1. Academic freedom is not the same as free speech
Think of the most outrageous or the even most brave thing you’ve heard someone utter in the United States. It’s likely protected! Think of the most offensive thing you’ve heard someone utter in the United States. It’s likely protected, too!
Even hate speech, though repugnant, is protected, a fact that often blows people’s minds. Just because it’s protected doesn’t mean hate speech is without consequence. Chief Justice Louise Brandeis defined the notion of counterspeech in 1927 in Whitney v. California, laying the groundwork for many of the protections of speech that we enjoy today. He argued that free speech should be followed by more free speech. People will suffer the sting of public opinion for offensive displays of free speech, and others will promptly follow with their own free speech condemning the first. In protecting the speech of both groups, to our great benefit, is the freedom of expression protected. And if you’re feeling crummy about someone’s use of their free speech, know that free speech is not supposed to be comfortable! Frederick Lawrence, President of Phi Beta Kappa, argues for broad application of free speech on college campuses, seeing campuses as unique spaces in which students can try out their ideas without excessive penalty. With any luck, they are challenged to hone their ideas through the practices of critical thinking and through engagement with others who challenge their ideas.
Sue Doe teaches courses in composition, research methods, and graduate teaching preparation while researching academic labor, writing-engaged curriculum, and student learning needs. A published scholar and coeditor of Generation Vet, she previously chaired Faculty Council and now serves as Executive Director of TILT, focusing on leadership, writing instruction, and faculty empowerment.
2. Academic freedom exists uniquely in higher education as a condition of employment and is assured through due process
Academic freedom, unlike free speech, is the exercise of professional judgment in classrooms and in scholarship and research. It assures that professional ideas are protected. Yet they are also limited by the standards and expertise of disciplinary communities themselves. Academic freedom is managed and maintained by the faculty and is a form of quality control that is assured by certain employment arrangements, including due process for all who teach and tenure for those faculty who have it. (See Section K of the Faculty and Administrative Professional Manual for CSU’s policies on due process and grievance. See Sections E.10 on Faculty Tenure. and E.11 on Appeals for Early Termination of Contract Faculty.)
Academic freedom works from an assumption that faculty who practice teaching and research in higher education possess sufficient expertise that the ideas they espouse will withstand the scrutiny of peers. Through annual review and promotion, faculty get the message about whether they are engaged successfully in that work or not.
Yet academic freedom ought not be confused with some sort of “knowledge hygiene” or a preference for neutral ideas! Ideas are fundamentally messy, or as theorist (and Chair of English at CSU) Julia Schreck describes them, dirty. That is to say that ideas are tied up in values, not devoid of them, and it is a fool’s errand to seek neutrality as a goal of higher education. Even a laboratory that seeks a sanitary environment, unpolluted by the incursion of bacteria, deals in questions and discoveries that are messy, difficult, and dirty, rather than sanitized or universally unobjectionable to all.
Scholarship and teaching are conducted to improve on ideas and practices, which means that the academic enterprise exists to challenge the status quo. Teaching in higher education involves a critical look at the values that propel us, not an avoidance of them. Here again we invite students to engage in Brandeis’s counterargument with the goal of developing the strategies they need for researching, evaluating, and expressing new ideas, perhaps even or especially ones that differ from their own. We can model how to do this with students by inviting them to challenge us respectfully so that they see what it means to have one’s ideas challenged without feeling personally violated.
3. We must be really good teachers, which means we must hold things in productive tension
Yes, we need to know our discipline’s research and scholarship, but we also need to have pedagogical nuance that bears in mind our students’ loyalties and levels of readiness. This means that students require our patience and respect as they work through their messy understanding. Difficult ideas and approaches should be scaffolded so that students have opportunity to grow. By extension, we might consider the limited pedagogical usefulness of shaming or alienating students in our dogged determination to show them what we believe is right. Rather, we can invite students’ vocalization of their imperfect ideas, challenge them to examine those ideas even further, and consider what we might learn from them.
A culture of learning can admit to the tentative nature of ideas even as we defend what we know and as we exercise academic freedom. As teachers and researchers, we can convey commitment within uncertainty, modeling what it means to change our minds based on additional information, showing that we cannot be completely neutral, nor are we always right. Holding such productive tension may be the essence of a college education.