Chair Talk 4.4 - Academic Freedom and Open Inquiry

Chair Talk 4.4     Academic Freedom and Open Inquiry

In the good old days, the academy was under attack mostly on budgetary grounds.  This Chair Talk is focused on some serious current challenges to institutions of higher education that are not about money.  It will address two very different kinds of challenges the academy is facing today: (1) who has the right to a podium at the UA; and (2) who gets to determine what gets said at that podium. As it happens, the first question brings up mostly freedom of speech issues, as codified in the First Amendment.  And the second issue focuses more on academic freedom issues, which go beyond the First in some ways, and fall short of it in others. 

First, let us consider the issue of who has the right to give a public speech at the UA.  We all know that there have been ‘preachers’ on the mall over the years saying some quite awful things, but the UA did not, and could not, shut them off completely.  We did our best to confine them. Given the constitutional framing of freedom of speech, the default position should be that anyone can speak.  Exclusions should be accepted only under very strict conditions – when there is the possibility of inciting violence or other illegal acts.  Public safety issues come into play here, and tough decisions have to be made that can sometimes appear to restrict freedom of speech.  Let’s hope we don’t experience this scenario at the UA too often, but when we do I hope our default remains being as open as we can possibly be.  The way to express one’s disapproval, in my view, is to show up and show it - in all manner of ways short of shutting a speaker down.

Second, consider the case of a scholar who comes to the UA to give a scholarly presentation.  Again, in my view, the best way to respond if you really don’t like that scholar’s position and find it morally reprehensible, is to show up at the talk and ask the toughest questions you can.  Our commitment has to be to the truth, reached through the rigorous scholarship our fields demand.  

We are an evidence-based community and if we largely hold the so-called “liberal” views we are claimed to hold (e.g., that evolution exists; that climate change exists; that society and culture matter; that diversity is adaptive in both biological and social contexts; that knocking your head against the wall, or any other hard thing, hundreds of times a year, is bad for your brain) it is because the best evidence supports these positions. But things can be less clear in the social sciences, where serious debates continue to swirl around fundamental questions such as how best to provide the equality of opportunity that many of us consider so important. In these domains, I would hope, we are all willing to listen to arguments on various sides of a contentious, perhaps politically fraught, issue – for example what is and is not a public good.  Academic freedom defends all manner of ideas, but there are disciplinary constraints on what counts as an acceptable idea.  For example, one cannot really offer creationism as an idea explaining the vast diversity of life on the planet, and the majestic variety of the physical environment. It is an unacceptable idea that has been rejected by the overwhelming majority of scientists in the relevant disciplines.  

Academic freedom protects the geology teacher who insists that the earth is billions of years old, because that’s what the evidence says must be the case.  While freedom of speech enables anyone to go out on the mall and tell a creationist story, academic freedom enables the professor to shut down a disruptive student who insists on telling that story in class – using up limited lecture time with ideas that the evidence shows are wrong, and thereby depriving the rest of the students of time to hear real facts about the world.  Academic freedom also allows a properly-credentialed academic to argue that education is not a public good and that no public money should be spent on education.  As an academic with an opposing view, however, I want to hear this argument, I want to see the data, or the logic used to get there.  

There are many such debates, important questions to society, that are well worth having, and to have them we must as a community be open to hearing from all sides of the scholarly landscape.  Again, noting that we don’t need to listen to palpably false prophets.

The second issue for us to consider is the struggle over freedom of inquiry, which includes the ability to teach what one wants to teach, assuming it fits within disciplinary norms and the curriculum in your program.  The details of courses, program requirements, etc., are completely in the hands of the faculty, the experts whose training prepares them for this role. A new kind of threat has emerged around this role, the harassment of faculty, aimed at silencing them, and hence the content they are trying to teach.  Social media often play a role in this.

Consider the following example: a student records a Professor’s comments, and passes on, typically out-of-context, damaging snippets to either the social media world, the local press, their favorite politician, or the Regents and relevant university President.  Consider another example: a faculty member who teaches certain content is subjected to threatening emails, or aggressive social media invasion, all the way from mild threats to conceivably life-threatening ones.  What do we do in such situations?  Together, with our sister campuses in Arizona we are grappling with how to handle this.  A first step is to try to understand the scope and character of the threats.  Perhaps there are only a few such cases.  So, please let me know if anything of this sort has happened to you.  You can send to my university address, but if you’d rather, you can send to my gmail address (nadellynn@gmail.com) from your non-UA address.  Even relatively mild examples are worth hearing about, so please let me know.

These extreme examples, and others of a less extreme but still consequential nature, are direct threats to academic freedom – such freedom doesn’t exist if we live in physical fear just for expressing ideas that are sanctioned by the academic disciplines we were trained to represent.  I am confident that our new President will do what it takes to protect our right to inquire where we wish, and to nurture a thirst for free and open inquiry in our students.  This is what we owe them, and what we are committed to delivering, as we strive to shape our students into an engaged and informed populace.

I look forward to hearing from faculty colleagues about these challenges.  Our responsibility to both our institution, and the students it serves, demands that we stand firm in supporting free speech, academic freedom, and the freedom of inquiry that are essential in preparing our students for the future.