Commentary

Academic Freedom and the University Professor

I've gone on now for four weeks discussing academic freedom as a right with responsibilities, its limitations compared to free speech, its misuse, and its suppression. But what does this have to do with Ward Churchill, the university of Colorado professor who ran into trouble when bloggers notices his ugly remarks about the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks?

We often see conflict between free speech and the demands of a free market within public companies. One easily finds examples of an employee being fired from a company because his public comments damage that company. This is particularly the case with employees that interact with customers, and with employees that represent the public image of the company. University professors have been spared this danger by their tenure.

The use of tenure as protection of free speech is often portrayed a defense of academic freedom within the university. In fact, such a use of tenure has nothing to do with academic freedom; it is instead a license to express opinions outside of one's field of study. Tenure in this circumstance protects a professor's free speech at the cost of damaging a university's reputation.

I can't see that tenure used in this way has much relevance to the quality of the education provided by a university. The more important issue is the use of tenure to avoid accountability for violating the demands of academic freedom, for when this occurs, the quality of a university education is damaged.

The idea that tenure actually weakens academic freedom directly contradicts the normal justification for tenure. The contradiction occurs because of the misperception that academic freedom is a broader liberty than free speech, but as I argue in an earlier commentary, academic freedom is a right with responsibilities within an academic community, which makes it narrower than free speech. Under the flag of academic freedom, a researcher can study any idea that is consistent with the scientifically established knowledge of his discipline. A physicist can study alternatives to the theory of general relativity as a theory of gravity, because general relativity has not been experimentally proven to be the correct theory of strong gravitational fields, but he cannot study theories of gravity that give a different result than general relativity for the perihelion drift of Mercury's orbit and the bending of light by the Sun, because these two effects are experimentally established as being correctly described by general relativity.

The professional obligations of academic freedom are unenforceable in the larger community. As Harlow Shapley and the astronomical community found out in 1950, the American public does not tolerate even the appearance of the suppression of free speech, even when the idea being suppressed is unscientific. After the astronomical community persuaded Macmillan to cease publication of Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, Doubleday commenced publication of the book, and they published subsequent books by Velikovsky. In contrast to Velikovsky's continued success in publishing his works, the curator of the Hayden planetarium was asked to resign for his statement of support for Velikovsky's work that was quoted in a Harper's magazine article. The curator had violated his responsibilities of academic freedom, I assume out of a poor understanding of physics.

Applying academic freedom to the classroom implies that a professor teaches what is known and accepted within his discipline, and in the areas of the discipline that are uncertain, he teaches all of the credible theories. He does not have a free hand to teach whatever comes to his mind. This is of course what a university's clients have come to expect; no one expects to be taught astrology or other discredited ideas in an astronomy department. A professor without tenure is under pressure to adhere to academic freedom, because the university itself is under pressure from the free market to adhere to a set of principles demanded by its students and their parents. But when a professor is given tenure, what is to keep him from teaching ideas that are discredited?

Many controversies surround Ward Churchill, including whether he lied about his background to obtain a professorship. The issue that concerns me, however, and which probably concerns many parents and students, is that Churchill is not upholding his responsibilities under academic freedom. From all reports, his scholarship and his teaching are dishonest. He is not providing his students with the education promised by his university, so he should be held accountable. The market is now holding the University of Colorado accountable with a plunge in out-of-state applications. The university need to hold Ward Churchill accountable by firing him.

I suspect that tenure will disappear over the coming decades. I cannot see that parents will continue to spend such large sums on education without receiving in return some control over what is taught. Such a change would strengthen academic freedom and improve the quality of a university education.