In Defense of Academic Freedom
CounterPunch, CA Weekend Edition
An Open Letter to the Regents of the University of Colorado on Ward Churchill
By GARY LEUPP
Dear Steve Ludwig, Cindy Carlisle, Patricia Hayes, Michael Carrigan, Tom Lucero, Steve Bosley, Kyle Hybl, Paul Schauer, and Tillie Bishop: I don’t envy your position as regents of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
On the one hand I envy the attainments that result in your serving on a Board of Regents. I myself am a mere professor of history. On the other hand, I do not envy your sitting on a board asked to produce a landmark decision in the history of academic freedom in this country.
That burden I believe is what is on your desk right now. A very weighty decision that places the deciders in the limelight.
As I understand the history of my vocation, scholars once got together, formed academic institutions, doubled as classroom teachers and administrators and built institutions of learning. At some point a professional managerial stratum emerged to facilitate the scholar’s classroom work, freeing up the scholar’s time by providing needed auxiliary services. As the college or university became more like a corporation, boards like yours emerged and wound up making or least approving the main decisions affecting academic life. Since then there’s always been an uneasy balance between “faculty governance” and the administrators’ role.
Professors, once masters of their institutions, became more like employees in a firm. Some people think that’s how it should be, or that it should be more and more like that. A favorite target for them, as you know, is the institution of tenure which operates to strengthen the faculty role. Some think professors ought to be judged on the product they produce, and how much of it they produce—for their employers (who, again, weren’t even there initially). They should be graded on how many tuition-paying students they attract to the institution, how big their enrollments are, how well they contribute to corporate America by influencing young minds to better contribute to that America and its global ambitions.
Some would like to apply an ideological litmus test to us academic employees: they might for example suppose that all professors, just to assume their positions in society, ought to agree and actively propagate that the U.S. is the best country in the world, its capitalist system generally admirable (maybe even “the end of history”), its history (while containing some unfortunate aspects) generally inspirational, its wars if sometimes mistaken always undertaken with honorable motives. There are some commentators hostile to us for being disproportionately irreligious, disinclined to believe with the majority of Americans in the literal truth of Bible stories, much more likely to understand science within the matrix of the theory of evolution, far less likely than the population at large to believe the government when it offers its explanation for its wars. But maybe we do that precisely because of our educational backgrounds. [more]