The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University
306
The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University
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Overview
Making a provocative foray into the public debates over higher education, acclaimed historian Ellen Schrecker argues that the American university is under attack from two fronts. On the one hand, outside pressure groups have staged massive challenges to academic freedom, beginning in the 1960s with attacks on faculty who opposed the Vietnam War, and resurfacing more recently with well-funded campaigns against Middle Eastern Studies scholars. Connecting these dots, Schrecker reveals a distinct pattern of efforts to undermine the legitimacy of any scholarly study that threatens the status quo.
At the same time, Schrecker deftly chronicles the erosion of university budgets and the encroachment of private-sector influence into academic life. From the dwindling numbers of full-time faculty to the collapse of library budgets, The Lost Soul of Higher Education depicts a system increasingly beholden to corporate America and starved of the resources it needs to educate the new generation of citizens.
A sharp riposte to the conservative critics of the academy by the leading historian of the McCarthy-era witch hunts, The Lost Soul of Higher Education, reveals a system in peril—and defends the vital role of higher education in our democracy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781595586032 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Press, The |
| Publication date: | 08/13/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 306 |
| Sales rank: | 920,777 |
| File size: | 790 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"SO FRAGILE AND SO INDISPENSABLE": WHAT IS ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT IT?
When Reverend Dennis Holtschneider, the president of DePaul University in Chicago, refused to grant tenure to the controversial Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein in June 2007, thus effectively ending Finkelstein's academic career, he was, he claimed, simply defending academic freedom, which was, he insisted, "alive and well at DePaul." A month later, the University of Colorado's Board of Regents made a similar declaration, stating that it was "committed to ensuring that the university will promote and respect" academic freedom, even as it capitulated to political pressures by voting to oust Ward Churchill, the school's most notorious professor. Neither the Colorado regents nor DePaul's president was setting a precedent. The American academy has a long-standing tradition of accompanying the dismissal of politically unpopular professors with invocations of respect toward academic freedom. As early as 1895, when the University of Chicago fired the outspoken economist Edward Bemis, its leaders insisted that his "'freedom of teaching' has never been involved in the case." During the McCarthy years, it was equally common for university authorities to claim that they were simply preserving academic freedom and the integrity of the academic profession by eliminating Communists or people associated with Communism.
In retrospect, it is hard to see how those authorities could square the dismissal of controversial professors with the defense of academic freedom. Yet in just about every case in which such faculty members lost their jobs because they were too outspoken or politically unpopular, the institutions that dismissed them justified that action by invoking the hallowed norms of academe. Not only do such justifications reveal the malleable nature of the concept of academic freedom, but they also show how central that concept was to the legitimacy of, even the identity of, the academic enterprise. In the following chapters, as I trace the development of academic freedom over the years, I will also be looking at how the challenges to that freedom evolved. But first, it is important to understand exactly what academic freedom is — and is not.
Like pornography, we know, or think we know, academic freedom (or the lack of it) when we see it. In its traditional formulation, it is, above all, a special protection for the faculty that shields professors from losing their jobs if they take politically unpopular positions in their writings, classes, and on- or off-campus activities. And so it is. But academic freedom is also a professional perquisite (not always secured by the First Amendment and the courts) that gives college teachers the autonomy they need to fulfill their professional responsibilities. Buttressed by the institution of tenure and the practices of peer review and faculty governance, it ensures that the academy's scholarship and teaching maintain the quality and level of innovation that have made the American system of higher education the envy of the world.
Unfortunately, one person's pornography may be another's high art. And so it is with academic freedom. Characterized in the important recent study by Matthew Finkin and Robert Post as "a warm and vaguely fuzzy privilege," the concept, so seemingly simple to define, is actually a complex set of beliefs, traditions, procedures, and legal rulings that govern many of the relationships between faculties and their employing institutions, the government, students, and the broader public. Our academic forebears may have set us up for today's confusion by labeling that package "academic freedom" rather than something less resounding but more concrete such as "traditional academic privileges and responsibilities" or "code of academic practices." Certainly, free expression is part of the mix. But to treat academic freedom as only, or even primarily, a form of free speech and a subset of the First Amendment is to view it in much too narrow and legalistic a perspective. Over the years, the concept has expanded to cover almost everything that happens on campus, but at its core it is a faculty perquisite, pertaining to the practices and ideas that define the academic profession and govern the work life of college and university teachers.
Perhaps some of the problem comes from the fact that the earliest formulations of the concept came from abroad. The first generation of American scholars, the men who established the modern research university at the end of the nineteenth century, got their professional training in Germany, where a bifurcated notion of academic freedom held sway. One part, Lernfreiheit or "freedom to learn," had to do with the freedom that German students then enjoyed to shape their education according to their own desires while swinging from one institution to another, drinking beer, dueling, and attending classes when so inclined. The other half, Lehrfreiheit or "freedom to teach," belonged to professors and not only gave them autonomy within their classrooms but also barred external controls on their research. Faculty governance reinforced this professional independence. German academics ran their universities, making all the personnel decisions and electing deans and other administrators from among their number. That autonomy, so it was claimed, was necessary if scholars were to engage in the unfettered pursuit of knowledge that was central to the mission of the German university. At the same time, their freedom from outside control set these academics apart from (and above) their fellow citizens in the rigidly stratified society of nineteenthcentury Germany.
Yet for all their freedom and authority within the university, German professors were quite constrained outside of it. The German university system, unlike the American one, was an arm of the state. Academics were civil servants and were thus expected to support the government. They could be — and were — fired for backing opposition parties. And while their colleagues did protest against such dismissals, they did so because the officials who carried them out were infringing on the faculty's collective prerogatives, not because they were upset about the violations of their colleagues' individual rights. In fact, most professors actually endorsed the restrictions on their own off-campus activities; abandoning their supposed political neutrality would, they felt, interfere with their scholarship and pollute their higher calling.
Despite the limited scope of its Lehrfreiheit, the prestige of the German professoriate in the late nineteenth century was so high that the faculty members who staffed the first generation of American research universities consciously sought to emulate it. In particular, they sought to incorporate the concept of academic freedom directly into their institutions, believing, as one later historian put it, "that academic freedom, like academic searching, defined the true university." The model they thought they were importing — that of a self-governing faculty that brooked no external interference with its core functions of teaching and research — was to become one of the distinctive characteristics of the American professoriate, developing in tandem with the growth of the modern American university.
In actuality, as the academic profession evolved, it embraced a wide variety of practices, of which the Germanic notion of academic freedom was only one. Its most significant characteristic was the codification of its own identity. This process, which we have come to call professionalization, was not unique to the nation's college and university teachers. As American society became increasingly complex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, other fields of endeavor — medicine, law, and engineering, for example — also developed rules of professional behavior, designed in large part to maintain their members' privileged status. Whatever the occupation, the same or similar systems and procedures came to characterize its practitioners' emerging identity as professionals. They exercised considerable autonomy within their workplaces; they controlled access to their ranks by means of some kind of specialized educational requirement or examination; and they built institutions such as bar associations, medical licensing boards, and scholarly organizations to serve as gatekeepers and regulators. Finally, they justified these measures in terms of service. Professionals had a higher calling than other workers; their activities benefited the common good of the entire society. As a result, they had to be free from meddling by outsiders who did not share their special knowledge and commitment.
Universities were central to the process, both as a source of the professions' necessary credentialing and as the institutional home of the newly organized academic profession. As it developed and became increasingly professionalized, the professoriate created its own instruments of self-regulation — the PhD, academic disciplines and departments, and scholarly presses and publications. Gluing all these diverse activities and institutions together ideologically was the code of practices and beliefs that would come to be known as academic freedom.
Autonomy was the crucial element here. Academic freedom, if it was to guarantee the respect and professional status that late nineteenth-century college and university teachers coveted, required that faculty members control the main conditions of their work. Yet that autonomy was — and still is — hard to come by. After all, unlike their fellow professionals in the fields of law or medicine, college teachers are not independent operators who can open up a private practice once they gain acceptance by their peers. They are employees, working within institutions officially governed by lay boards of trustees and subject to the authority of university administrators. As a result, faculties, if they were to retain their distinctive status as professionals, had to develop mechanisms that would keep those outsiders from interfering with what they taught and wrote and whom they hired.
The first generation of professionalized American academics recognized the anomalies of their situation. In their 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, the founders of the American Association of University Professors strove to codify the distinctive position of college and university teachers, who were, the declaration explained, "appointees, but not in any proper sense the employees" of the people who hired them. Thus, just as judges maintained their independence from the executive officials who appointed them, so too, professors were to be free from external interference. Legally, they might be subject to the authority of trustees and administrators, but if universities were to perform their modern function of creating and disseminating knowledge, and to perform it in accordance with the common good, then faculty members whose work was central to the universities' mission had to exercise almost complete autonomy within the educational sphere. In that sense, therefore, academic freedom was above all a matter of professionalism, a tool that American college and university teachers could use to control their own terms of employment.
That it was (and still is) also a struggle for free expression stems from the nature of academic work, which, as the intellectual degeneration of the universities under the Nazi and Soviet regimes reveals, cannot be performed adequately under conditions of duress. The teaching and research that academics carry out must be free from outside interference. Scholars and scientists cannot merely follow orders. New knowledge can be produced only through the unfettered interplay of these people's trained minds with the data they collect in their libraries and laboratories. Similarly, as teachers, faculty members can only develop their students' powers of rational and independent thought if they are themselves autonomous within their classrooms. There is nothing controversial about this vision of academic freedom; we hear it every May and June in the nation's commencement addresses — an edifying truism no less accurate for being dull.
What this noble and often empty language does not, however, convey is the bifurcated reality of the struggle for academic freedom; it is both a high-minded campaign for free expression as well as a more self-interested one for professional status and respectability. That the latter campaign is almost always swathed in the rhetoric of the former should not surprise us. Because of their indeterminate position as both employees and independent professionals, academics have often been peculiarly sensitive about their own status. After all, in a society where money counts, they are not rich. Isolated in large part from the rest of the middle class by their cultivated lifestyle, they withdraw into what was, at least until a few decades ago, a decorous and inbred collegial world where prestige is the main commodity and no one wants to rock the boat. At the same time — and this, too, matters — their professed concern for and genuine need for intellectual autonomy is real. Thus, we should not let the less sympathetic aspects of the struggle for academic freedom detract from its legitimacy. After all, intellectual freedom does not exist within a vacuum; it operates through its academic constituents. As a result, whatever strengthens the power and autonomy of the academic profession also protects the broader freedom of inquiry and expression that the rest of society allegedly prizes and actually needs. That there may also be some collateral damage in the form of professorial deadwood is the not too hefty price that academic freedom exacts.
Of course, the freedom and autonomy American faculties enjoy are far from unlimited. As the AAUP's founders recognized, the academic profession had to act responsibly. It had to establish and enforce its own regulations if it was to keep trustees and politicians from dictating syllabi or firing instructors. Those regulations were rather straightforward. According to the 1915 declaration, faculty members had to present the conclusions of their research as "the fruits of competent and patient and sincere inquiry ... set forth with dignity, courtesy, and temperateness of language." Similarly, as teachers, they must not take "unfair advantage of" their students "by indoctrinating" them with their own opinions, but instead must "train them to think for themselves." Finally, in their off-campus activities, professors had the "peculiar obligation to avoid hasty or unverified or exaggerated statements, and to refrain from intemperate or sensational modes of expression." Fulfilling these obligations not only would ensure the quality of the academic community's research and teaching by establishing standards that the whole community could accept but also would keep outsiders at bay. In other words, academia had to police itself. "If this profession," the AAUP's founding document explained,
SHOULD PROVE ITSELF UNWILLING TO PURGE ITS RANKS OF THE INCOMPETENT AND THE UNWORTHY, OR TO PREVENT THE FREEDOM WHICH IT CLAIMS IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE FROM BEING USED AS A SHELTER FOR INEFFICIENCY, FOR SUPERFICIALITY, OR FOR UNCRITICAL AND INTEMPERATE PARTISANSHIP, IT IS CERTAIN THAT THE TASK WILL BE PERFORMED BY others.
And those "others" will almost certainly "lack full competency" to judge "when departures from the requirements of the scientific spirit and method have occurred," not to mention that they may also be motivated by something other "than zeal for the integrity of science." Above all — and here the language of the 1915 declaration is particularly revealing — "it is ... unsuitable to the dignity of a great profession that the initial responsibility for the maintenance of its professional standards should not be in the hands of its own members."
Creating the mechanisms to develop and enforce those professional standards has been complicated by the multiple loyalties of faculty members — to the colleges and universities that employ them, to their disciplines, and finally to the academic profession as a whole. Tradition has allocated the chief institutional responsibility in the latter sphere to the AAUP, with the result that many schools and associations within each discipline have borrowed freely from the analyses, policies, and recommended procedures that the association has developed in its nearly one hundred years of existence. Particularly ubiquitous in this regard is the AAUP's 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, a short document that not only summarizes the way in which academic freedom protects college and university teachers in their research, classrooms, and extramural utterances but also contains guidelines for granting and protecting tenure. More than two hundred scholarly and professional associations have officially endorsed this statement, while many colleges and universities have incorporated its language into their own faculty handbooks and union contracts.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Lost Soul Of Higher Education"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Ellen Schrecker.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction "Official Duties": Juan Hong and the Crisis of the University,
Chapter 1 "So Fragile and So Indispensable": What Is Academic Freedom and Why Should We Care About It?,
Chapter 2 Academic Freedom Under Attack: Subversives, Squeaky Wheels, and "Special Obligations",
Chapter 3 "Part of the Struggle": Faculties Confront the 1960s,
Chapter 4 "A Long-Range and Difficult Project": The Backlash Against the 1960s,
Chapter 5 "Patterns of Misconduct": Ward Churchill and Academic Freedom After 9/11,
Chapter 6 "Tough Choices": The Changing Structure of Higher Education,
Chapter 7 "Under Our Noses": Restructuring the Academic Profession,
Epilogue "Everything Is on the Table": The Academy's Response to the Great Recession,
Notes,
Index,