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
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.
