Academic Freedom Under Fire

By John K. Wilson (collegefreedom@yahoo.com)

Academic freedom in America is always under threat, and in the past year too many colleges gave in to the temptation to censor. The “war on terror” provide justification for many of the worst infringements of academic freedom, but beneath the veneer of “patriotic correctness” a deeper assault on academic values was accelerating: the corporatization of higher education. During a time of budget cuts at campuses across the country, whether caused by state deficits or stock market woes, academic freedom sometimes is sacrificed for the bottom line.

The corporate influence on academia is often direct, via corporate sponsorships of athletic programs, buildings, pro-business departments, and scientific research. But the corporate model is equally damaging, imposing a cult of efficiency and authoritarianism upon the collegial ideal of higher education. According to the corporate model profit-making trumps liberty, and appeasing the most powerful economic interests is the duty of every administrator. Following corporate America’s embrace of temp workers, today 43% of college faculty are adjuncts or part-timers, more than double the level two decades ago. Under the corporate model, liberal education is secondary to money-making training.

Academic freedom is endangered by the corporate model because higher education’s values of openness are sacrificed to the popular will, its protections for liberty are eliminated in the quest to duplicate the authoritarian CEO model, and its protection of dissent is dismissed as a threat to the economic survival of the institution. Fighting for academic freedom, and against the corporate domination of higher education, requires an understanding of the principles upon which colleges are founded: the expansion of knowledge, and the teaching of this knowledge through the widest possible freedom of thought and expression.

Back to 2002-03 State of Academic Freedom Report

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