Reichman 2019. The Future of Academic Freedom
Reichman, Henry, and Joan Wallach Scott. 2019. The Future of Academic Freedom. Critical University Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
This book is a collection based on essays written by Henry Reichman, a long-serving (2012-2021) chair of the American Association of University Professors Committee A (Academic Freedom and Tenure) and based, in large part on some of the “more substantial” blog posts he wrote for the Association during his tenure.
While Reichman indicates that the opinions in this book are his own, he also owns the fact that, written as they were/are by a serving officer of the Association, they inevitably reflect the opinions of that institution as well. And in fact the book very much reads as a defence of the AAUP’s positions on Academic Freedom over its history: a little in the same way Michael Higgins — a Basilian priest and Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at St. Michael’s College who reports on the Vatican for the Globe and Mail — always seems to discover at the end of his pieces that the Pope has chosen exactly the right approach to whatever problem Higgins is discussing, Reichman’s book largely discovers chapter-after-chapter how the AAUP’s approach and understanding is the right one in various debates about academic freedom and its relation to free speech.
This note is less a criticism than a warning: while there is a lot of good in this book and while Reichman picks up a lot of contemporary topics in a very thorough and measured way, The Future of Academic Freedom is not the place to come to find a nuanced, personal discussion of the pros and cons of various positions taken in debates on Academic Freedom over the years; instead it is a book about a number of contemporary debates in Academic Freedom on which the AAUP has issued canonical statements that the author feels can be usefully glossed and contextualised.
Again, a warning rather than a criticism. For the most part Reichman does a very strong job elucidating the issues involved in the various debates, bringing a broad bibliography to bear (notes 1 and 3 to Chapter 2 are particularly good as bibliographies of major works, contemporary and historical respectively, on Academic Freedom), and engaging with the positions of various authors and commentators — all, in the end, in light of the AAUP’s position.
In keeping with this approach, Reichman’s book therefore also suffers from the same basic incoherence that lies at the heart of a lot of contemporary discussion of Academic Freedom: that is to say truly owning the difference between Free Speech on the one hand and Academic Freedom on the other.
That these two are not the same thing is a truism in discussions of Academic Freedom. As Reichman and many other commentators have pointed out, Free Speech (particularly in the American, first-amendment, sense) is a content-neutral right: you can speak under freedom of expression laws regardless of whether or not your speech is correct, wise, evidence-based, convincing, or anything else. Academic Freedom, on the other hand, as those who make this distinction then go on to say, is about a content- and context-sensitive professional right: speech that corresponds to the basic expectations of academic practice, including (and there is some variation on this): accuracy, relevance, good faith, and so on.
The problem, however, is that neither the AAUP, nor (in my view) most commentators on Academic Freedom take this distinction fully seriously — in the sense of using it to restrict academics whose speech does not reach this standard.
This is something that I’m hoping to write more about, so let me illustrate the problem with a specific example: the AAUP’s 1994 statement On Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes.
A lot of the concern in that statement now seems overblown: it is difficult to me at least to see how letting students know that required readings in a course might involve difficult subject matter is a fundamental assault on academic freedom. But the most relevant part is a paragraph that Reichman quotes several times:
On a campus that is free and open, no idea can be banned or forbidden. No viewpoint or message may be deemed so hateful or disturbing that it may not be expressed…. An institution of higher learning fails to fulfill its mission if it asserts the power to proscribe ideas — and racial or ethnic slurs, sexist epithets, or homophobic insults almost always express ideas, however, repugnant. Indeed by proscribing any ideas, the university sets an example that profoundly disserves its academic mission.
While it is true that this statement is explicitly about “Freedom of expression,” the invocation of the “mission” of the university several times in these few sentences ties it clearly to Academic Freedom, the basis of which lies in that same freedom.
Except “racial and ethnic slurs,” etc., are really not part of any academic standard. I’d go farther than the AAUP and say that they always express ideas; but these ideas are simply not being expressed in a way that is consistent with academic standards. If we are serious in saying that academic freedom is a different right than freedom of speech — and a right that is more limited in its application — then we have to admit that while they might be protected under freedom of speech, they should not be protected under Academic Freedom.
As I say, I’ll get back to this later; but basically, my own opinion can be summarised like this: Freedom of speech is the right to be a crank; academic freedom is the right to show you are not one.
