The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University

Also by Ellen Schrecker

Cold War Triumphalism:

The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism (editor)

Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America

The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents

No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities

Regulating the Intellectuals:

Perspectives on Academic Freedom in the 1980s

(co-edited with Craig Kaplan)

The Hired Money:

The French Debt to the United States, 1917–1929

Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook

THE LOST SOUL OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Corporatization, the Assault onAcademic Freedom, and the End of the American University

Ellen Schrecker

© 2010 by Ellen Schrecker

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.

An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared as Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain: Academic Freedom in the Aftermath of 9/11 in the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom.

Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2010

Distributed by Perseus Distribution

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Schrecker, Ellen.

The lost soul of higher education : corporatization, the assault on academic freedom, and the end of the American university / Ellen Schrecker.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59558-603-2 (hc.: alk. paper) 1. Academic freedom—United States.

2. Universities and colleges—United States. 3. Education, Higher—Economic aspects—United States. 4. Business and education—United States. I. Title.

LC72.2.S36 2010

378.1’2130973—dc22

2010008278

The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry. The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable.

www.thenewpress.com

Composition by dix!

This book was set in Minion

For Pazit and Ila

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction Official Duties: Juan Hong and the Crisis of the University

Chapter 1 So Fragile and So Indispensable: What Is Academic Freedom and Why Should We Care About It?

Chapter 2 Academic Freedom Under Attack: Subversives, Squeaky Wheels, and Special Obligations

Chapter 3 Part of the Struggle: Faculties Confront the 1960s

Chapter 4 A Long-Range and Difficult Project: The Backlash Against the 1960s

Chapter 5 Patterns of Misconduct: Ward Churchill and Academic Freedom After 9/11

Chapter 6 Tough Choices: The Changing Structure of Higher Education

Chapter 7 Under Our Noses: Restructuring the Academic Profession

Epilogue Everything Is on the Table: The Academy’s Response to the Great Recession

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began as an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education comparing the academic freedom violations of the McCarthy period with those after 9/11. When The New Press’s editorial director, Marc Favreau, contacted me to suggest that I expand it into a larger work, I foolishly agreed. Having already written a number of essays and lectures about the subject, I assumed it would be easy to stitch them together into a book. But, as so often happens, the more I looked at the contemporary state of academic freedom, the more I realized how much more I needed to know before I could make any sense out of it. This book, then, is the product of more research than I had intended to do when I first set out to write it.

I got a lot of help. In fact, the amount of assistance that I received in this project belies my own complaints about the lack of solidarity within the academic profession. Colleagues, friends, and perfect strangers have all been unfailingly openhanded in volunteering information and advice. They are, of course, in no way responsible for anything I have written, but their contributions have greatly enhanced my work.

For more than a decade I have been active in the American Association of University Professors, first as the editor of its magazine, Academe, and more recently as a member of its National Council and its Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Accordingly, I have been able to rely on the AAUP’s able and dedicated staff members, who have graciously provided documents, answered questions, and pointed me to sources. Everyone has been helpful, especially Ernst Benjamin, John Curtis, Jordan Kurland, Rachel Levinson, and Gary Rhoades.

Many other friends and colleagues have supplied equally valuable materials and suggestions. Evelyn Hu-DeHart and Paul Lauter were particularly generous in offering access to their personal papers. I am also grateful for the assistance of Fred Anderson, Robert Cohen, Elizabeth Hoffman, David Hollinger, Maurice Isserman, Walter LaFeber, Stephen Leberstein, Frinde Maher, John McDermott, Bart Meyers, Michael Parenti, William Rorabaugh, and Malini Johar Schueller. At Yeshiva University, I was blessed by having a truly gifted historian, Elliot Friedman, as my undergraduate research assistant.

Several people took the time to read all or part of the manuscript. Their suggestions, even if I didn’t always incorporate them, have been enormously useful. I know the book has been much improved by the thoughtful comments of Ernst Benjamin, Marjorie Heins, Mary and Howard Hurtig, Michael Nash, David Rabban, Gary Rhoades, Leah Rosenberg, Joan Wallach Scott, Carole Silver, and my fellow Deconstructionists: Renate Bridenthal, Barbara Foley, Leonard Gordon, Jack Hammond, Peter Ranis, and Lise Vogel.

I owe a special debt to Michael Nash and Marilyn Young for the opportunity to spend the academic year of 2007–2008 at New York University’s Tamiment Library as the recipient of the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Fellowship. Michael, in particular, has been a true godfather to this project in every way. Tamiment has been an invaluable resource, and I cannot be too effusive in thanking Michael and his staff, especially Kevyne Baar, Peter Filardo, and Gail Malmgreen.

I have also been fortunate to work with such a patient and insightful editor as Marc Favreau. His wise comments and commitment to the project, as well as the fine editorial work of Sarah Fan and Sue Warga, have eased the sometimes stressful process of turning a manuscript into a book. My literary agent, Ron Goldfarb, has also been a stalwart facilitator and goad.

Finally, there is my husband, Marv Gettleman, without whose loving support this book could never have been written. Not only did he take on far more than his share of household chores, but he also provided all the editorial assistance and encouragement any author could ask for. As for my granddaughters, Pazit and Ila Schrecker, they have done nothing for this book other than to give its author joy.

Introduction

OFFICIAL DUTIES: JUAN HONG AND THE CRISIS OF THE UNIVERSITY

Juan Hong was a prickly individual. A full professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of California–Irvine, where he had been teaching since 1987, Hong apparently felt compelled to police his colleagues and alert his superiors to their wrongdoings. In one instance he complained that a fellow faculty member had not only misrepresented her credentials to obtain a merit increase but also obtained state funding for having solicited a donation of software that had actually come from her husband’s company. Another complaint involved a colleague who had been awarded a raise on the basis of a falsified CV. Hong also criticized his chairperson and dean for having offered an academic appointment to a candidate without consulting the full department. And, finally, he protested against the overuse of adjuncts, claiming that letting them teach six of the eight courses in the materials undergraduate program was evading the department’s obligation to its students to staff courses with experienced faculty, rather than younger, transient lecturers.¹

The university, Hong believed, rewarded him for his whistle-blowing by denying him a merit raise. The administrators who dealt with the matter did not, of course, claim that Hong’s complaints were responsible for the denial. Rather, as the provost explained in an official letter to Hong in March 2005, it was Hong’s inadequate research, especially his failure to get any grants, that had precipitated the unfavorable decision. The administration then also threatened to change Hong’s status from full professor to lecturer with security of employment, demanded that he come up with a written plan of remediation, and doubled his teaching load. After filing an unsuccessful whistle-blower retaliation complaint with the university, Hong turned to the courts. He wanted vindication for having exercised his constitutional freedom of speech.

His timing could not have been worse. The Supreme Court had just rendered a highly controversial decision in the case of Garcetti v. Ceballos, involving a Los Angeles assistant district attorney who was punished for complaining about irregularities in the DA’s office. As the Court saw it, the First Amendment did not protect a public employee from retaliation against speaking out if that speech was pursuant to his official duties. The implications of the decision for the nation’s college and university teachers, most of whom teach at public institutions, were frightening. So frightening, in fact, that Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the Court’s majority, noted there might be problems with expression related to academic scholarship or classroom instruction and specifically reserved the issue of whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship and teaching. Justice David Souter’s dissent was even more explicit: Garcetti, he feared, could imperil First Amendment academic freedom in public colleges and universities, whose teachers necessarily speak and write pursuant to ‘official duties.’²

Hong’s suit against his superiors and the University of California was one of the first post-Garcetti cases involving a university professor to reach the courts. Ignoring Kennedy’s disclaimer, the federal district judge who heard the case ruled in September 2007 that Irvine’s retaliation against Hong did not violate his First Amendment rights. Because his complaints dealt with the university’s business and because participation in that business through the mechanism of faculty governance was one of Hong’s official duties, those complaints had no constitutional protection. Hong, of course, appealed, and as of this writing, the Ninth Circuit has yet to render its decision.

Recognizing how devastating the case could be for the future of academic freedom, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), along with the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, submitted an amicus brief in support of Hong.³ As the traditional guardian of faculty rights, the AAUP really had no choice. Since everything a professor publishes or says in class is related to his or her job, allowing the lower court’s decision to stand would undermine much of the legal support that exists for academic freedom in the nation’s public colleges and universities. While faculty governance is a less clear-cut component of academic freedom than teaching or research, it is equally crucial. Without a say over the conditions of their employment, professors cannot exercise the autonomy they need in order to fulfill their professional obligations. If the educational quality and intellectual integrity of their institutions is to be maintained, faculty members must participate in decisions about the curriculum and the hiring, tenure, and promotion of their colleagues. For that reason, therefore, Juan Hong’s e-mails and letters about the internal workings of his department deserve as much protection as any statement he might have made in class or published in a scholarly journal.

As far as the AAUP’s amicus brief is concerned, however, the specific content of Hong’s complaints, as long as it does not indicate that he is unfit to teach, is essentially irrelevant. But the issues the case raises go beyond the—admittedly critical—realm of traditional academic freedom, with its quasi-legal safeguards against outside interference with the work of college and university teachers. Today the entire enterprise of higher education, not just its dissident professors, is under attack, both internally and externally. The financial challenges are obvious, as are the political ones. Less obvious, however, are the structural changes that have transformed the very nature of American higher education. In reacting to the economic insecurities of the past forty years, the nation’s colleges and universities have adopted corporate practices that degrade undergraduate instruction, marginalize faculty members, and threaten the very mission of the academy as an institution devoted to the common good.

Hong’s complaints about his colleagues’ misbehavior address some of hazards that this transformation presents. Whatever the validity of his charges (and I withhold judgment here), the perception, for example, that scientists are misrepresenting themselves and their work is a recent and disturbing phenomenon. It reflects the increasingly competitive atmosphere within the academy and the escalating pressure on faculty members to do more research, win more grants, and publish more articles. Similarly, Hong’s dissatisfaction with his superiors’ failure to consult the entire department before making an appointment speaks to the growing tendency of academic administrators to increase their own power at the expense of their faculties. Finally, and most important, Hong’s concern about his department’s reliance on part-time lecturers points to what is perhaps the most serious threat to American higher education today: the casualization of the academic labor force. More than 70 percent of all college-level instruction in the United States is now in the hands of contingent faculty members—part-time and full-time teachers with temporary contracts. The implications of that revolution (and it is a revolution) in the composition of the faculty—for the quality of its instruction, for the welfare of its students, and for the university’s ability to carry out its traditional mission—can only be disastrous.

Over the years, the United States has become increasingly dependent upon its system of higher education. A college degree is central to the American dream. It offers the main—and often the only—assurance of economic advancement for most men and women without athletic ability or musical talent. Whether it actually fulfills that promise is another question, but the explicitly meritocratic basis upon which it rests supplies the establishment with an ideological buffer against demands from underprivileged groups and individuals for a more egalitarian distribution of the nation’s resources. The college campus has, in other words, replaced the frontier as the nation’s most important social safety valve. In addition, universities also provide the research and training that make scientific progress (and the technological and economic advances based upon that progress) possible. There are nonmaterial benefits as well. The academy protects the American mind. In a world of sound bites and bullet points, the nation’s campuses are among the last few places where it is still possible to deal with complicated ideas or entertain unorthodox opinions. Professors are the nation’s main public intellectuals; they raise the questions with which an informed citizenry must deal. They are, therefore, essential to the preservation of the reasoned debate and unfettered expression that our democratic system requires.

And they are in serious danger. The threat to the academic community takes two forms: one is the ramping up of the traditional attacks on academic freedom in the wake of 9/11 and the recent culture wars, and the other is the corporate-style restructuring of American higher education. The academy has always had to fend off external challenges from politicians and others who want to eliminate unpopular professors or censor the curriculum. Those pressures have not abated. But now the nation’s colleges and universities are also confronting demands for so- called reforms that would substitute economic considerations of productivity and cost-effectiveness for the traditional educational values of enlightenment and individual growth. In the name of efficiency and accountability, groups and individuals both on and off the campus threaten to transform higher education into a source of vocational training and corporate research. In the process, the nation’s faculties, once the main component of American higher education, have been shunted aside. Yet without a vibrant faculty, the university cannot carry out its educational mission. And without academic freedom, the nation’s college and university teachers cannot create new knowledge or stretch their students’ minds.

In its traditional form, academic freedom belongs above all to the faculty. It is the system of procedures and protections that allows learning and scholarship to take place on the nation’s campuses. It makes it possible for members of the academic profession to speak freely inside and outside their classrooms and to publish the results of their research without fearing that they will be dismissed or otherwise punished by the institutions that employ them. And it protects (or should protect) such squeaky wheels as Juan Hong from retaliation if they criticize those institutions. Without academic freedom, a pall of conformity would descend over the nation’s colleges and universities. No longer would professors be willing to raise troubling questions that push at the boundaries of accepted wisdom. Nor would they be able to resist the pressures that are currently deforming the academy by turning it into a dog-eat-dog environment that pits institutions, faculty members, and students against one another in an exhausting and unwinnable struggle for resources.

Let us not, however, get too misty-eyed about the plight of the academic community. As an institution, it was never without major flaws—flaws, moreover, that have in part (though only in part) contributed to its present precarious condition. The uniqueness and, some would say, the strength of the American system of higher education is its diversity. It contains more than four thousand institutions, public, private, secular, and religious, that range from major research universities to proprietary trade schools. It is only to be expected, therefore, that the roughly 1.3 million men and women who constitute the nation’s faculties would be as diverse as the institutions that house them. Unfortunately, however, that diversity has militated against the ability of the members of the academic profession to form a common front in their own defense and that of higher education as a whole. Political differences, disciplinary loyalties, generational ruptures, as well as the stratification of the nation’s institutions of higher learning, divide faculty members within and between those institutions. As a result, it is often the case that, instead of recognizing their common interest in preserving and renewing the university, faculty members have pursued their own private agendas—often at the expense of one another, their students, and ultimately the common good. Yet unless the nation’s college and university teachers get their communal act together, academic freedom may well disappear from their campuses and the academic profession as we know it could vanish from the face of the earth.

This book, then, is a plea to and for the faculty. It examines the current plight of American higher education in the hope that understanding the structural and political threats it faces will help the nation’s faculties and the broader public mount a successful defense against those threats. I write from the faculty’s perspective, not only because I am a faculty member but also because so much of what passes for a discussion of higher education today does not bring professors into the conversation. There are, it is true, many other people who have an interest in what is happening on the nation’s campuses; students are a particularly important—and embattled—constituency. But only the faculty can carry out higher education’s central mission of creating and disseminating knowledge. If, in other words, the nation’s colleges and universities are to continue to educate—not simply train—the millions of men and women who seek that education, the faculty’s voice must be not only heard but listened to.

Because I am a historian, I cannot make sense of any situation without putting it into its historical context. This book, although by no means a history of academic freedom and American higher education, nonetheless looks at the current problems of academe through the lens of the past. It offers a somewhat bifurcated view, however, for I am examining the two separate yet related challenges to the academic community. The first part of the book—Chapters 1 through 5—explores the fate of the traditional form of academic freedom, tracking the faculty’s essentially political struggle against the external threats to its autonomy and free expression. The second part—Chapters 6 and 7—examines the structural changes within the academy. It looks at the ways in which those changes affected the nation’s colleges and universities, undermining the ability of their faculties to protect their own academic freedom, their students’ educations, and that all too elusive common good. Though seemingly very different, the political and structural challenges to American higher education are deeply intertwined. Not only do they both threaten the faculty’s central position within the academic community, but they also reinforce each other. Political attacks on controversial teachers and ideas make it hard for professors to maintain their traditional authority within and outside the university, while structural transformations undermine the faculty’s ability to resist those politically motivated pressures.

More specifically, Chapter 1 offers an overview of the traditional paradigm of academic freedom, looking at its conceptual evolution as well as at the institutional arrangements such as tenure and faculty governance that have been developed to protect it. Chapter 2 examines the way in which the academy handled the attacks on that freedom from the origins of the modern university in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the end of the McCarthy period in the 1950s. Chapter 3 looks at the 1960s, sketching out the surprisingly uncharted story of the many ways in which faculty members responded to the challenges of those turbulent years. Chapter 4 deals with the backlash against the sixties and the development of the well-orchestrated campaign against the so-called left academy that ultimately produced the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s. Chapter 5 brings the story of the traditional attacks on academic freedom up to date by looking at how the university was affected by the post-9/11 crackdown on civil liberties.

The focus changes in Chapter 6 which explores the structural transformation of the academy in the aftermath of the financial troubles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It examines what many observers have called the corporatization of the university—the adoption of business-related values and practices and the commercialization of faculty research. Chapter 7 deals with how this transformation affected the nation’s college and university teachers. In particular, it explores the way in which the increased emphasis on research has put pressure on faculty members at every level. It also looks at how and why the contingent faculty has grown and how its members cope with their marginal status. Finally, the epilogue offers a preliminary assessment of the implications of the current financial meltdown for the academic community and the future of higher education in the United States.

It would be satisfying to produce a happy ending. But at this point in the history of America’s colleges and universities, it is hard to come up with one. Straitened resources are intensifying the competition that has so poisoned the American academy. Unless faculty members can overcome their own divisions and make the rest of the country understand how central their interests are to the system of higher education as a whole, the inexorable downgrading of the academic profession will continue. Still, there are some encouraging signs. For all their griping, most Americans recognize the importance of higher education for their own future and that of their children. A few years ago, when the conservative rabble-rouser David Horowitz was peddling an insidious attack on the nation’s faculties, just about every state legislature that considered Horowitz’s agenda turned it down. Academic freedom and the integrity of American higher education, when properly understood, turns out to be something that this nation still prizes. Let us hope that continues to be the case.

Chapter 1

SO FRAGILE AND SO INDISPENSABLE: WHAT IS ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT IT?

When Reverend Dennis Holtschneider, the president of DePaul University in Chicago, refused to grant tenure to the controversial Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein in June 2007, thus effectively ending Finkelstein’s academic career, he was, he claimed, simply defending academic freedom, which was, he insisted, alive and well at DePaul.¹ A month later, the University of Colorado’s Board of Regents made a similar declaration, stating that it was committed to ensuring that the university will promote and respect academic freedom, even as it capitulated to political pressures by voting to oust Ward Churchill, the school’s most notorious professor.² Neither the Colorado regents nor DePaul’s president was setting a precedent. The American academy has a long-standing tradition of accompanying the dismissal of politically unpopular professors with invocations of respect toward academic freedom. As early as 1895, when the University of Chicago fired the outspoken economist Edward Bemis, its leaders insisted that his ‘freedom of teaching’ has never been involved in the case.³ During the McCarthy years, it was equally common for university authorities to claim that they were simply preserving academic freedom and the integrity of the academic profession by eliminating Communists or people associated with Communism.

In retrospect, it is hard to see how those authorities could square the dismissal of controversial professors with the defense of academic freedom. Yet in just about every case in which such faculty members lost their jobs because they were too outspoken or politically unpopular, the institutions that dismissed them justified that action by invoking the hallowed norms of academe. Not only do such justifications reveal the malleable nature of the concept of academic freedom, but they also show how central that concept was to the legitimacy of, even the identity of, the academic enterprise. In the following chapters, as I trace the development of academic freedom over the years, I will also be looking at how the challenges to that freedom evolved. But first, it is important to understand exactly what academic freedom is—and is not.

Like pornography, we know, or think we know, academic freedom (or the lack of it) when we see it. In its traditional formulation, it is, above all, a special protection for the faculty that shields professors from losing their jobs if they take politically unpopular positions in their writings, classes, and on- or off-campus activities. And so it is. But academic freedom is also a professional perquisite (not always secured by the First Amendment and the courts) that gives college teachers the autonomy they need to fulfill their professional responsibilities. Buttressed by the institution of tenure and the practices of peer review and faculty governance, it ensures that the academy’s scholarship and teaching maintain the quality and level of innovation that have made the American system of higher education the envy of the world.

Unfortunately, one person’s pornography may be another’s high art. And so it is with academic freedom. Characterized in the important recent study by Matthew Finkin and Robert Post as a warm and vaguely fuzzy privilege, the concept, so seemingly simple to define, is actually a complex set of beliefs, traditions, procedures, and legal rulings that govern many of the relationships between faculties and their employing institutions, the government, students, and the broader public.⁴ Our academic forebears may have set us up for today’s confusion by labeling that package academic freedom rather than something less resounding but more concrete such as traditional academic privileges and responsibilities or code of academic practices.⁵ Certainly, free expression is part of the mix. But to treat academic freedom as only, or even primarily, a form of free speech and a subset of the First Amendment is to view it in much too narrow and legalistic a perspective.⁶ Over the years, the concept has expanded to cover almost everything that happens on campus, but at its core it is a faculty perquisite, pertaining to the practices and ideas that define the academic profession and govern the work life of college and university teachers.

Perhaps some of the problem comes from the fact that the earliest formulations of the concept came from abroad. The first generation of American scholars, the men who established the modern research university at the end of the nineteenth century, got their professional training in Germany, where a bifurcated notion of academic freedom held sway. One part, Lernfreiheit or freedom to learn, had to do with the freedom that German students then enjoyed to shape their education according to their own desires while swinging from one institution to another, drinking beer, dueling, and attending classes when so inclined. The other half, Lehrfreiheit or freedom to teach, belonged to professors and not only gave them autonomy within their classrooms but also barred external controls on their research. Faculty governance reinforced this professional independence. German academics ran their universities, making all the personnel decisions and electing deans and other administrators from among their number. That autonomy, so it was claimed, was necessary if scholars were to engage in the unfettered pursuit of knowledge that was central to the mission of the German university. At the same time, their freedom from outside control set these academics apart from (and above) their fellow citizens in the rigidly stratified society of nineteenthcentury Germany.

Yet for all their freedom and authority within the university, German professors were quite constrained outside of it. The German university system, unlike the American one, was an arm of the state. Academics were civil servants and were thus expected to support the government. They could be—and were—fired for backing opposition parties. And while their colleagues did protest against such dismissals, they did so because the officials who carried them out were infringing on the faculty’s collective prerogatives, not because they were upset about the violations of their colleagues’ individual rights. In fact, most professors actually endorsed the restrictions on their own off-campus activities; abandoning their supposed political neutrality would, they felt, interfere with their scholarship and pollute their higher calling.⁷

Despite the limited scope of its Lehrfreiheit, the prestige of the German professoriate in the late nineteenth century was so high that the faculty members who staffed the first generation of American research universities consciously sought to emulate it. In particular, they sought to incorporate the concept of academic freedom directly into their institutions, believing, as one later historian put it, "that academic freedom, like academic searching, defined the true university."⁸ The model they thought they were importing—that of a self-governing faculty that brooked no external interference with its core functions of teaching and research—was to become one of the distinctive characteristics of the American professoriate, developing in tandem with the growth of the modern American university.

In actuality, as the academic profession evolved, it embraced a wide variety of practices, of which the Germanic notion of academic freedom was only one. Its most significant characteristic was the codification of its own identity. This process, which we have come to call professionalization, was not unique to the nation’s college and university teachers. As American society became increasingly complex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, other fields of endeavor—medicine, law, and engineering, for example—also developed rules of professional behavior, designed in large part to maintain their members’ privileged status. Whatever the occupation, the same or similar systems and procedures came to characterize its practitioners’ emerging identity as professionals. They exercised considerable autonomy within their workplaces; they controlled access to their ranks by means of some kind of specialized educational requirement or examination; and they built institutions such as bar associations, medical licensing boards, and scholarly organizations to serve as gatekeepers and regulators. Finally, they justified these measures in terms of service. Professionals had a higher calling than other workers; their activities benefited the common good of the entire society. As a result, they had to be free from meddling by outsiders who did not share their special knowledge and commitment.⁹

Universities were central to the process, both as a source of the professions’ necessary credentialing and as the institutional home of the newly organized academic profession. As it developed and became increasingly professionalized, the professoriate created its own instruments of self-regulation—the PhD, academic disciplines and departments, and scholarly presses and publications. Gluing all these diverse activities and institutions together ideologically was the code of practices and beliefs that would come to be known as academic freedom.

Autonomy was the crucial element here. Academic freedom, if it was to guarantee the respect and professional status that late nineteenth-century college and university teachers coveted, required that faculty members control the main conditions of their work. Yet that autonomy was—and still is—hard to come by. After all, unlike their fellow professionals in the fields of law or medicine, college teachers are not independent operators who can open up a private practice once they gain acceptance by their peers. They are employees, working within institutions officially governed by lay boards of trustees and subject to the authority of university administrators. As a result, faculties, if they were to retain their distinctive status as professionals, had to develop mechanisms that would keep those outsiders from interfering with what they taught and wrote and whom they hired.

The first generation of professionalized American academics recognized the anomalies of their situation. In their 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, the founders of the American Association of University Professors strove to codify the distinctive position of college and university teachers, who were, the declaration explained, appointees, but not in any proper sense the employees of the people who hired them.¹⁰ Thus, just as judges maintained their independence from the executive officials who appointed them, so too, professors were to be free from external interference. Legally, they might be subject to the authority of trustees and administrators, but if universities were to perform their modern function of creating and disseminating knowledge, and to perform it in accordance with the common good, then faculty members whose work was central to the universities’ mission had to exercise almost complete autonomy within the educational sphere. In that sense, therefore, academic freedom was above all a matter of professionalism, a tool that American college and university teachers could use to control their own terms of employment.

That it was (and still is) also a struggle for free expression stems from the nature of academic work, which, as the intellectual degeneration of the universities under the Nazi and Soviet regimes reveals, cannot be performed adequately under conditions of duress.¹¹ The teaching and research that academics carry out must be free from outside interference. Scholars and scientists cannot merely follow orders. New knowledge can be produced only through the unfettered interplay of these people’s trained minds with the data they collect in their libraries and laboratories. Similarly, as teachers, faculty members can only develop their students’ powers of rational and independent thought if they are themselves autonomous within their classrooms. There is nothing controversial about this vision of academic freedom; we hear it every May and June in the nation’s commencement addresses—an edifying truism no less accurate for being dull.

What this noble and often empty language does not, however, convey is the bifurcated reality of the struggle for academic freedom; it is both a high-minded campaign for free expression as well as a more self-interested one for professional status and respectability. That the latter campaign is almost always swathed in the rhetoric of the former should not surprise us. Because of their indeterminate position as both employees and independent professionals, academics have often been peculiarly sensitive about their own status. After all, in a society where money counts, they are not rich. Isolated in large part from the rest of the middle class by their cultivated lifestyle, they withdraw into what was, at least until a few decades ago, a decorous and inbred collegial world where prestige is the main commodity and no one wants to rock the boat.¹² At