Posted by Ilya Somin:
Stanley Fish on Academic Freedom:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_02_08-2009_02_14.shtml#1234552928
Prominent English professor and legal scholar Stanley Fish has[1] an
interesting NYT column on academic freedom:
Last week we came to the section on academic freedom in my course
on the law of higher education and I posed this hypothetical to the
students: Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level
executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or came late,
blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims,
abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients. What
would happen to you?
The chorus of answers cascaded immediately: �I�d be fired.� Now, I
continued, imagine the same scenario and the same set of behaviors,
but this time you�re a tenured professor in a North American
university. What then?
I answered this one myself: �You�d be celebrated as a brave
nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies, a pedagogical
visionary and an exemplar of academic freedom.�
Fish then describes a particularly egregious case at the University of
Ottawa, where a professor apparently used academic freedom and tenure
as pretexts for extreme neglect of his duties and abuse of his
authority.
While the Ottawa situation described by Fish strikes me as an extreme
case, the general problem he identifies is real: The combination of
tenure and overbroad conceptions of academic freedom really do
sometimes enable academics to behave irresponsibly with little or not
sanction.
Many view academic freedom as a kind of sacred, intrinsic value. I
think that Fish is closer to the truth in viewing it as a limited,
prudential institution that gives professors the discretion they need
to teach and research effectively, and to avoid retaliation for
expressing unpopular political views outside of class. However,
academic freedom should not be considered a blank check to shield our
teaching methods and research from all outside scrutiny.
References
1. http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/academic-freedom/
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
