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Of course, there are a variety of strikes differing in the nature of their objectives, the time, place, and manner of their calling, and in many other ways. But to start, let's consider the kind of strike which is being urged upon professors by the American Federation of Teachers as a standard policy. That is, the economic strike as a final effort to prevail on issues of wages and working conditions when collective bargaining reaches impass. That's the kind of strike I want to talk about first. If you're still here, I will talk about what I want to call the academic interest strike and finally the political interest strike, right? Now I'm talking about the economic collective bargaining, self-interest strike. And I think that there are five professional values which are imperiled by strikes of this con. No blackboard. Never mind, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. First is the service ideal.
Secondly, the moral basis of professional claims, third, the commitment to shared and cooperative decision-making, fourth is the commitment to what I like to call reason, fifth is the pursuit of distinction. Let me talk about first, the service ideal. Now professors don't live by ideals alone either. Their employee status makes them no less dependent on this salary because they're professionals. And if concern with economic returns and better working conditions were held to be unprofessional, only the clergy and not all of them would qualify. But the strike on the industrial model as a means of furthering personal self-interest is to something else again. For what is entailed is the calculated interference with the flow of the product or service in which one's protagonist has a strong interest in order to compel him to accept one's terms. The industrial worker at best stops or at least to tails.
The production or sale of goods by withholding his services and concert with others to the detriment of the economic position of the employer. And thereby provides him with a further incentive to grant what the worker seek. What happens when similar strikes are transferred to the university setting is plain enough. The professor brings education and its attendant activities to a halt in order to win concessions from administrators, boards or legislators. And he does so, despite the fact that the provision of the service of education and research is central to his professional commitments, for the reasons I tried to say before. Now look, it would be implausible to make a parallel between campus strikes and strikes in essential services like hospitals or transportation. A few more holidays in the academic calendar create some inconvenience to students and others more or less depending upon the duration of the strike. But it produces nothing like the hardship of withholding hospital services or stopping the means of transportation.
Working with ingenuity, one can often make good the loss to some extent, by extending the term, while making up classes or giving out class assignments. But even where serious and irreparable injury is not done, as I submit, it tends not to be done in the case of university strikes. What the economic strike amounts to is that the professor holds his services ransom for his own benefit. And what further adds to its inappropriateness is the way in which pressure is broad. The shutting down of the university poses no direct economic threat to the administration or the governing board or in the case of a public university to the state. The pressure on these groups is the pressure that comes from their accountability for providing the services of the university and the public's expectation that they will meet that responsibility. By providing the services of the university is a pivotal element of the professor's professionalism.
The irony of the economics strike is that it operates through the professor's cutting off the services that both they and the governing boards are responsible for providing on the premise that the boards will yield before the professors do to the pressures to continue that service. Now that isn't all there is to be said, obviously. The interest of the university and that of its professors are mutual and not antagonistic. Higher salaries help stave off raids and permit more effective recruiting. They avoid the need for press pro professors to moonlight. And they avoid the kind of bitterness and resentment which hinder excellence in devotion. And reduce teaching loads of plainly conducive to better teaching and research. Moreover, governing boards and legislatures have their responsibilities too. And these include not only keeping the hotel open, but maintaining the conditions of university
life which permit its goals to be achieved, one of which surely is a fairly treated and not an exploited faculty. The injustice of exploitation is doubly acute when the victims are constrained by professional commitments to us chew the defenses available to other employees. For these and other reasons, professors I think may legitimately and professionally assert what can be taken to be their self-interest, their economic self-interest in a variety of ways. But the unprofessional of the strike of which I was talking remains notwithstanding these latter observations, for the reasons I try to suggest. Now let me talk about the moral basis of professional claims. What is involved in the regularized use of the strike in a collective bargaining relationship, not entirely, but an important part, is shifting the basis of professional claims, from
common commitment and moral entitlement to the play of power in a competitive context. The move from academic synates to collective bargaining, backed by a strike, is a move to the marketplace. And the spirit of the marketplace is that you are entitled to what you can exact and what you can exact is what you are entitled to. Paraphrase, the language of a recent Berkeley report on university governance, the institutionalization of the collective bargaining strike obscures the special character of a university by regarding it much as one does any other pluralistic society, populated by diverse interest groups and lacking a common commitment to anything more than the bargaining process itself. Now, I hope I have already made sufficiently clear that I am aware that there are in fact diverse interest groups on a campus and that some of the attributes of a pluralistic society
are invariably present. This is hardly to say, however, that it is desirable to surrender to these tendencies, still less to augment them by adoption of the trench warfare of the collective bargaining strike and the reduction of faculty claims from the basis of common commitment to that of the play of power. Take, for example, the claim to autonomy. As I tried to point out earlier, instances, insistence upon independence in planning, performing, and judging work may be regarded principally as either a demand in the employee interest or a claim resting on the requirements of the effective rendering of the services and on its high social importance. What gives the professors claim to autonomy, its moral legitimacy and persuasiveness in a lot of sense, is his primary commitment to the service of research and education, to the extent that the professor is prepared to subordinate this service ideal to his employee self interest, and to relegate the determination of what he is to be accorded to the play of
power in a competitive relationship, he has compromised the moral legitimacy of his claim. And the same may be said for other claims, even for the claim of academic freedom. The next danger is related to that I just described. I have in mind the potential destructiveness of the collective bargaining strike for cooperative and shared decision making between the faculty and the administration and governing boards of the university. For what is imperiled by such action is the system of university government which holds the greatest promise for the effective progress of the main business of research and education. In many essential respects, decisions taken by the administration in American universities and these matters, within its special competence, make as a necessary contribution to research and education.
As the decisions the faculty makes within its sphere, and administrative decisions often have an acutely direct bearing upon the faculty's own professional contributions. In a word, there is a, in fact, a closely meshed interdependence between the university's faculty and its administrators, which indeed provides the rationale of shared decision making authority. And the argument I put to you is that the injection of the collective bargaining strike in threat and, in fact, is likely to prove a formidable obstacle to that salutary patterns of government because of the embattled and adversary atmosphere, necessarily created by the whole institutionalization of collective bargaining. Let me turn to the problem third of the commitment to reason. As university professors, we are charged pre-eminently and constitutionally with the advancement and instruction and the uses of reason.
More so than any other group in the community. This entails, among many things, but at least it entails commitment to non-coercive argument and persuasion and skepticism of self-interested judgments. To an important extent, the strike is inconsistent with such commitment. Now, I don't want to say that anything more than the presentation of facts and the development of logical inferences in muted conversational tones, anything more than that is an abandonment of reason. Controversial ideas, particularly where they are put to support claims being made of another, must be expected to be put in ways most likely to secure their acceptance. This may often require the appeal of emotion to other groups in the community whose opinion is important to those we want to persuade, to lobby, and other political arts. And some kinds of demonstrations, designed to marshal and to demonstrate mass support, are not necessarily outlawed to reason where rival claims are in contest.
A strike is all of these things to be sure, but it is also something more. I am not ready to mark out the line between aggressive persuasion and coercion. But I submit that a strike is not near the gray area. In its essential import, it entails inflicting and sustaining some injury on another until he concedes what you want. Economic injury to the employer, in the case of an industrial strike, and the injury of abating the educational processes, which the administration and governing boards are ultimately and legally accountable for, in the case of the academic strike. This I think is outlawed to the professional commitment to reason and argument, however acceptable it may be in the competitive world of business and industrial relations. It is therefore an injury to ourselves, but it should be said that it is also an injury to our students, whom we cannot escape instructing when we act as professors.
When we depart from the methods of reason for ourselves to get what we want, we cannot help conveying a lesson for them when their wants are not satisfied. And there's another point which shouldn't be overlooked. The strike not only foresakes reason in its conception and its basic strategy, but in the tactics of its execution, it appeals to sentiments of solidarity, calling for the subordination of individualized judgment. A picket line is in effect is not simply an invitation, intellectually and rationally to appraise agreements. It is a signal to join, regardless of one's judgment on the merits, at the risk of open and notorious disloyalty to the group. The final value would stake the pursuit of distinction. Effective collective actions such as a strike requires mass support, and this is attainable over the long run by appealing to mass interest. This entails a constant quest for political solidarity, even as against academic principle
and practices. For example, the protection of the employee against discharge or non-renewal whenever his case is arguable, or sometimes even when it is not. Salary increases controlled by automatic formulas rather than by professional judgments of merit, timidness in the face of damaging or irresponsible behavior by faculty members. In a word, the push for distinction tends to be redirected simply by the dynamics of collective action toward solidarity, with consequent loss to the educational enterprise. Solidarity forever would be a more stirring and indigenous strain than Gaudiamo's Iggy tool, but less suitable for campuses than for union halls. Now, I have to this point been talking about the economic strike in the context of collective bargain. Let me now consider another kind of strike, which differs in that it's a current stance, is independent of collective bargaining, and its predominant purpose is not the furthering
of self-interest, but the furthering of some academic interest, such as academic freedom shared government or educational policy, the St. John's University Strike or the Catholic University Strike last couple of years or cases in point. What damage to professional commitments are there here? The analysis has to be different from that of the collective bargaining economic strike. The interest asserted is not principally the economic self-interest of the professor, but rather those very ideals and practices of academic life, which are indispensable for the effective rendering of education and research. Academic freedom, professional autonomy, and matters necessarily committed to them. Further, what is entailed is not an institutionalized dichotomy between staff and managers, mediated by a regularized use of force or its threat, but rather an ad hoc response to what's believed
to be a radical and intolerable departure from essential standards of academic life. Nonetheless, there is a difficulty, and it arises from the fact that the strike for this or any other purpose constitutes this abordination of reason and persuasion to the use of coercion, usually founded upon a wholly self-made judgment of the rightness of one's cause. I've already described the damage this entails for professional commitments and discussing the economic collective bargaining strike, and the same is true for the academic interest strike, notwithstanding the difference in the aims sought. The point may perhaps more clearly be made by comparing the measures for redressing academic injuries which have become respectable, such as censure by the AAUP, or withdrawal of accreditation or its threat by the relevant accrediting agency. Both are forms of pressure, but they differ in several relevant respects.
First, these latter sanctions operate directly against the offending institution rather than through the abatement of student education. To be sure, students may ultimately be adversely affected by either sanction and substantially so, but the sanction is directed to the source of the offence, and the harmful consequences follow from the wound the university has inflicted upon itself, whether it be by marring the atmosphere of academic freedom or falling below minimum educational standards. Literature and withdrawal of accreditation are the verification of these self-inflicted wounds, not their inflection. Second, the processes of invoking the sanction are markedly different. The decision to strike in protest is generally made at mass meetings by those personally and profoundly interested, usually quickly and in heat. This is in sharp contrast to the patient exploration of the facts, the hearing of all sides, and the final decision made by non-interested parties, which characterize censure by the AAUP
or withdrawal of accreditation by an accrediting agency. The latter is not inconsistent with the commitment to reason, truth, and disinterestedness. The former, the strike, tends to be. No one who has spent years as I have, reviewing and judging alleged violations of academic freedom and tenure, can fail to be impressed by how complicated the circumstances can be, or how readily one can fall into error in the facts or in final judgment in these matters. What appear at first blush to be outrages to be outrages to be outrages, at times turn out to be quite otherwise after investigating committees have explored the circumstances and interviewed the interested parties.
Sometimes the case is without merit, sometimes it's closely balanced. Sometimes the blame is shared by faculty as well as by administration, not always of course, but often enough to raise grave reservations over the resort to the strike with its consequent damage whenever a sizable group on the campus feels that an academic wrong has been done. Now I have talked about the personal self-interest strike in the academic interest strike. A word now about what may be called the political interest strike. The concerted refusal to meet classes, for example, as a means of dramatizing a deeply felt disagreement with some political policy, such as the war in Vietnam. Here the direct injury to students is slight, since by definition these are symbolic short lived protests, and since the university administration is a bystander rather than a protagonist, the considerations deriving from faculty administration government of the university are not the same as they are with the other kinds of strikes.
But the danger to the university which they pose is their potential politicization of the enterprise of learning. They entail an official professorial view on a point of political concern. And thereby tend to convert one of the few institutions in society dedicated to objectivity and sober and skeptical inquiry into a partisan area for political demonstrations. This by itself could have troubling and unsettling effects on the free pursuit of scholarship and education. So immense the danger is that it involves a self-destruction of the main barrier to the political and social threats of the outside community, the barrier of the principled neutrality of universities as institutions. As individuals we have our viewpoints on political and social issues of our times. As professors in that role we do not.
Our only corporate commitment is to academic freedom and autonomy within the university. Because these are the indispensable conditions for our work, for learning and the pursuit of truth. This is the posture of neutrality which affords maximum protection against the winds of political controversy which allows us to claim just entitlement to public and governmental support regardless of what political views offer the moment in the ascendancy. And which gives us and our students protection as individuals against official pressures toward conformity and toward orthodoxy. Once we ourselves have breached this neutrality by using the university itself and our roles as professors within it to advance political judgments. We hold personally, we forfeit the strongest moral link in the claim in the chain of our defenses.
In all of the foregoing I have tried to identify what there is in the special calling of the professor and the special role of the university that is imperiled by the strike. But if I have created the expectation, despite my earlier protestations, that I would therefore dam old strikes and those who engage in them, or broadly support the imposition of retaliatory university discipline, I must disappoint. For all I feel warranted in concluding is that there is a strong prime of phase case against the professorial strike for the reasons I've just stated. The inflection of even great injuries may be justified by the need to avoid still greater ones and may be excused by pressures and circumstances which challenge the restraint of the most scrupulous. This is as true in the law as it is in the judgments we make in daily life, and it is no less true of the strike. Now, if I hadn't been so awfully long-winded during the first 50 minutes of my talk to
you today, or as the alternative, if the dean had been prepared to give me a dispensation of another half hour and I had been insensitive enough to ask for it, what I would now have done would be to try to indicate what the conditions are which qualify the application of the considerations I just tried to describe which disfavor the strike, and I would have tried to indicate those special kinds of circumstances which tend either to justify or to excuse the strike. And I also would have made as strong a pitch as I could towards restraint and caution in the utmost, in the exercise of administrative discipline in dealing with persons who engage in strikes. But I think that you want your freedom more than what small enlightenment I could provide on this subject, and I will therefore refer you to the book which presumably will eventually
come out which will contain all these learned addresses, and in the entry of my want to thank you for being such patient and understanding, suffering victims. Thank you very much. You have been missing to Sanford H. Pettish, Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, and Chairman of the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee of the American Association of University Professors. He has discussed the strike and the professoriate. This has been the third in a series of programs about dimensions of academic freedom today, presented by the University of Illinois Radio Service and the College of Law of the University of Illinois. The final program in this series will be presented by Edward J. Bloustine, President of Bennington College, Vermont, on dimensions of academic freedom. This program was distributed by the National Educational Radio Network.
Series
Dimensions in academic freedom
Episode Number
#3 (Reel 2)
Contributing Organization
University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/500-6688mn9r
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Date
1969-01-03
Topics
Philosophy
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:25:15
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University of Maryland
Identifier: 69-10-3 (National Association of Educational Broadcasters)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Duration: 00:25:02
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Citations
Chicago: “Dimensions in academic freedom; #3 (Reel 2),” 1969-01-03, University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 28, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-6688mn9r.
MLA: “Dimensions in academic freedom; #3 (Reel 2).” 1969-01-03. University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 28, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-6688mn9r>.
APA: Dimensions in academic freedom; #3 (Reel 2). Boston, MA: University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-6688mn9r