THOUGHTS ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM:
Institutional academic freedom, however, is commonly more limited than personal academic freedom. A professor’s freedom to teach English 101 is limited to what the English department requires in that course. The English department’s freedom to set the curriculum is limited by the minimum graduation requirements for each degree. And the university’s freedom is limited by the legislature’s decisions about what to fund and what not to fund.
Usually, legislators are content to leave universities alone to make their own funding decisions. This forbearance fails, however, when the academy becomes a force of ideological conformity. An egregiously imbalanced faculty can limit the ability of a college to expose students to a wide range of ideas, undermining its core mission. Furthermore, there is evidence that faculty on the left use their majority influence to enforce conformity through hiring and promotion decisions. That influence introduces bias in curriculum, speakers, programs and federal grants, inhibiting the robust academic dialogue that facilitates an apolitical search for truth.
In these cases, where there is viewpoint discrimination against ideas and scholars who are outside the norm, and even more so when that norm is at odds with the norms of the non-university community, there is a democratically justifiable reason for elected officials to intervene. The intervention should not reach to the level of defunding individual professors, but it certainly reaches to the funding of new academic units desired by the funding public.
Such an intervention may even be necessary to preserve the very basis on which academic freedom is justified in the first place: a true marketplace of ideas.
In my opinion, administrators have no claim to academic freedom, but they’re the ones calling the shots in many cases. If they attract the attention of the legislature, that’s their problem.
Plus:
Arizona led the nation in establishing “freedom centers” to promote civic education, leadership, statesmanship and the understanding and appreciation for freedom. The centers are now national models of debate and dialogue. Texas and Tennessee are now also considering or taking action on similar proposals at their flagship universities.
Left-leaning faculty at these institutions resist these programs, claiming that their very existence threatens academic freedom and faculty governance. But a public institution serves the public, and the real principle is not faculty governance but shared governance. Furthermore, the complaining faculty may need to check their privilege as members of the dominant ideology on campus. The lived experience of their colleagues with minority viewpoints may reveal that faculty governance can itself undermine academic freedom.
Just look at the political donation records of the faculty at any state university — including mine — and it looks like an ideological monoculture. If we want universities that “look like America,” maybe they should break down politically like America. Which would be a dramatic, wrenching change for basically all universities. But we’re told that we should embrace dramatic, wrenching, painful change in the name of diversity. So be it.
