Dimensions in academic freedom; #1 (Reel 1)

Dimensions in academic freedom noted scholars and administrators discussed a central issue in education in a series of four programs. At the University of Illinois radio service and the College of Law of the University of Illinois present a study of one of the challenges facing the modern university in this program. Walter P. Metzger a professor of history at Columbia University and author in the field of academic freedom academic history and social history will speak on the nature of the university dimensions of academic freedom. And now Mr. Metzger I've been given a rather short time to speak on an exceedingly long subject. This ratio works to your advantage since it forces me to be brief. And greatly to my disadvantage since it forces me to be succinct. And that is something which a fellow of my prolixity has to sweat for to achieve. I I can at least put my main contention

in and watch out. It is that the. Theory of academic freedom as it has been generally accepted in this country has become uncritical respect outmoded. I do not mean that the ethic of academic freedom has grown out of date. Freedom of teaching and research is not only relevant to the modern university but essential to the modern university. The one grace that may not lose without losing everything. But the theory of academic freedom does not merely advocate or extol academic freedom. It describes the forces and conditions that place this excellent thing in jeopardy and it prescribes certain prophylactic strategies to offset these specific threats. And it is in this latter sense. As a view of the realities of social power that I think it has in some degree outlived its day. I one should not suppose that it owes

its staleness to senescence. Though it draws on an ancient legacy of assumptions. The theory of academic freedom did not become crystallized in this country until 1915. When author Lovejoy of Johns Hopkins the IRA seal and John Dewey of Columbia and a number of other academic luminaries wrote The general report on academic freedom and tenure for the newly founded Association of professors the AUP. To call this report a classic is to pass judgement on its quality not its Venerableness ideas only two generations old do not exactly qualify as antiques. But a short period in the life span of ideas. Can be a millennium in the life span of institutions especially American institutions which have been known to change at a breakneck speed. What has happened in the half century since 1950 is that the American University has been remodeled. While the ideas that were once consonant with it

have not. The result is a discrepancy between thought and context. Or to use the test phrase cultural lag. By the lights of 1015 a violation of academic freedom. It. Was a cry designed and executed within the confines of the institution. Dissident professors were the victims trustees and administrators were the culprits. The power of dismissal was the weapon the loss of employment was the wound. Working with this confined scenario the writers of the 1015 statement could assume that the key to crime prevention lay in the adoption of regulations that would heighten the security of the office holder and temper the power of the boss. So persuaded they persuaded others and in time these institutional devices called academic tenure and due process came to be generally adopted if not always faultlessly applied. It should be noted however that by defining

a violation of academic freedom as something that happens in a university rather than something that happens to a university. These writers ignored a class of evils that had caused their foreign counterparts much concern. Nothing was said in this document about the relation of the university to St. off already and nowhere in its cast of suspicious characters. There appears such historic candidates as the meddlesome minister of education. The censoring Custom House official the postal guardian of public morals the intruding policeman or the hostile judge. And nothing was said in this document about threats to the autonomy of the institution that what they were not at the same time. Threats to the livelihood of its members. In fact it wasn't even here acknowledged that an academic corporate interest as distinct from an academic man's prerogative. Existed and needed to be preserved. 1915 as criminology in the criminology we live

on today. Was wise to the ways of the harsh employer. But it lacked as we still lack today an adequate theory and vocabulary for dealing with less parochial offenders and subtler kinds of offense. A second contribution of these theorists was the assertion that the university as a university had to be neutral on public issues. In the lengthy history of universities this is Norm. Norm of institutional neutrality had not been generally accepted. You can think of numerous examples of religious or political commitment. To the appearance of the continental universities to the confessional preferences of the local rulers or the involvement of Oxford in Cambridge in the dynastic struggles of Tudor England or the process of proselytizing efforts of the church built colleges in America prior to the Civil War. The writers of the 1015 statement took aim at a considerable

tradition. When they likened the modern university to an intellectual experiment station in which new ideas might safely germinate or to an inviolable refuge in which men of ideas might safely congregate or most simply and most expressively to a home for scientific research. University as they saw it was not to be a missionary society not to be a propaganda agency not to be a political party. It was to be a residence a hothouse a sanctuary. The metaphors given to it were adoring but they left it with nothing to proclaim. How was this no substance rule to be effectuated What were the means of this lack of NS. From different institutions in society these writers might have borrowed any one of several neutral strategies they might have taken their cue from the politically independent newspaper. With its balanced display of editorials. Now the neutrality of that kind would have required the appointment of illogical partisans

reflecting different biases on the spectrum to faculty seats. Or they might have tried to copy the civil and military services where there were none see active codes of conduct. Neutrality in that case would have required the prohibition of all partisan actions by the faculty especially when the faculty wore its uniforms. They are the implicitly the writers of the 1015 statement rejected both of these possibilities. They chose instead a formula which may have been suggested by the marketplace. Let the institution disown responsibility for anything its members say or publish and then let them permit its members to say and publish what they please. Neutrality by disownment. Is easier to administer the neutrality by selection. Harder to abuse the neutrality by prescription. But it did produce an asymmetrical doctrine. Which we continue to adhere to and that is that professors have the right to express opinions but their colleges and universities do

not. By including personal freedom under academic freedom these writers made the doctrine even more asymmetrical. Traditionally academic freedom had offered on the job protection freedom of teaching and research. These It had been supposed were the main arenas where professors exhibited their special competence and where they deserved a special attitude. Beyond these areas they had terrain of utterance. Which professors like any other citizens were presumed to enter at their own risk. They were authors of the 1015 statement strongly opposed such as zonal ordinance. Academic freedom they insisted protects professors and all of their identities as teachers scholars scientists citizens experts consultants and on every kind of platform it applies they and subsequent generations have agreed not to a category of speech but to a category of persons. What in the American experience. Gave rise to this

cluster of pronouncements. A thorough answer to that question would involve an exhaustive history of civil liberties in America. A project which if I were ever brave enough to tackle I would never be brave enough to do in haste. But I may within my boundaries of time and courage. Offer up a partial answer. One having to do with the special congregants between the concepts of these professional spokesmen and the institution in the institutional conditions they observed. The first thing to be said about the college and university. In the year 1015 is that it was a social agency possessed of very impressive powers within its own domain. This attribute which I will call its local ness. Is evident in many dimensions spatially. It was usually a contiguous property. In most cases mocked off by a fence that kept the students in Corral. And warm

the outsider of the line of trespass geographically. It was in a sequestered region usually in the outskirts of the major cities or in the bucolic setting of the college towns. Functionally it was complex enough to be self-sufficient but not so complex as to be incoherent. It built its own playgrounds and clinics. But it was not responsible for communal health and recreation. It told the lower school educators what it wanted. But it was not asked to run the lower schools. Administratively with the exception of a dwindling number of church connected institutions it also had this quality of localness. It had its own board of regents trustees its own budget its own bylaws and in the private sector which was then the dominant sector it had co-opted boards of trustees and rather confidential budgets. Legally it or rather its governance was endowed by charter and statute with a vast amount of discretionary authority. Extensive in the management

of goods that all 30 was almost without limit when it came to the treatment of persons. The courts usually taking the position that no rights were legally enforceable unless they were specified in the employment contract or implied by the in loco parentis rule. Here the academic institution was rather like a foreign enclave in a sovereign country. Ruling a native population. In a kind of extraterritorial way. Because institutions calling themselves academic came in many different shapes and sizes. The grandest institutions of that period those that had gathered into their custody the tools of modern scholarship and science and the pick of the nation's scholars and scientists were much more involved with the world around them than where the colleges that had remained little a cause. But the worldliness of Harvard Chicago Columbia had not yet. So to rob them of their localness. For one thing. The equipment the scientific

tools were on the Edison scale of cost Brookhaven magnitudes had not yet been in imagined by the usual fund drives and bequests and begging. The institution could cover those costs through internal budgeting and thus keeping trol of what it sought and what it spent. For another thing the academics scientists and scholars still had heavy academic duties. At this point in academic history. While there were many teachers who did not do research there were practically no researchers who did not teach. And teach assiduously and regularly in much more than in a pro-forma sense. Men who worked in the university also worked for the university. Even in their transactions with their patrons the colleges and universities of 1915 had a great deal of decisional independence. It's a convention of academic history to deny this. To conclude from their chronic poverty their annual quoting of the state legislature their incessant

wooing of potential benefactors that they were the most obsequious of creatures. But I suspect that the implicit model of comparison here is the English University of the nineteenth century an institution that owed its aplomb and influence to the privileges of a very special upper class using American base points when it arrives I think it less desolate conclusions. It was true. That none of these universities could support themselves then as now the income from client fees did not cover the cost of client services. But there are certain things working in their favor. One was the tendency in this period for donation to become dissociated from innovation after the Napoleonic nineties. There'd been an abatement in the founding of new institutions This in itself. Market decline in initiatives taken by outside patrons increasingly college presidents insisted that the purpose of the gift should be determined not by the giver but by the recipient. But they weren't always ready to refuse a charity that started many of the other way. Significantly while contributions to higher education kept

mounting there occurred no appreciable increase in the amount of external regulation. Of State laws of incorporation and state accounting systems which were the main modes of public regulation were neither exacting nor efficient. Large scale private philanthropy that had instigated important changes in such fields as medical education was not yet ubiquitous Reforma and self regulatory bodies like the regional accrediting associations tended to be trade associations. Shielding the run of the mill establishment against its fly by night competitor. Far less than in railroads or in banking where the companies in academe held to a common level of performance. And the reason. It's not very hard to find serving a small segment of the population seemingly marginal to the economy taken more seriously for its fun and frolics than for its earnest devotions. The university was

a public on a mint. And curiosity. It was not yet seen as a public utility. Above all and what makes this period seem an age of innocence our own little academic Bell a pock the central state was not intrusive. Prior to the Civil War the federal government gave millions of public acres to dozens of public colleges with practically no conditions. Afterwards when it tied its land of gifts to agricultural and mechanical instruction it did lay down general conditions but it attempted practically no supervision. In 1915 Washington didn't even have an apparatus for dealing consecutively with academe. The federal interest in education which at that time almost negligible could be contained in a lowly bureau whose primary task was to get statistics and they weren't very good statistics at that. The federal interest in science which was at that time quite considerable. Could be met by governmental agencies like the Naval Observatory or the Geological Survey and did

not impinge on the university's substantial federal assistance without a significant federal presence. This didn't strike contemporaries as an anomaly. It was attributed in that day to the happy compromises of our Constitution and to the strength of public opinion. And I don't doubt that a narrow reading of the Tenth Amendment combined with the Jeffersonian prejudices did set up barriers to federal intrusion. Where such barriers did not exist as in Great Britain in the 19th century there could be considerably Tartus pressure. For all their vaunted independence. Oxford and Cambridge had to submit to extensive changes suggested by a Royal Commission in the 1870s and enforced by parliamentary decrees. But there was another reason. One less visible to contemporaries. Why the central state was undemanding and that was simply that it did not have to make demands. A nation that had just ended world politics but not yet become a world power. That lived in the endemic security of a

minimal army and a safe frontier lacked one of the principal motives for interference. The motive of military necessity. When that motive was supplied as it would in a future far more imminent than anyone then could have foretold. The state would lay an imperious levy on the aims and spirit of the university as well as on its faculties and young men. For example in 1918 by decree of government every male college student was inducted. And became a soldier. Every college dormitory became a barracks. Every college lawn became a training ground under the control of the Department of War. The student on the training corps they called it. It came to an end with armistice and was decried and then forgotten in the post-war years. It was not until the second world war that the academic system would be re militarized and this time the marriage of Mars and Minerva would not only be solemn nice but preserved. Much of the parochialism of the

1015 statement can I think be attributed to this quality of local ness. If power resides in the unit then the concept of freedom will also be atomistic and confined. This will explain I think the emphasis of the document on the internal happening. Its consummate concern with the campus world. But to get it some of its more specific biases one has to take note of another feature of the system. Its capacity to generate within each perimeter an inordinate amount of state a strain. The academic profession in this period had just just come of age and become more specialized more secular and as I'd like to think more scientific. It had come to think of itself as a mentor to public government. It come to expect it would be treated with the dignity that its social role demanded. Alas this was also the period of extremely paternalistic and personal estate business management. This is the period before the period of

management by genial manipulation and management by negotiated rules. In this pre Elton Mayo environment. Businessmen doubling as trustees and not a few business minded presidents could be so egoistic as to believe and what is more so tone deaf as to say that men on academic appointments were like men in commercial employment. Are bound to respect and appease their hires or else they have to go. The imitating potential of this psychology can be gauged in one of the earliest cases investigated by the AUP. A case that went on SAA not simultaneously with the writing of the 1015 statement in 1915. The trustees of the University of Pennsylvania dismissed the Economist Scott Nearing for a reason they refused to disclose. The reason was that Scott Nearing was a radical not yet a Marxist but about to become so. In explaining why he did not have to explain George Wharton pepper a prominent trustee he said

if I am dissatisfied with my secretary I suppose I would be within my rights in terminating his employment. I was then a professor nothing more than a clerk. A trustee's a menu insists one pro trustee administrator Chancellor day of Syracuse would not go as far as that. A professor he was willing to admit did deal in some fashion with ideas. But there was nothing in this creative function that gave him leave to affront the man who paid his check. The dismissal of nearing Roe chancelor days entirely proper. That is what would happen to an editorial writer of The Tribune if he would disregard the things for which the paper stands. So where then trustees despite the fact there were no sense stockholders the owners of the university. The editors of The New York Times and choosing not to go quite so far offered their own enlightening treatise on the rights of wealth in America. As they saw it the university belonged to the donors who are its fount of wisdom and idiology the trustees were the agents of the donors charged with the execution of that immortal

claim. The professors. They were the whiners and the spoilsports Eveready under the academic freedom cover to claim a right for which they didn't pay. And I quote. Men who through toil and ability have got together enough money to endow universities or professors chairs do not generally have in mind that their money should be spent for the dissemination of the dogmas of socialism or the in the in the teaching of ingenuous youth how to live without work. Yet when trustees country interest we endeavor to carry out the purposes of the founder by taking proper measures to prevent the misuse of the endowment we always hear a loud howl about academic freedom. We see no reasons why the upholders of academic freedom in this sense should not establish a university of their own. Let them provide the funds erect the buildings layout the campus and then make a requisition on the padded cells of Bedlam for their teaching staff. Nobody would interfere with the full freedom of professors. They could teach socialism and shiftlessness until doomsday without restraint. The editorial page of The New York Times

was considerably livelier than that it has become. But the effect of these gothic pronouncements on the sensibilities of professors can't be measured by the frequency with which they were carried out. Surely this is not frequently. They were not frequently carried out but the mere utterance of these platitudes of possession. Was a wound professional pride. It required and it got an answer in the form of a treatise on academic freedom. A philosophical rejoinder to a rude and Philistine attack. It is important to bear in mind that the norm of institutional neutrality was not simply an ethicist abstraction it was a specific answer to the claim that trustees had the privileges of owners. The belief that academic freedom and freedom from the institution was not simply a libertarian reflex. It was an attempt to solace a profession whose status aspirations had overpassed status gains in certain very key respects. The 1915 statement

was a tract intended for its times. That times I submit have changed. Not everywhere not in all respects a small denominational college may still look like it looked in 1015 or university prominent in 1015 is in all likelihood prominent today. Many professors still have status problems. But at the height where you lose shadings and gain synopsis you can see enormous transformations of these one of the most important has been the shift of decisional power from the campus to agencies outside the campus richer larger more complex than ever before. The typical modern institution of higher learning is less autonomous than ever before. It has become I coin a word deal localized with consequences that we are just beginning to perceive. The localization has not been a

single process but a product of various processes all working roughly the same way. The engulfing of many universities by the central city which grows up has grown up around them with the result that everything they do in the way of land use becomes imbued with political implications and enmeshed in municipal law. That is one be localizing process the growth of bureaucratized philanthropy is one of the critical sources of innovation. That is another process the growth of a radical student movement which challenges the law of the campus and brings in off campus police that is another process. The deepening involvement of the university in social welfare with the result that it becomes responsible for a clientele far larger than that which it merits. That is another process. And so too is the rationalisation of public higher education. The the traditional assault on extraterritoriality and the vast enlargement of the federal presence. Processes that seem to me so important. But I would like to give more than a passing word to

each in 1015. Only two states attempted to coordinate their assortment of tax supported institutions by 1965 only nine states that their State University their land grant colleges their teacher's colleges their junior colleges live in a kind of uncoordinated confusion. The trend has been not only toward coordination there's been taught high degrees of integration. By 1065 fully 15 states that set up superordinate bodies with power to alter and create state institutions by plan. Suny. The gigantic State University of New York was established in 1909 to take charge of 46 existing institutions and to establish as many units and such new ones as its overall blueprint would prescribe the California master plan at current reckoning bring seventy six junior colleges 18 state colleges and a nine campus university under the sway of dovetailing central hierarchies. In these more integrated systems the off

campus administration makes decisions on capital investment intuition levels architectural design and you site location entrance requirements and degree capacities. The local administration makes decisions on how these decisions can be carried out. This unequal division of power between the central office and the branch these vertical and horizontal integrations of plants in similar and diverse lines make lead to localized academic institution in the modern business cooperation seem very close in type if not of kin and a growing members of the faculty within these institutions. The analogy seems only all to act if we are employed by the educational counterpart of General Motors and US Steel. Some of them now are saying let us be responsive to that reality. Let us elect a single bargaining agent to protect us against the collective might of management. Let us fight for our economic interests without the constraints of a service ethos. And let us if need be strike. Localized institutions might have exacerbated

professional resentment but the localized institutions seem to erode professional Ilan.