Like all liberal rights, academic freedom cuts both ways politically. Much of the controversy that it engenders is a function of one side wanting to claim as its exclusive property a right that by its very nature is two-sided. The growth of the alt-right in the wake of Trump’s election and the return of arguments over political correctness (first time tragedy, second time farce) to North American campuses has made a public issue of what in less fraught times would be studiously ignored by everyone outside of academia.
In Canada, the main fault line today is the University of Toronto, and in particular Psychology Professor Jordan Peterson’s one man campaign against pronouns. Cloaking himself in the mantle of “science,” he has argued that there are no biological or social grounds for using genderless pronouns when referring to trans people, and has accused his opponents of violating academic freedom in their critical responses to his position. Recently, he has upped the ante. Building on his popularity as an alt-right icon, he has promised to start a web site to expose left-wing “cult” classes on campus. As he told CBC radio:
“We’re going to start with a website in the next month and a half that will be designed to help students and parents identify post-modern content in courses so that they can avoid them,” he told CTV’s Your Morning in August.
“I’m hoping that over about a five-year period a concerted effort could be made to knock the enrolment down in postmodern neo-Marxist cult classes by 75 per cent across the West. So our plan initially is to cut off the supply to the people that are running the indoctrination cults.”
[Colleagues at the University of Toronto are alarmed. Not only is this a gross failure of collegiality– we are supposed to criticize each other but not call each other names and try to destroy one another’s classes– but they are also worried– legitimately– that in the ionized political atmosphere that prevails today, being singled out on this website could make them the targets of violence. I will leave these legitimate concerns to one side and use the example as a lens to examine the real meaning and value of academic freedom].
So, parents, before you start worrying that your child will go to U of T and come home next Thanksgiving in saffron robes singing hymns to Lord Krishna, let me decode Prof. Peterson’s invective. “Post-modern” was a term that was au courant when I was graduate student, more than 20 years ago. Today, um, not so much. “Neo-marxist” is even older. Its referent– if it ever really had one– would be figures like Herbert Marcuse who, in the 1960s, tried to re-formulate Marx’s critique of capitalism to account for the ways in which the working class had been absorbed into the system. So his terms of abuse are a bit out of date, but hey, he is a psychologist and not a practitioner of the dark arts of Anthropology or English literature (two disciplines which have, according to the good doctor, been taken over by cult leaders).
What actually troubles him is that some disciplines have the temerity to challenge the authority of empirical science, to expose its historical entanglements with very unscientific hierarchies of power, and to defend interpretive approaches to the problem of truth that take into account self-understanding, context, culture, and history. In other words, students in these classes have the opportunity to think critically– the very opposite of cultish indoctrination.
Supporters of Peterson will say that academic freedom gives him the right to expose what he regards as unscientific dogma; his critics can rejoin that academic freedom gives them the right to teach methods and content critical of the western canon and natural science. The truth is that academic freedom gives both sides the right (subject to key limitations that I will discuss below) to make whatever arguments they think need making. Like the right to free speech, academic freedom is a formal right that protects the expression, in an academic context, of politically opposed positions. Attempts to capture it by either the left or the right will always fail, because it protects expression, not content.
In order to understand academic freedom as well as its real value and importance, it is important that we not treat it as an abstract value but as a collective agreement right. Academic freedom does not appear in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While it might usefully be thought of as a species of free speech, the only documents that formally assert it and are able to protect it are faculty collective agreements (and, sometimes, University Senate by-laws). Here are the relevant clauses from the Collective agreement between my Faculty Association and the administration of the University of Windsor:
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10:02 Each member shall be free in the choice and pursuit of research consistent with the objectives and purposes of the University and in the publication of the results, subject only to the normally expected level of performance of her/his other duties and responsibilities.
10:03 Each member shall have freedom of discussion. However, in the exercise of this freedom in the classroom, reasonable restraint shall be used in introducing matters unrelated to her/his subject. The University shall not require conformity to any religious beliefs, doctrines or practices.
10:04 The University shall not impose supervision or other restraints upon, nor will it assume responsibility for, what is said or written by a member acting as a private citizen. However, as a person of learning she/he shall exercise good judgment and shall make it clear that she/he is not acting as a spokesperson for the University.
As should be clear, the main purpose of academic freedom is not to protect marginalized political positions of whatever ideological stripe, but rather to ensure that research and teaching are unconstrained by administrative, economic, or political power. The relevant contrast is not between left and right, but between truth and power: academic freedom is necessary because the discovery of truths depends upon the free exercise of intellect, including its critical exercise against any and all authorities who would try to block the dissemination of certain truths that undermine their legitimacy.
The main threat to academic freedom is university administrations themselves, and the social, political, and economic forces that batter at the walls of the university demanding that research and teaching serve their interests. That said, academic freedom itself protects Marxist economists and business professors, radical feminists and defenders of traditional marriage, nationalist historians of the First World War and post-colonial critics of imperialism. So long as there are competing political positions in society they will be represented in academia. All attempts of one side or the other to use academic freedom to de-legitimate the other side contradict the very value to which they appeal.
That said, there are two very good reasons for social critics to defend academic freedom even though it also protects the right of their opponents to attack them. First of all, alt-right fantasies aside, the university is not ruled by neo-marxist cultists. Boards of Governors are stuffed with business people, and senior administrators increasingly identify their role with that of a CEO. While there are a few dogmatic leftists teaching, there are no neo-marxist cultists running universities. Ordinary market forces are a much bigger threat to the existence of Anthropology and English Literature than Peterson’s website will ever be. The totalitarian drum beat of jobs, jobs. jobs, abetted by administrators who design budgets that de-fund the arts and humanities (as well as basic research in the sciences) in favour of commodifiable research, are rapidly shifting the university away from social criticism and toward conformity with money imperatives. Academic freedom can be an important value basis for the critique of institutional degeneration.
Second, the left has to learn how to win arguments again. We need to convince opponents that the world is wrong and stop being satisfied with patting each other on the back for our moral purity. That means a willingness to engage the intellectual enemy and prove that we have more coherent and comprehensive understandings of the world, that we can expose their contradictions and one-sided constructions, and that we have a convincing program that can build multi-faceted majority support.
The only real and legitimate constraint on academic freedom is the truth that our research and teaching ought to serve. Where there are contrary positions, both cannot be true, but to decide between them generally requires argument. Argument is not ad hominem insult; criticism is not dogmatic rejection of whole fields of social and cultural research. Moreover, truth is not the preserve of the natural sciences. To be sure, natural scientific understanding of the elements and laws of material reality are of essential importance, both as intrinsically valuable achievements of the human mind, and also as essential contributors to collective health and well-being. But science does not exist in a Platonic realm of ideas free from political and economic power. Nor are the laws of material nature sufficient to understand human history, society, and culture. There is no value free way to study values, and no way to fully understand human history, society, and culture without studying values. That ensures that there will be disagreement. Academic freedom is essential to ensuring that those disagreements are resolved by superior evidence, reasons, and argument, and not by campaigns to de-legitimate those disciplines with the historical competence to compile, evaluate, and articulate the evidence.