Professor Richard De George explains what academic freedom is — and is not — in today’s Washington Post “Outlook” section. He also notes academic freedom faces threats from both without and within the academy.
On proposals to create an “Academic Bill of Rights,” De George has this to say:
the controversy over the proposed “academic bill of rights,” like the Summers case and many others, serves to highlight the dangers to academic freedom from within the university itself. The bill of rights, which was conceived by conservative activist David Horowitz and his watchdog group Students for Academic Freedom, would require professors to present a greater diversity of views on unsettled issues. It is a reaction on the part of conservative students to what they feel is the dominance of liberal faculties at many universities, where the students say that claims made in the name of academic freedom implicitly permit professors to require that students hew to a certain political line in order to pass a course, or where potential faculty members have to hold a certain political ideology in order to be hired.
Where either is done in the name of academic freedom, it is certainly an abuse of that concept. A science class is not the appropriate forum for a discussion of politics, for instance, and no course should provide a teacher with a captive audience for Bush-bashing or any other political indoctrination. On the other hand, students have no “right” not to hear views with which they disagree. Part of their education arguably consists in having some of their opinions challenged.
On campuses that are primarily liberal, conservative faculty and students often feel pressure to keep quiet, not to write on or even raise certain subjects, and to stifle their dissenting opinions. On conservative campuses, liberals feel similar pressure. Such pressure is incompatible with the free flow of discussion and the free exchange of ideas that academic freedom requires and is supposed to promote. But no legislature should dictate what has to be taught in any course, even in the name of balance. The solution is to promote greater respect for the academic freedom of all, not to push legislation that would in fact undermine that freedom.
That sounds about right to me.
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