One statement of the meaning of academic freedom is set out in the 1967 Kalven Report, a statement of policy by the University of Chicago explaining why a university should not take political positions on matters of public policy.
Here is part of the Kalven Report:
The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society. A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.
The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.
Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues.
The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints. And this neutrality as an institution has its complement in the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest. It finds its complement, too, in the obligation of the university to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues.
The members of the committee issuing the report included John Hope Franklin and future Nobel laureate George Stigler, who slightly dissented from a few sentences on the rare instances where the university in its corporate capacity as a property owner, receiver of funds, or member of an organization might take account of politics.
While criticizing the American Sociological Association for taking a public position on Iraq, William Sjostrom called the Kalven Report “the best statement of academic freedom I know of.”
Erin O’Connor praised the language of the Kalven Report while discussing an idea I sent her in my pre-blogging days, a proposal that universities adopt an explicit policy that students and faculty have no right not to be offended. My argument then:
Universities should adopt explicit policies rejecting the right not to be offended. As a current graduate student in Sociology at the University of Chicago, I was offended by the way that some of Marx’s ideas on economics were taught, particularly the labor theory of value–as if Marx’s critique was sound economics, as if we hadn’t had fifty million people killed by the collectivism of agriculture alone (a modest estimate not including the tens of millions dying in collectivist wars).
The idea that I had a right not to be offended in class never even occurred to me, and would be one that I would find offensive to be offered.
I was scheduled to have the great Harry Kalven for first-year torts in 1974 at the University of Chicago, but his final illness progressed to the point where he couldn’t teach any more, so we had the brilliant young Bob Ellickson (now at Yale) to fill in teaching us torts, a course outside his usual area of expertise (property).
Unfortunately, Don Randel, the current president of the University of Chicago, has given a more confused and confusing statement on academic freedom.
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