A question of autonomy: The view from Salzburg

Academe, May/Jun 2002 by Snyder, Martin D

For eastern European and former Soviet universities, the quest for academic freedom is complicated. Greater institutional and faculty autonomy has brought more dependence on external funding.

There is an old Arabic expression, "A subtle conversation, ah, that is the Garden of Eden!" By such a definition, the experience of participants in the Salzburg Seminar last February was nothing short of paradisiacal. Part of the seminar's continuing Universities Project (1997-2002), the February conference brought together some fifty faculty members and administrators from seventeen countries. The United States and the former Soviet-bloc countries of eastern and southeastern Europe had the most representatives.

For four days, the participants, basking in the luxury of Schloss Leopoldskron, the seminar's eighteenth-century headquarters, ruminated over the meanings of autonomy in European and American higher education and the implications of those meanings for university governance.1 Given the abstract nature of the seminar theme and the diversity of educational systems involved, it is hardly surprising that the consensus that emerged was of a general nature. Still, the conversations illuminated facets of autonomy well worth the examination.

At first glance, the definition of autonomy seems clear enough. Derived from the Greek words for "self' and "law or customary usage," the word describes the practice of selfgovernment that we consider the right and responsibility of colleges and universities. But the issue is not so simple. As the seminar's cochair, C. Peter Magrath of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, pointed out, autonomy is always relative. What colleges and universities should seek, he suggested, is reasonable, not absolute autonomy. Total autonomy, total independence and separation from society, is simply impossible. The degree of an institution's autonomy varies according the nature of its relationships. Perhaps, then, it is most useful to think of multiple autonomies or degrees of autonomy. Consider some of the relationships that affect an institution's ability to govern itself.

The issue of college or university autonomy inevitably raises the question of the purpose of autonomy and the purpose or purposes of colleges and universities themselves. Institutions of higher learning have always served their societies; they have never been the isolated "ivory towers" of popular imagination. Since their inception, they have engaged the issues of their day, discovered and distributed whatever was at the time deemed "useful knowledge," and established various, often idiosyncratic, financial relationships with patrons, donors, and governments. These relationships suggest varying degrees or types of autonomy.

Luc E. Weber argued in his 2000 contribution to Responsiveness, Responsibility, and Accountability: An Evaluation of University Governance in Switzerland that the mission of a university is twofold. It must be both "responsible" and "responsive." The former involves the long view of the university's mission and society's needs. The latter addresses the immediate strategies for meeting the short-term economic and social requirements of the community.

Degrees of Autonomy

Traditional thinking about universities has stressed their basic mission-or long-term responsibility-to preserve the culture and heritage of society, generate new knowledge, and transmit that knowledge to future generations. Society has created and supported these institutions in the belief that, by preserving, discovering, and transmitting knowledge, they serve the common good and advance the status of humanity. Historically, society has recognized the university's need for autonomy to achieve its goals, but it has also, at least implicitly until now, imposed certain expectations: effective (if not always efficient) self-government, professional integrity and standards, and intellectual objectivity.

Yet another, arguably unique, responsibility is also entrusted to colleges and universities: to provide an enduring and credible vehicle for social criticism. To criticize requires perspective and independence that come only with a high level of autonomy. To be fully integrated into a social context and to be controlled by the structures and mechanisms of that context make independent criticism virtually impossible. As members of the former East-bloc universities at the Salzburg Seminar were quick to point out, their institutions' autonomy depended on the willingness and ability of the professoriate "not to notice" what was going on around them. Universities in name only, such institutions functioned not as true universities but, in Magrath's words, as "ideological factories that were the handmaidens to the dictatorship." To serve as true critics of society and to provide principled intellectual leadership, even in the face of official opposition-that is, to be truly responsible-colleges and universities require the highest degree of autonomy possible.