truth, when even the AAUP loses touch with its guiding principles, outside input becomes a necessary means of reminding colleges and universities of their professional obligations and of protecting the academic freedom that allows them to govern themselves as they see fit.
A growing number of examples speaks to the positive power of outside input. Last year, strong public pressure led Columbia University president Lee Bollinger to issue new grievance guidelines in response to students' complaints about intimidation in the classroom./39/ Last spring, media exposure convinced Penn State president Graham Spanier to affirm students' rights to display politically contentious artwork./40/ The University of Colorado is tightening up its hiring and promotion procedures in response to the public outcry over Ward Churchill./41/ Even the AAUP has recently released a statement defending the practice of inviting controversial speakers to campus./42/ And last winter, ACTA's 2005 report, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, became the basis for HB 1222, a bill introduced by South Dakota Rep. Phyllis Heineman and Sen. Lee Schoenbeck to urge institutions of higher learning to report on concrete measures taken to ensure academic freedom and intellectual diversity./43/ In response, the South Dakota Board of Regents volunteered to report on the implementation of the Board's policy on Academic Freedom and Responsibility. And this fall, Regents implemented a policy requiring state institutions to include on all student syllabi an Academic Freedom Statement clarifying that student academic performance "may be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on opinions or conduct in matters unrelated to academic standards."/44/ Far from "interfering" with academic freedom, outside input of the sort described here actively works to safeguard it.
There are, of course, limits to how far outside input can and should go. Constructive legislative intervention of the sort outlined by HB 1222, which would have given schools virtually total discretion about how they ensured academic freedom and reported about it, must be differentiated from invasive and misguided attempts to control how professors teach and what they say. Such attempts include an Arizona bill that would have required alternative coursework for students who are offended by particular assignments (as if education were compatible with never encountering ideas that make one uncomfortable)./45/ They would include misguided attempts to legislate quotas for conservative students and faculty. Such projects are abuses of legislative power that interfere with the institutional autonomy guaranteed by academic freedom.
Appropriate forms of outside input must be, of course, limited in scope. Criticism and commentary, however persuasive, can only do so much. By nature criticism cannot compel action--and by definition it can be ignored by those who are not receptive to it. For these reasons, outside input must be perceptive and sensitive if it is to be effective. A case in point is the "Statement on Academic Rights and Responsibilities" issued by the American Council of Education and 29 other organizations in June 2005./46/ The statement recognized that groups such as ACTA have a point when they criticize colleges and universities for their lack of intellectual diversity. It pledged support for "intellectual pluralism and academic freedom," stated that "neither students nor faculty should be disadvantaged or evaluated on the basis of their political opinions," and cautioned that institutional autonomy is conditional, a privilege that entails a "particular obligation to ensure that academic freedom is protected for all members of the campus community." But when ACTA wrote to one hundred of the nation's top colleges and universities in September, asking what actions they had taken in response to the ACE statement, the result was telling. Not a single one had done anything concrete to address the problems the ACE statement had defined./47/ ACTA followed up with its December 2005 report, Intellectual Diversity: Time For Action, which outlines measures colleges and universities can readily implement to ensure intellectual pluralism on campus. Praised for its sensitivity to academic freedom, the report offers a model for how outside input can help institutions maintain their autonomy while improving their commitment to free intellectual inquiry for all./48/ As this example shows, outside input, when managed with sensitivity and vigilance, complements institutional autonomy; far from interfering with academic freedom, it is a means of helping colleges and universities secure and preserve it.
Outside input is an essential, positive good to an academy in serious danger of losing its way. As the late SUNY-Albany president Kermit Hall warned, "Only when higher education is willing to address squarely...the existence of an oppressive campus orthodoxy, will we command full legitimacy."/49/ When, in the name of academic freedom, academics and officials dismiss valuable input as "interference," they discredit the enterprise of higher education itself. Far from limiting outside input, what we really need is to refine the concept of interference itself in this context. It must no longer be considered legitimate to claim that criticism is interference, or that requests for accountability are interference, or that studying academe and participating in debates about academe is interference. These things are not interfering; they are completely consistent with the ideal of academic freedom, and they play a pivotal role in ensuring that academic freedom will survive into the future.
Notes
[The Montana Professor 17.1, Fall 2006 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]