The New York Review of Ideas » Reviews | June 2009
Un-forbidden Fruit
For the Common Good, by Matthew W. Fink and Robert C. Post.
By Jessica Kaplan
For the Common Good: Principles
of American Academic Freedom
by Matthew W. Fink, Robert C. Post
Yale University Press
272pp, $27.50
It all started a few thousand years back with a naked couple and an apple. Since then, scholars have been toiling with what knowledge is acceptable to consume and share. In their new book, For the Common Good, Matthew W. Finkin and Robert C. Post provide a context for the current debates regarding what professors can and cannot do, in and out of the classroom.
They begin with the benchmark 1915 Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure drafted by the American Association of University Professors, and the subsequent 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure jointly drafted by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges. These documents establish the expectation that “institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.”
Throughout much of history, this was not the case. That initial demand that “…of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat…,” has persistently haunted free-thinking academics. Until the Middle Ages, professors were used as marionettes delivering only the bits of information that were pre-approved by the church, institutional administrators or private university donors. If they transgressed the regulated boundaries of thought, there were consequences. In 1633 the church persecuted Galileo for touting heliocentrism. In 1915 Wharton’s Board of Trustees condemned a professor whose socialist teachings went against their benefactor’s capitalistic mission. Even now, public opinion continues to censor what universities can do. In 2003, outraged conservative citizens protested the University of North Carolina’s liberal freshman reading assignment–Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
This later type of antagonism has been dominating the academic freedom conversations of the last decade. It’s no secret that the Bush administration elicited powerful reactions from a largely liberal professoriate; those emotions have been funneled into the classroom, much to the chagrin of conservatives and fundamentalists who are painted as the academic-freedom-nemeses of the 21st century. Prior to the Declaration, the debates focused on “whether academic freedom should exist, contemporary controversies assume the desirability of academic freedom and attempt to spell out its implications.” Does academic freedom now imply that that these professors have the right to do whatever they want in their classrooms? Or, are these politicized classrooms merely furthering the personal interests of opinionated professors instead of furthering the common good?
The professoriate may be above the manipulative strings of administrations and politics, thanks to the Declaration. They are not, however, granted the leisure to run buck-wild with the First Amendment:
Academic freedom is not the freedom to speak or to teach just as one wishes. It is the freedom to pursue the scholarly profession, inside and outside the classroom, according to the norms and standards of that profession.
This common understanding clarified by Finkin and Post has been adopted by hundreds of educational institutions around the country. It permits for a relative uniformity in the rights of the American professoriate. Professors are free to research, create and publish new knowledge, as long as they conduct that research according to professional expectations. They are free to teach what they want within the realm of their expertise, as long as they educate their students and don’t indoctrinate them with limited perspectives. And, finally, they are free to speak as citizens regarding matters on and off campus as long as those expressions don’t render them unfit for the classroom. “Free to” and “as long as” being equally significant.
Finkin and Post explain the theoretical justifications of their tenets of academic freedom methodically. They also try to make each freedom relevant; they pull from precedent cases where AAUP’s Committee A clarified discrepancies between professorial leaps and the consequent penalties. They do this most effectively in their chapter on “The Freedom of Teaching”; this is the only aspect of academic freedom that they highlight with contemporary controversy. Modern accusations of teachers misusing their freedom are in regards to the introduction of extraneous “political or ideological commentary into their courses and their failure to maintain neutrality.” All other chapters go so far as to highlight touchstone AAUP cases, but stop short of providing a context for how that freedom fits in with the modern academic atmosphere.
As professors of law (The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Yale, respectively), Finkin and Post are careful to offer caveats regarding material not covered within the 155 pages of text and the 106 pages of periphery resources. However, certain omissions interfere with their ability to make this synthesis of academic freedom fully rounded. For example, it is curious that the deep connection both authors have with AAUP’s Committee A is not made explicit (Finkin was chairman from 1980-1990 and is presently a consultant and Post has been a consultant since 2008).
The defined principals of academic freedom and the pragmatic legalities upheld by AAUP’s Committee A are thoroughly and clearly explained. However, the philosophical motivation for pedagogical liberty is parsed in a less satisfying way. The fuzzy title of “common good” sounds noble, but in a society as complex and diverse as America, its meaning is nebulous. If all academic freedom is meant to serve the common good, then who gets to decide what that good is? ♦