Academic freedom used to be about pursing the truth. Is that still the case? Academic freedom is under attack. Do you know where the idea came from? Do you know how it has evolved over the years? The National Association of Scholars has published a chart comparing 14 major statements on academic freedom published since 1915.
From the introduction:
We publish this chart today because America faces a growing crisis about who can say what on our college campuses. At root this is a crisis of authority. In recent decades university administrators, professors, and student activists have quietly excluded more and more voices from the exchange of views on campus. This has taken shape in several ways, not all of which are reducible to violations of “academic freedom.” The narrowing of campus debate by de-selection of conservatives from faculty positions, for example, is not directly a question of academic freedom though it has proven to have dire consequences in various fields where professors have severely limited the range of ideas they present in courses.
This example suggests some of the complications in the concept of academic freedom that were not apparent to the drafters of the 1915 Declaration of Principles. The threats to academic freedom do not always arise from outside the university. Potent threats to academic freedom can arise from the collective will of faculty members themselves.
This is the situation that confronts us today. Decades of progressive orthodoxy in hiring, textbooks, syllabi, student affairs, and public events have created campus cultures where legitimate intellectual debates are stifled and where dissenters, when they do venture forth, are often met with censorious and sometimes violent responses. Student mobs, egged on by professors and administrators, now sometimes riot to prevent such dissent. The idea of “safe spaces” and a new view of academic freedom as a threat to the psychological well-being of disadvantaged minorities have gained astonishing popularity among students.
[David Randall, “Charting Academic Freedom: 103 Years of Debate,” National Association of Scholars, January 2018]
