Purely Academic

But 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.

Our society recognizes and defends academic freedom not for the benefit of professors but for the benefit of all. There have been in the past and are still today universities where there is no academic freedom. In the former Soviet Union, the state prescribed what would be taught, what could be published and what research was allowed. The result was a passive citizenry and a stultified research program. It is not coincidental that academic freedom came into its own in Europe along with the emergence of political and religious freedom, the spread of democracy, the burgeoning of science and the articulation of a liberal approach to thought. They all go together as the intellectual authority of the state and of the church are replaced by the authority of reason, argument and evidence.

The loss of academic freedom would impose a high cost on the future of our society, even if most people are not aware of it today. Ironically, at a time when the public is questioning whether academic freedom has gone too far, this essential freedom stands in greater need than ever of public support.

Author's e-mail: degeorge@ku.edu

Richard De George is university distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas and author of "Academic Freedom and Tenure: Ethical Issues" (Rowman and Littlefield).