What Is Academic Freedom?

Is academic freedom in the U.S. really in danger? Absolutely, says rising young (36) Historian Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind)--but not alone for the reasons that most teachers seem to think. In his latest book, Academic Freedom (Henry Regnery; $3.75), Kirk points an accusing finger at the teaching profession itself. Some of freedom's most earnest champions, he writes, are actually gnawing away its roots.

One reason for this. Kirk holds, is that many a teacher does not begin to understand the true basis of academic freedom. It is not, as Philosopher Sidney Hook insists, a gift from the community, nor is it justified simply because it benefits society. "Academic freedom, in short, belongs to that category of rights called 'natural rights,' and is expressed in custom, not in statute." Plato's Academy "was not founded by the community, nor did it owe its primary allegiance to the community. It was instituted by private persons ... to enable them to pursue the Truth without being servants of an evanescent community. And this idea of intellectual freedom, the freedom of the Academy, has ever since been the model for all men trained in the classical disciplines."

Bearers of the Word. In their own way, the medieval universities carried on the tradition. Like Plato's Academy, they were free "because their allegiance was to the Truth, as it was given to them to perceive it, and not to the community." Far from smothering discussion, the Christian framework of these universities "encouraged disputation of a heat and intensity almost unknown in universities nowadays . . . They were free, these Schoolmen, free from external interference and free from a stifling internal conformity, because the whole purpose of the universities was the search after an enduring truth, beside which worldly aggrandizement was as nothing."

Today, says Kirk, the ancient notion that teachers are Bearers of the Word, servants only of the Truth, has fallen into disrepute. In place of Truth "derived from apprehension of an order more than natural or material," such scholars as John Dewey and Sidney Hook "early became attached to democracy as an ideal, and in time made democracy into an abstraction and an absolute, for lack of any other god."

But the new slogan, "Education for democracy," is a barren one, for democracy can work for evil as well as good. "Democracy is ... simply a means to certain ends . . . And those ends, Justice and Freedom, are in large measure the products of religious faith, of the religious conviction that the human person has dignity and rights because divine wisdom so ordained ... I do not think that academic freedom could long prosper under King Demos, if Democracy should succeed in casting off its religious sanctions."

Destroying Negative. Unfortunately, says Kirk, the fear of any dogma has led to a completely erroneous definition of academic freedom. Such "doctrinaire liberals" as Historian Henry Steele Commager and President Harold Taylor of Sarah Lawrence "think of the Academy as a place where professors, like the Sophists, talk perpetually of the impossibility of knowing anything with certitude, and the necessity for considering every point of view, and the need for being ever so liberal. These latter gentlemen put me in mind of Bacon's famous line: 'What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.'"

Professor Commager's theme that "everyone ought to dissent from everything for dissension's sake . . , is all a negation, praising liberty because liberty gives opportunity to demolish ancient things, and praising the Academy because the Academy may be utilized as a safe corner from which to dislodge the wisdom of our ancestors."

Kirk is no man to deny that the U.S. university has plenty of tormentors from the right, both in and out of Congress. But "whatever constriction of academic freedom may have come to pass in recent years because of timidity about expressing political opinions, this loss is very small in comparison with the diminution of true freedom of the intellect through a deadening but voluntary conformity to pragmatic smugness and the popular shibboleths of the day ... If the Academy is to preserve its liberties ... it must be defended by men loyal to transcendent values."

But to what values precisely?

"To the proposition that the end of education is the elevation of the reason of the human person, for the human person's own sake.

"To the proposition that the higher imagination is better than the sensate triumph.

"To the proposition that the fear of God, and not the mastery over man and nature, is the object of learning . . .

"To the proposition, Socratic and Christian, that the unexamined life is not worth living.

"If the Academy holds by these propositions, not all the force of Caesar can break down its walls; but if the Academy is bent upon sneering at everything in heaven and earth, or upon reforming itself after the model of the market place, not all the eloquence of the prophets can save it."

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