Introduction

Academic freedom is in a troubled state today, under attack on many fronts. The widely publicized critiques of "political correctness" have drawn considerable attention to the leftist threats to free expression. But the crusade against "PC" has obscured many other hazards to academic freedom in America today which come from right-wing sources. This "conservative correctness" poses a danger which is all too often overlooked.

While it is important to point out the intolerance on the left, a sense of perspective is in order about where the greatest threats to academic freedom come from. Nearly every mainstream newspaper and magazine in America has published an editorial or lead article condemning political correctness. But most of them have been silent about the conservative attack on higher education, or have even praised it as part of the war against PC. The fight in defense of academic freedom must be bipartisan, but unfortunately there have been few principled defenses of academic freedom

While the political correctness "debates" raged, almost no one realized how federal and state governments were drastically cutting student aid and university funding, reducing educational opportunities for disadvantaged Americans. The attack on "PC" has played at least a small role in the ease with which conservatives had pushed through the de-funding of higher education.

In recent years, the most powerful threat to academic freedom has come from a growing movement for greater government control over higher education. During a period of tight budgets, colleges and universities as well as government agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities are being targeted for ideologically-motivated cuts.

The recent attacks on tenure are a disturbing threat to academic freedom, since they would leave faculty vulnerable to dismissal based on their beliefs and deprive them of the security needed to make controversial arguments. But we should never think of academic freedom as something limited to tenured faculty. Academic freedom must also encompass assistant professors seeking tenure, instructors and graduate assistants who have no secure jobs, administrators, and even students. Otherwise, the idea of academic freedom will reduced to mere job security, and not a protection for the freest expression of diverse views in the university.

The core value of academic freedom is not procedural rights. Academic freedom is the protection of intellectual diversity. Academic freedom declares that dissent shall not be punished, whether in the form of public speeches or ideas expressed in a classroom. Neither firing nor reprimands nor bad grades should be imposed upon an individual simply because of their political views. Academic freedom is not something that is earned: one need not prove oneself a genius before being given the freedom to think and speak. Rather, academic freedom is the very foundation of intellectual life at a university.

Academic freedom is an ideal we must pursue constantly, and never quite fully achieve. It is a mistake to believe that academic freedom is fully protected anywhere. There are orthodoxies everywhere: A student who feels silenced in a classroom, a professor who is not hired because colleagues believe her research deals with an unimportant topic, a graduate student told to pursue a less controversial dissertation proposal.

The concept of academic freedom is a minefield of contradictions and dilemmas. The open expression of opposing views inevitably creates conflicts that cannot be fully resolved. A professor who discusses her views in a classroom and challenges what students say may find that some students try to simply parrot her beliefs. But the expression of ideas is an inevitable and essential part of higher education; to urge silence by a professor for the sake of preventing "advocacy" will not stop students from detecting an ideology, and instead will limit the open expression of these views. The best a teacher can do is to encourage dissent whenever possible, make sure that students are rewarded and not punished for disagreeing, and honestly try to achieve an ideal of academic freedom.

The assault on academic freedom comes at a time when many conservative intellectuals reject the very notion of academic freedom or restrict it so narrowly that it ceases to be a meaningful protection of free expression. Gertrude Himmelfarb writes in Commentary (9/95), "Originally intended to protect professors in their scholarly pursuit of truth within the university, while ensuring their political rights as citizens outside the university, the doctrine is now invoked to allow professors to express their political views in the classroom, without regard for either scholarship or truth." But how can professors pursue the truth if they know Himmelfarb and her allies are monitoring their political views? What one professor considers a truth informed by scholarship, Himmelfarb might dismiss because she disagrees politically with it.

What guardians of the academy are going to define what the truth is and how far a professor is allowed to stray from it? Can we trust anyone to define and enforce these proposed ideological limits on free speech in the classroom? It is always tempting to imagine that we are above bias and ideology, and to convince ourselves that we know the final truth. But we must resist the idea that it is possible to restrict the academic freedom of those we dislike without damaging the principle of academic freedom for everyone.