Ivory tower or holy mountain? Faith and academic freedom

Academe, Jan/Feb 2001 by Wolterstorff, Nicholas

Academic freedom, like free speech always comes with strings attached.

IS IT WRONG FOR A COLLEGE OR UNIVERSITY TO attach religious qualifications to the academic freedom of its faculty? Before I answer that question, let me explain what I take academic freedom to be. Perhaps it's easiest to see what it is by considering what constitutes an infringement on it. Infringing on a professor's academic freedom consists of impairing, or threatening to impair, her academic position or standing in some way or the other: firing her or threatening to fire her, refusing to promote her or threatening to refuse to promote her, preventing her from serving on important committees or threatening to prevent her from so serving, rejecting her candidacy for some post or threatening to reject it, and so forth.'

But of course many such impairments or threats do not constitute infringements on academic freedom. What has to be added is something about the grounds for the actual or threatened impairment. Infringement of academic freedom typically happens when the actual or threatened impairment occurs on account of the person's position on some issue, or on account of her publicizing her position. The issue may or may not be within the person's academic field; it's all too usual for the threat to be issued on account of the person's position on some political or religious issue.

The fact that the academy has to make judgments of competence requires that we say more than just that, however. For an infringement of academic freedom to occur, the impairment of the person's academic standing has to be based on some other aspect of the positions he holds than their scholarly competence or incompetence. It has to be based on what I shall call the ideological content of his position. If the university refuses to promote some young professor because of the scholarly incompetence of the positions he holds, although it would be impairing his academic standing on account of certain of his positions, such impairment would not constitute infringement on the person's academic freedom.

The distinction between disapproving of the ideological content of what a person says and judging it incompetent is, of course, fraught with difficulty in application. Not that the distinction can never be confidently drawn; certainly it can be. Nonetheless, those who talk as if the several academic guilds-the guild of historians, the guild of philosophers, and so on-have arrived at ideologically neutral criteria of competence, and as if it's easy to distinguish the employment of these from ideological discrimination, seem to me to be living in fantasyland.

Let me now join together the two components of what it is to infringe on a person's academic freedom to which I have called attention: to infringe on a person's academic freedom is to impair or threaten to impair that person's position or standing in the academy on account of the ideological content of the position she holds or publicizes on some issue.

Qualified Freedom

In practice, the right to academic freedom is no more absolute than the civil liberty of free speech. The formulation concerning free speech in the U.S. Bill of Rights is absolute, but if one looks at the law that emerges from judicial decisions having to do with free speech, it's clear that free speech is a qualified liberty. judges address the facts of the cases before them, and the law emerges from their decisions.

The same sort of thing is true for academic freedom; it's no more absolute than is the civil liberty of free speech. The guideline for the practice of the academy is not the stark formulation I offered above, but that formulation as duly qualified.

When a court declares that it is acceptable for the government to impose some restriction on a person's speech, is the court saying that it's acceptable for the government to infringe on free speech? That falls strange on the ear; the connotation of infringe suggests that infringing on someone's right is a bad thing to do. Better to say that the court's decisions function to qualify a freedom. I shall speak of academic freedom in the same way. Although it's never a good thing to infringe on academic freedom, every educational institution does and should attach qualifications to that freedom. The issue will always be which qualifications are appropriate.

Eight Considerations

In considering academic freedom in religiously based institutions, I can think of eight considerations that seem necessary or useful to bear in mind. Some of these considerations relate to the social setting in which we deal with the issue of academic freedom; others are matters of semiphilosophical background.

Modern Society

In the first place, questions of academic freedom arise for us within the context of a modernized society that recognizes distinct spheres of social and cultural life. Some of my readers will understand that I am alluding to Max Weber's theory of modernization; because I cannot assume that all are familiar with the theory, let me say just a word about it.