Academic freedom around the world

Academe, Jul/Aug 1999 by Schrecker, Ellen

Academic Freedom Around the World

THEY'RE ABOLISHING TENURE IN GREAT BRITAIN, SCRAPPING THE humanities in China, and shooting professors in Algeria. And we think we've got problems.

When AAUP president Jim Richardson, fresh from a UNESCO meeting in Paris last fall, suggested that Academe look into the state of academic freedom around the world, the project seemed interesting, though hardly earthshaking. We contacted people in a variety of places, asking for brief reports on the situation in their countries. As their often-horrifying submissions began to filter in, we realized that many of our own troubles may well be the local symptoms of a new global epidemic.

Traditional assaults on academic freedom continue, of course. Because universities house critical thinkers and unconventional ideas, they are invariably targeted for political repression. But in conflict-ridden countries like Serbia or Algeria, basic human rights are at issue. Academics in those places not only lose their jobs, but also face the arrests, beatings, and (at least in Algeria) killings that Brazilian and Argentine scholars recently endured. The attacks come from many sources. Religious fundamentalists and radical nationalists, as well as state authorities, harass professors and drive them from their classrooms.

More distressing, however, because less expected, is the rollback of academic freedom in democratic countries. As universities everywhere feel the impact of market forces, professors are being pressed to abandon their traditional openness and conform to the more restrictive practices of corporate life. Outrages like the refusal of an Australian university to support a professor who criticized a local developer are all too reminiscent of those that goaded the AAUP's founders into action at the beginning of this century.

What most threatens the traditional independence of academics, however, is the more subtle damage wreaked by a globalizing economy that has increased the worldwide demand for higher education while drying up the public resources available for it. All our contributors-even those from countries where outright repression still occurs-describe the cutbacks afflicting their universities. They speak of low salaries, outdated equipment, inequitably distributed resources, and the inability of scholars to keep current in their fields. They speak as well of how the competition for scarce resources undermines collegiality and drives standards down. Younger scholars are the most at risk, especially in systems in which patronage and favoritism rule. Certain patterns of thought (often the legacy of previous authoritarian regimes) and certain types of research get rewarded, while others starve, if they are not directly suppressed. The humanities are particularly endangered, as university administrators seek commercial opportunities and shun whatever does not attract paying customers. Vocationalism, Mary Burgan reports, is the order of the day. The bankers and bureaucrats who ran the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference she and Jim Richardson attended expect higher education to promote economic rather than intellectual development.

In a world in which, as Lynn Schoch's account of the financial problems of Asian students at Indiana University reveals, foreign crises touch every campus, academics will have to organize internationally. They will have to create the kind of institutional presence that human-rights attorney Joseph Saunders calls for. UNESCO's adoption of an international charter of faculty rights and responsibilities may well be the first step toward creating a framework within which the organized academic community can act. But, as Donald Savage and Patricia Finn explain, the unexpectedly strong opposition to the statement's provisions on academic freedom underscores how much at risk that freedom may be.