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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
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7 occurrences of Dictionary of the History of Ideas
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I

Academic freedom is the liberty of thought which is
claimed by teachers and other elements of the educa-
tional community. While the claim to freedom of the
mind has a very long history—it was asserted in ancient
Athens, for example, by Socrates—academic freedom,
as the more specialized concern of the schools, is a
rather modern phenomenon, having been first recog-
nized in some of the universities of Western Europe
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emerging
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the university
in the medieval age was to a considerable extent an
autonomous corporate institution, but the master or
teacher was subject to powerful restraints, both internal
and external, and to the inhibiting force of authori-
tative tradition. Beginning with the founding of the
university at Leiden in 1575, academic freedom began


010

to take root in the Western world, albeit very slowly,
as a consequence of the gradual development of an
atmosphere of tolerance nurtured by the rise of reli-
gious, political, and economic liberalism, and the
growth of the so-called new sciences. Francis Bacon's
Advancement of Learning (1605) proclaimed the phil-
osophical underpinning of the case for freedom of
experimental inquiry with respect to the new sciences.
The fierce, destructive, sectarian religious and political
conflicts which characterized the struggle between the
Reformation and the Counter-Reformation led a deci-
mated and exhausted Western Europe to comprehend
the values of toleration. The steady growth of com-
merce, which, among other things, drew attention to
the desirable consequences of competitive enterprise,
together with the rise of the liberal state, led to the
emergence of a philosophy of knowledge which
stressed the basic contingency of ideas, and the utility
of testing the value of ideas, not in terms of the power
of those who espoused them, but rather in terms of
their capacity to stand up under the competition of
other ideas. There was a logical transition from the
competition of the marketplace to the competition of
ideas.

While academic freedom has by no means achieved
universal acceptance in the contemporary world, it is
accepted as the normal expectation in most countries
of Western Europe, with the exception of the dictator-
ships on the Iberian peninsula. It is not accepted by
the communist or communist-dominated countries in
Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia. It is significant
that academic freedom is regarded, at least in princi-
ple, as a necessary and desirable aspect of higher edu-
cation in many of the developing countries of Africa,
the Middle East, and the Far East. In the many coun-
tries where academic freedom is understood and re-
spected, however, there are two uses of the term which,
if not fundamentally different, seem to differ in their
points of emphasis. Thus, in Great Britain the term
generally refers to the freedom of the educational
institution as a whole from outside influences, political
or otherwise.

While this usage of the term is by no means unknown
in the United States, in America it almost invariably
refers to the freedom of the individual professor. Of
course, outside influences are often brought to bear
upon American colleges and universities, and the con-
cept of academic freedom requires the institution to
resist any attacks upon its freedom to act as a corporate
body. Nevertheless, in accordance with the individ-
ualistic tendency of the concept of rights in American
constitutional law, the claim to academic freedom is
generally stated and tested in terms of individual
teachers. Whatever may be the force of outside influ
ences, the concept holds that the institution has an
obligation to protect the rights of academic freedom
for all of its faculty members. Since the ultimate power
of control over an American college or university is
vested in its governing board, a dismissal in violation
of a professor's academic freedom simply cannot hap-
pen unless the board decrees it. It follows that in the
American system of higher education, responsibility for
protecting the academic freedom of teachers rests with
those who are legally in control of the institution, and
who have the power not only to condone violations
of that freedom, for example, by making improper
dismissals, but also the power to protect the faculty
against outside pressures and to defend their freedom.
American experience indicates that even though a
university may enjoy complete institutional autonomy,
so far as external pressures are concerned, it is still
possible for the university's administration to act in
a manner which is injurious to the faculty's claim to
academic freedom.