Someone asked me why I’m so troubled by the University of Southern Mississippi controversy. After all, the university is trying to fire the professors not for their scholarship or their teaching, but for their involvement in an investigation of an administrator’s alleged fraud (or, according to the University, for their unspecified misconduct in this investigation). What’s the big deal?
Well, to begin with, I think that academic freedom should secure the faculty’s right to comment on all sorts of matters, from politics and science to the way the university conducts its affairs. In other workplaces, including government workplaces, the need to maintain good working relations or prevent tension, controversy, or public disapproval of the employer may justify restrictions on what employees can do. But the premise of academic freedom is that universities operate better as centers of learning and inquiry when they allow a broad range of speech, even despite these costs.
But there’s also a much more specific reason to protect this speech: Academic freedom also embodies a tradition of internal governance, by which many of the decisions about the way the university operates are made by faculty, or at least with the advice of faculty. This self-governance is preservative of other aspects of academic freedom, but it’s also supposed to be helpful in maintaining the quality of research and teaching as well. To my knowledge the norm in serious American universities is that the faculty get to make many decisions, such as hiring, curriculum, academic standards, and so on, and while the administration may sometimes veto some such decisions, and may take the lead in other decisions, the faculty generally plays a serious and important role (sometimes as the primary decisionmakers and sometimes as influential advisors).
If this is so, then the faculty — as joint governors of the school — must have the right to criticize the administration, which must of course include the right to investigate alleged resume fraud by the University’s vice president of research. If the University is right that the faculty members whom it’s trying to fire engaged in defamation (i.e., were themselves lying) or real misuse of university facilities, then its actions might well be proper. But if the University is just trying to silence faculty members whose criticisms it sees as disruptive, that’s very dangerous indeed. Shared governance, whether in Washington, D.C. or in a university, necessarily involves some disruption and tension. Trying to eliminate that disruption and tension is impossible unless one abandons the shared governance project.
Comments are closed.