Academic freedom
The Statement of Academic Freedom:
We, the undersigned, believe the following two principles to be the foundation of academic freedom: that academics, both inside and outside the classroom, have unrestricted liberty to question and test received wisdom and to put forward controversial and unpopular opinions, whether or not these are deemed offensive, and that academic institutions have no right to curb the exercise of this freedom by members of their staff, or to use it as grounds for disciplinary action or dismissal.
But..what does it actually mean in practice to have unrestricted liberty to question and test received wisdom? If your job is to teach beginning biology or geology or geography or history, do you have unrestricted liberty to question and test received wisdom by teaching stark falsehoods? Do you have unrestricted liberty to spend all your teaching time systematically teaching misinformation? If not, what in the statement makes that clear?
I’m not asking that to be provocative; I really don’t know; I don’t see anything in the statement that would distinguish between controversial opinion on the one hand, and plain charlatanry or even plainer lying or pure error and incompetence on the other. What if someone becomes convinced that Einstein’s wife helped him with his work and teaches her students that (in Women’s Studies or History or Sociology of Science and Knowledge or Broadcast Media)? What are academic institutions supposed to do about falsehood and/or error?
I had an immediate (slightly irking)reaction myself. While I wellcome academic courage and support the challenge of conventional knowledge ( That’s in fact at the very heart of scientific inquiry, isn’t it?) I miss some thoughts or statement on how to avoid the bullshit.
As it stands, the Statement of Academic Freedom could really be the base for e.g. a new post-modern programme, couldn’t it?
Wasn’t it Popper who phrased something sensible about new theories and the concurrent need for rigor in proofs?
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
The preamble states:
“Restrictive legislation, and the bureaucratic rules and regulations of government quangos and of universities themselves, have undermined academic freedom.”
I would like to see some examples here, although the following para might answer that questioon in part – the ‘examples’ simply aren’t being written.
“Many academics are fearful of upsetting managers and politicians by expressing controversial opinions. Afraid to challenge mainstream thought, many pursue self-censorship.”
It’s a stark message. Alarmist almost. I would expect to see this in relation to China, not the UK.
That said – check out its ‘author’
http://www.battleofideas.co.uk/C2B/document_tree/ViewADocument.asp?ID=67&CatID=75
He wrote “The McDonaldization of Higher Education” Greenwood Press 2002
Doesn’t appear too nutso. (He did get a contribution from Furedi though, which means no cigar.)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0897898567/instituteofid-21
I’m very confused about this – I wasn’t aware that there were ‘hate speech’ rules and similar impositions at UK universities. Apart from an understandable nervousness abou the effect on their career prospects, what stops academics speaking out at present?
i> Do you have unrestricted liberty to spend all your teaching time systematically teaching misinformation? If not, what in the statement makes that clear?
It is not so much what academics teach during teaching hours as what they say outside of teaching hours that is the hot potato. The AFAF statement refers to “controversial and unpopular opinions” expressed “both inside and outside the classroom”. Outside – there’s the rub. Everybody expects academics to abide by academic standards when teaching their students. But what if a maths professor believes (say) that black people are intellectually inferior and repeatedly expresses these views in the mass media? He might be sacked on grounds of ‘gross misconduct’ – e.g. behaviour which is deemed offensive to the employer’s clients or adversely affects the employer’s reputation and is thus detrimental to the employer’s interests – not because his beliefs detract from his teaching of the prime number theorem.
AFAIK under UK law as it stands the employer does not even have to examine the truth or falsehood of the employee’s beliefs, since the expression of a true belief can be offensive and ‘bad for business’ while the expression of a false belief can be flattering and beneficial (‘good publicity’). Outside the classroom, truth is not even the issue. Of course there is no obligation on university employers to avail of the legal remedies available to them but unless UK employment law is changed there is no way of preventing them from doing so.
The term ‘academic freedom’ is really a misnomer. What is at issue is ‘freedom of academics’, which is a different matter.
Does anyone else recall the case of the “scientific racist” (and fervent believer in IQ tests,pro-Freudian,etc) Chris Brand vs. Edinburgh University back in 1996?
I was working for the Uni at the time, so it was of particular interest…what they did him for, eventually, was that he used Uni computing resources to promote his personal views that older men shagging 12-year old boys was fine if both parties were of above average intellect, amongst other things.
Some comentary (pro & anti) here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/marek.kohn/malik.html
Uni statement on academic freedom,etc here:
http://www.cpa.ed.ac.uk/pressarchive/brand-03.html
Disciplinary details here:
http://www.cpa.ed.ac.uk/pressarchive/cb-hod.html
More uni details here:
http://www.cpa.ed.ac.uk/pressarchive/10.1997-cb.html
And an ever-so-slightly-biased defence by some people who describe themselves as “National Liberals”…yersss..
http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/
Hope some of that proves remotely interesting!
Andy, you’ll find full details of the Chris Brand case on this page of the ‘crispian’ website you referred to.
[http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/McDNLArch3b.htm]
In my opinion Brand’s sacking (primarily on grounds of ‘offending’ feminists and blacks both inside and outside the classroom, not because of his controversial views as expressed in scientific publications) was deplorable but unless the UK Education Act 1988 is changed there is no way of preventing repeat performances. And if state-funded universities can’t be legally obliged to tolerate provocative gadflies like Brand we might as well throw in the towel. What’s next? ‘Offending’ Muslims or Roman Catholics or creationists?
And yes, yes – there’s always a limit, even to the right to offend. If only one could discover exactly where that limit lies in some ‘objective’ sense.
But since the free speech issue is a normative and not an empirical one, that limit will never be found.
Surely the principle has to be that as long as the academic work is not affected in any way and that no law is broken by related extra-curricular activity then an academic should be untouchable?
“The AFAF statement refers to “controversial and unpopular opinions” expressed “both inside and outside the classroom”. Outside – there’s the rub. Everybody expects academics to abide by academic standards when teaching their students. But what if a maths professor believes (say) that black people are intellectually inferior and repeatedly expresses these views in the mass media?”
But this precisely misses the point of what I’m saying – or perhaps denies it. Does everyone expect academics to abide by academic standards when teaching their students? And more to the point, does the statement include or acknowledge or leave room for that expectation? The point about the freedom of academics to chat about their opinions in public is familiar enough, but it’s not the only possible point that can be made. It doesn’t cover for instance McIntosh if he does in fact teach his students that evolution is incompatible with the 2d law of thermodynamics. I think that’s what Dawkins was saying in his letter to the Guardian, and this statement really doesn’t confront that issue, as far as I can see. So no – outside there is not the rub, because everyone is already well aware of that issue; inside is the issue that I’m trying to flag up.
“Surely the principle has to be that as long as the academic work is not affected in any way…an academic should be untouchable?”
Yes, but the statement doesn’t make that stipulation. That’s why I think it could have been worded better.
The high school history teacher in New Jersey who wasted time in his advanced class on – of all things – Constitutional history, by droning about his born-again religious views, is another example. Does he have an academic freedom right to do that? I would say absolutely not, but the statement on academic freedom doesn’t offer any grounds for that response – at least not that I can see.
Cathal,
you might just have to “trust me” on this one (hah!), but the inside line in the Uni was that all they could really hit him with was the misuse/abuse of Uni computers, primarily to promote his personal ‘paedophilia ain’t so bad’ standpoint. He’d been told he couldn’t use Uni resources for his private enterprises, but continued to do so…
(although I can think of umpteen members of staff who used Uni pc’s to host their personal websites, do highly dodgy websurfing,etc,etc [people really should learn to clean out their cookies folders when using shared equipment] and regularly left them on all night at the Uni’s expense…and none of them ever got any hassle.)
And that “crispian” website is more one-eyed than Arsene Wenger on a bad day!
:-)
Sorry to go off on a tangent, but the link to the Institute of Ideas website provided by Nick S. led me to this:
http://www.battleofideas.co.uk/C2B/document_tree/ViewACategory.asp?CategoryID=150
Battle of Ideas 2006 essay: ‘Let Battle Commence…’
Opening salvo from Dolan Cummings, editorial and research director of the Institute of Ideas:
“We never believed that the narrowing of party political differences reflected popular contentment with the status quo.
Oooh! What a brave assertion, straight from the hip. That’ll shake up all those people out there thinking that the narrowing of party political differences was an indication of popular contentment. I mean, all the time one notices people yawning and saying how they really, really like the current state of affairs in the UK.
p.s Well, DUR by me.
That crispian website is Brand’s personal webspace…
Amazing what a quick bit of double-checking can do.
It’s also most impressive how such a clearly intelligent (if mistaken – I mean, FREUD?? arrghh) bloke can be quite so specific when he talks about differences between human “races” – indeed, one might ask Cathal exactly what he means when he uses the term “black”, and whether he understands just how useless such a catch-all skin-colour-based category is?
If ye liketh genetics (or even if you don’t, it’s a good mental workout..urgghh), try this:
http://www.goodrumj.com/RFaqHTML.html
Excellent discussion of definitions of ‘race’, ‘subspecies’, etc…
one might ask Cathal exactly what he means when he uses the term “black” ..
I mean people most of whose ancestors hail from Africa — just as by ‘white’ I mean people most of whose ancestors hail from Europe.
It’s not a question of ‘essentialising’ different population groups — just one of recognising the realities of human biodiversity.
BTW if perhaps you feel the term ‘race’ smacks too much of the Third Reich, you can always replace it by ‘cline’ or some term that highlights the existence of a biological continuum.
Allen, thanks for the off-topic reference to ‘The Battle for Ideas – Let Battle Commence …”
There is something a little ‘Chauncey Gardener’ about Dolan Cummings’s essay (“there was and is potential for much more imagination” … “There is no time like the present to start shaping the future” … “we humans make our own history”, etc.). But above all the organisers are far too optimistic about the intellectual capacity of the general public and too unwilling to acknowledge the sheer force of human stupidity, ignorance and gullibility.
As to the question “Do Ideas Matter?” My answer: “Yes, but not half as much as the price of petrol.” [to most people, at any rate].
>As to the question “Do Ideas Matter?” My answer: “Yes, but not half as much as the price of petrol.” [to most people, at any rate].< And not one tenth as much as how United fared today.
Cathal says:
“I mean people most of whose ancestors hail from Africa”
So if the proportion is 51-49, then they’re “black”?
I see.
I thought the “industry-standard” definition of a subspecies went something like this:
“members of a subspecies would share a unique, geographic locale, a set of phylogenetically concordant phenotypic characters, and a unique natural history relative to other subdivisions of the species. Although subspecies are not reproductively isolated, they will normally be allopatric and exhibit recognizable phylogenetic partitioning….evidence for phylogenetic distinction must normally come from the concordant distributions of multiple, independent genetically based traits.”
Subtle difference from yours. Subtle, but I’d argue it was there, hidden away in the fine print.
And I love the way you dragged the nazis in – especially how you imply that I might be considering them! Nice try with the old assumptions there! :-)
It’s pretty obvious to anyone who claims to follow empiricism that there are assorted human subspecies – but as the conclusion from the reference I offered says:
“So if we do belong to different biological races, what, if anything, does this mean? Subspecies are closely related by definition, and human races appear to be less genetically distant than the major phylogroups of many other species. While FST values for neutral variation are by no means negligible from a population genetics point of view, it’s significant that the overwhelming majority of genetic variation is found within populations, reaffirming the importance of treating people as individuals. It’s also significant that the FST value for the most prominent racial trait – skin color – has been estimated to be about 0.60, which means that the visible variation between races greatly exaggerates overall genetic differences. Admixture in some populations further clouds the picture. The average European contribution to the gene pool of American blacks has been found to be about 20%, and admixture between the major races in some other regions is substantially higher.”
But that just doesn’t make for such snappy rhetoric, does it?
:-)
And I love the way you dragged the nazis in – especially how you imply that I might be considering them!
Bullshit, Andy, I thought you were possibly implying ME.
I’m not going to enter into a technical debate about the definition of human races and subspecies here — suffice it to say that experts differ and that I don’t consider the topic important enough for me to invest a lot of time in investigating it and certainly not in debates in which the argumentum ad Hitlerum inevitably turns up pretty early on (my fault on this occasion, I must confess).
I wasn’t aiming at “snappy rhetoric” BTW — I was just blogging, not writing a dissertation.
Thanks for your citations, though — top-rate food for thought. Enjoy the New Year.