What, Where, When, How?

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

--Bacon

All Freedom is academic.

--Pogo

The faith of the U.S. university is that free trade in ideas leads to knowledge and wisdom. That this concept is flourishing was clear at the recent 49th annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors in San Francisco. Yet academic freedom remains a vexed issue because the ideals work out in practice as a tough position on the part of the professors: that colleges shall not fire professors who profess to be seeking truth, even when the professor's "truth" diametrically opposes everyone else's.

This sort of freedom goes well beyond every man's constitutional right of free speech, and is too lofty to be confused, as it commonly is by whiny teachers or muddled newspapers, with lesser liberties of the profession. Academic freedom cannot properly be employed to license oddball behavior, or give special sanction to a teacher's statements when made off campus or outside his field. It does not excuse incompetence, or exempt professors from criticism.

Yet these distinctions make the central concept all the stronger. Columbia's Physicist Isidor I. Rabi defines academic freedom as "the right to knowledge and the free use thereof." It is every professor's responsibility "to discover, speak and teach the truth, however difficult and unpopular this may be to others," says the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina. "One cannot search for the truth with a closed mind or without the right to question and doubt at every step," says University of Chicago President George Beadle, who in his time has found a lot of truth.

Pressure & Conformity. Academic freedom has two historic liens on it in the U.S. Most U.S. colleges were founded by churches, and dogma long kept a restraining hand on evidential inquiry. Then came state universities, dominated by legislatures and Governors, who control the purse strings. Vulnerable to doctrinal or political pressures, professors have been fired for views on everything from slavery and secession to Darwin and free silver to sex and Cuba.

This outside pressure creates an inside pressure: academic conformity among thousands of bystanding professors. Historian Russell Kirk has denounced the academic community's "voluntary conformity to pragmatic smugness and the popular shibboleths of the day." In the words of a Stanford professor, "No one wants the boat rocked, and freedom with responsibility usually means keeping your mouth shut."

The average U.S. professor is no Socrates. In the face of possible wrath or ridicule, he tends to retreat to "safe" positions. By such faculty flinching, everyone is cheated. Who knows what the world loses, wrote John Stuart Mill, in "the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral"--or subversive or even Philistine?

Ground Rules. To embolden the many by safeguarding the few is a basic A.A.U.P. purpose. In its current statement of principles, made jointly with the Association of American Colleges, it sets the ground rules of academic freedom. Though master of his classroom, the teacher should avoid "controversial matter which has no relation to his subject." Though free to speak up outside the classroom, "he should remember that the public may judge his profession and his institution by his utterances." He should be accurate, respectful of other opinions, and "make every effort to indicate that he is not an institutional spokesman."

In return, A.A.U.P. expects a teacher to get tenure after a probationary period of not more than seven years. He should then be fired "only for adequate cause," such as incompetence or moral turpitude, as judged by a faculty committee and the college governing board, with disputes settled in face-to-face hearings with a defense counsel present.

When a school fires a teacher seemingly without "due process," A.A.U.P.'s "Committee A" (academic freedom and tenure) launches a finecomb investigation. Full details are published in the A.A.U.P. Bulletin. Members may then be asked to vote for censure, which repels not only job seekers, but also such donors as big philanthropic foundations. At its San Francisco meeting, A.A.U.P. swelled the blacklist to 15 campuses, from Pennsylvania's Grove City College (no hearing) to Tennessee's Fisk University (no separation pay). "Once a school gets on our censured list," says A.A.U.P.'s General Counsel, Harvard Law Professor Clark Byse, "it really wants off."

"Commonly Accepted." To some harried college presidents, these limits seem painfully binding. It is hard to get rid of the tenured professor who coasts along, or writes twaddle in letters to newspapers and lends himself to embarrassing causes while riding on the institution's name. Even incompetence is difficult to prove; a side effect of academic freedom is that college presidents do not feel entitled to go into classrooms to check on professorial performance.

Where faculty freedom flourishes, professors who get fired are usually guilty of some act so flagrant that the president believes he can make the ouster stick. In 1960, University of Illinois President David D. Henry fired Biologist Leo F. Koch after Koch wrote a letter to the campus newspaper backing premarital sex among students. Said Koch: "With modern contraceptives and medical advice readily available at the nearest drugstore, or at least a family physician, there is no valid reason why sexual intercourse should not be condoned among those sufficiently mature to engage in it without social consequences and without violating their own codes of morality and ethics."

When parents howled in protest, President Henry bounced the professor (now a teacher in a San Francisco prep school) without a hearing on the ground that his views were "contrary to commonly accepted standards of morality." The academic senate unanimously voted to reprimand Koch--but not to fire him. A.A.U.P. censured Illinois on the ground that Koch got no due process. Committee A's investigators also pictured a great university as ideally "an enlightened and lively center of investigation and controversy," and urged that Illinois be scolded for trying to hold a professor to "commonly accepted" morality.

Citizen v. Scholar. A.A.U.P.'s rating of professorial freedom to teach and discuss politics is well up from the McCarthy era, but the association's respected president, Princeton Economist Fritz Machlup, questions some limitations left over from then. In relating national loyalty to scholarly integrity, he wants to keep clear the distinction between citizenship and scholarship. As citizens, professors must obey the law like everyone else, but as scholars, "professors have only one obligation: to search for truth and speak the truth as they see it."

How about the accepted view that a Communist professor is automatically dishonest and thus unfit to teach? "The fundamental principle of American justice," says Machlup, is "that guilt is personal and cannot be proved by opinion or association; we cannot make party membership a decisive criterion." If the Communist is demonstrably dishonest, he must go. Then, suppose he honestly preaches totalitarianism? "If we silence him," says Machlup, "then we have actually abrogated freedom of speech, whereas he has merely talked about doing so."

Not all scholars insist on carrying the ideal of freedom this far. In 1953, Yale's President A. Whitney Griswold argued in a landmark statement that a professor must have both "integrity and independence" and the "affirmative obligation of being diligent and loyal in citizenship." Captive scholarship was just as far from his mind as from Machlup's, but he meant to make it clear that professors must defend the country in time of danger.

Fashions in Courage. In academic freedom, there seem to be fashions in courage, based inversely on how bad things get. So it goes in the South, which last year accounted for 23 of the A.A.U.P.'s 55 outstanding cases of academic freedom. This year the ratio is significantly down: 18 out of 68. But things are still not all rosy, particularly at Negro colleges, where state officials have hounded integrationist teachers and students.

One reason for progress is the power of the A.A.U.P. blacklist to keep away potential professors just when the South is crying for them. Another reason is the lesson of Ole Miss, where Classicist William Willis reports that segregationist "screaming" no longer scares anyone. "The faculty speaks much more freely now than it did last September," says Willis. "Oh, students still report professors to the local Citizens Council. But all we get are a few harassing phone calls." The point is clear: "A substantial portion of the faculty found that by exercising academic freedom, they have it."

That point has occurred to many other Southern professors, who elect to carry on instead of fleeing North like their colleagues. "The place to fight for a principle," says Iredell Jenkins, philosophy professor at the University of Alabama, "is where it is a living issue, not where it is an accomplished fact, and still less where it has become a mere object of sanctimonious self-congratulations."

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