Understanding Academic Freedom

Understanding Academic Freedom PDF

Author: Henry Reichman

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1421442159

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"This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to academic freedom, surveying its history and application to research, teaching, and public expression, as well as its treatment in the legal arena and its applicability to students"--

The Future of Academic Freedom

The Future of Academic Freedom PDF

Author: Henry Reichman

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 142142858X

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The issues Reichman considers—which are the subjects of daily conversation on college and university campuses nationwide as well as in the media—will fascinate general readers, students, and scholars alike.

The Concept of Academic Freedom

The Concept of Academic Freedom PDF

Author: Edmund L. Pincoffs

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 1975-02-01

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 029276636X

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Most professors and administrators are aware that academic freedom is in danger of being brushed aside by a public that has little understanding of what is at stake. They may be only marginally aware that the defense of academic freedom is endangered by certain confusions concerning the nature of academic freedom, the criteria for its violation, and the structure of an adequate justification for claims to it. These confusions were enshrined in some of the central documents on the subject, including the 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, agreed upon by the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and endorsed by many professional organizations. Careful analysis of them will not do away with debate; it will bring the debate into focus, so that attacks on academic freedom can be appraised as near or far away from the center of the target and can then be appropriately answered. Nearly all the contemporary writing on academic freedom consists of attack or defense. The Concept of Academic Freedom is the first book to deal exclusively with fundamental conceptual issues underlying the battle. In the discussion of these issues, certain philosophical positions crystallize: radical versus liberal conceptions of the status and function of university teachers, specific versus general theories of academic freedom, consequential versus nonconsequential theories of justification. Partisans (and enemies) of academic freedom would do well to decide on which side of these divisions they stand, or how they would mediate between sides. Otherwise many questions will remain unclear: What is under discussion—a special right peculiar to academics or a general right that is especially important to academics? Is justification of that right possible? Can the right be derived from other rights, or from the theory of justice or of democratic society? Or is the argument for academic freedom one that more properly turns on the consequences for society as a whole if that freedom is not protected? The essays in this book explore these and other problems concerning the defense of academic freedom by radicals, the justification for disruption on campus, and the control of research. Contributors to the volume include Hugo Adam Bedau, Bertram H. Davis, Milton Fisk, Graham Hughes, Alan Pasch, Hardy E. Jones, Alexander Ritchie, Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Rolf Sartorius, T. M. Scanlon, Richard Schmitt, John R. Searle, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and William Van Alstyne. All are outstanding in their fields. Many have had practical experience in the legal profession or with the American Association of University Professors on the issue of academic freedom.

Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom

Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom PDF

Author: Joan Wallach Scott

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-01-22

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 0231548931

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Academic freedom rests on a shared belief that the production of knowledge advances the common good. In an era of education budget cuts, wealthy donors intervening in university decisions, and right-wing groups threatening dissenters, scholars cannot expect that those in power will value their work. Can academic freedom survive in this environment—and must we rearticulate what academic freedom is in order to defend it? This book presents a series of essays by the renowned historian Joan Wallach Scott that explore the history and theory of free inquiry and its value today. Scott considers the contradictions in the concept of academic freedom. She examines the relationship between state power and higher education; the differences between the First Amendment right of free speech and the guarantee of academic freedom; and, in response to recent campus controversies, the politics of civility. The book concludes with an interview conducted by Bill Moyers in which Scott discusses the personal experiences that have informed her views. Academic freedom is an aspiration, Scott holds: its implementation always falls short of its promise, but it is essential as an ideal of ethical practice. Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom is both a nuanced reflection on the tensions within a cherished concept and a strong defense of the importance of critical scholarship to safeguard democracy against the anti-intellectualism of figures from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump.

The Future of Academic Freedom

The Future of Academic Freedom PDF

Author: Louis Menand

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780226520056

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The essays respond to critics of the university, but they also respond to one another: Rorty and Haskell argue about the epistemological foundations of academic freedom; Gates and Sunstein discuss the legal and educational logic of speech codes. But in the end the volume achieves an unexpected consensus about the need to reconceive the concept of academic freedom in order to meet the threats and risks of the future.

It's Not Free Speech

It's Not Free Speech PDF

Author: Michael Bérubé

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2022-04-26

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1421443880

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How far does the idea of academic freedom extend to professors in an era of racial reckoning? The protests of summer 2020, which were ignited by the murder of George Floyd, led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more generally. But while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncomfortable question: Does academic freedom extend to racist professors? It's Not Free Speech considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be rigorously distinguished from freedom of speech, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacy—theories that have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever. Approaching this question from two angles—one, the question of when a professor's intramural or extramural speech calls into question his or her fitness to serve, and two, the question of how to manage the simmering tension between the academic freedom of faculty and the antidiscrimination initiatives of campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion—they argue that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it very difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech. In recent years, those with traditional liberal ideals have had very limited effectiveness in responding to the resurgence of white supremacism in American life. It is time, Bérubé and Ruth write, to ask whether that resurgence requires us to rethink the parameters and practices of academic freedom. Touching as well on contingent faculty, whose speech is often inadequately protected, It's Not Free Speech insists that we reimagine shared governance to augment both academic freedom and antidiscrimination initiatives on campuses. Faculty across the nation can develop protocols that account for both the new realities—from the rise of social media to the decline of tenure—and the old realities of long-standing inequities and abuses that the classic liberal conception of academic freedom did nothing to address. This book will resonate for anyone who has followed debates over #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, and "cancel culture"; more specifically, it should have a major impact on many facets of academic life, from the classroom to faculty senates to the office of the general counsel.

Versions of Academic Freedom

Versions of Academic Freedom PDF

Author: Stanley Fish

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-10-23

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 022606431X

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Advocates of academic freedom often view it as a variation of the right to free speech and an essential feature of democracy. Stanley Fish argues here for a narrower conception of academic freedom, one that does not grant academics a legal status different from other professionals. Providing a blueprint for the study of academic freedom, Fish breaks down the schools of thought on the subject, which range from the idea that academic freedom is justified by the common good or by academic exceptionalism, to its potential for critique or indeed revolution. Fish himself belongs to what he calls the It s Just a Job school: while academics need the latitude call it freedom if you like necessary to perform their professional activities, they are not free in any special sense to do anything but their jobs. Academic freedom, Fish argues, should be justified only by the specific educational good that academics offer. Defending the university in all its glorious narrowness as a place of disinterested inquiry, Fish offers a bracing corrective to academic orthodoxy."

Academic Freedom

Academic Freedom PDF

Author: Jennifer Lackey

Publisher: Engaging Philosophy

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 019879150X

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Academic freedom allows members of institutions of higher learning to engage in intellectual pursuits without fear of censorship or retaliation, and lies at the heart of the mission of the university. Recent years have seen growing concerns about threats to academic freedom, many brought about from the changing norms of (and demands on) the university. A wide range of new issues - including content warnings, safe spaces, social media controversies, microaggressions, and no platforming - have given rise to loud cries, in both scholarly and popular contexts, that academic freedom is under serious attack. This volume fills both of these gaps in the current literature by bringing together leading philosophers from a wide range of areas of expertise to weigh in on both traditional issues and timely challenges that involve academic freedom. Divided into four main sections, it covers the rationale of academic freedom, its parameters, the new challenges to academic freedom (ranging from content warnings to political correctness), and the conflicts between academic freedom and the enforcement of laws and regulations governing the university.

Democracy, Expertise, and Academic Freedom

Democracy, Expertise, and Academic Freedom PDF

Author: Robert C. Post

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-01-24

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0300148631

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A leading American legal scholar offers a surprising account of the incompleteness of prevailing theories of freedom of speech. Robert C. Post shows that the familiar understanding of the First Amendment, which stresses the “marketplace of ideas” and which holds that "everyone is entitled to an opinion," is inadequate to create and preserve the expert knowledge that is necessary for a modern democracy to thrive. For a modern society reliably to answer such questions as whether nicotine causes cancer, the free and open exchange of ideas must be complemented by standards of scientific competence and practice that are both hierarchical and judgmental. Post develops a theory of First Amendment rights that seeks to explain both the need for the free formation of public opinion and the need for the distribution and creation of expertise. Along the way he offers a new and useful account of constitutional doctrines of academic freedom. These doctrines depend both upon free expression and the necessity of the kinds of professional judgment that universities exercise when they grant or deny tenure, or that professional journals exercise when they accept or reject submissions.

Who's Afraid of Academic Freedom?

Who's Afraid of Academic Freedom? PDF

Author: Akeel Bilgrami

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-02-10

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 0231538790

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In these seventeen essays, distinguished senior scholars discuss the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinize a variety of obstacles to such inquiry that they have encountered in their personal and professional experience. Their discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to speech codes, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, political pressure groups, and government policy, as well as phenomena of high generality, such as intellectual orthodoxy, in which coercion is barely visible and often self-imposed. As the editors say in their introduction: "No freedom can be taken for granted, even in the most well-functioning of formal democracies. Exposing the tendencies that undermine freedom of inquiry and their hidden sources and widespread implications is in itself an exercise in and for democracy."