Academic Freedom and Pluralism
Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition.
by Russell Kirk.
Regnery. 210 pp. $3.75.
The central proposition of Russell Kirk’s brief but valuable book on academic freedom is that academic freedom is part of the natural law, “and if theorists deny the reality of natural law, logically they must deny the reality of academic freedom.” According to the conception of natural law that Mr. Kirk espouses, society is composed of groups of people with specialized jobs to do, and each group has certain rights and responsibilities arising from and appropriate to the nature of its job. Academic freedom is the name for the rights appropriate to that group in society who devote their lives to study and teaching. Since it is the responsibility of the scholar to discover the truth, and of the teacher to instruct others in it, he must have the freedom to fulfill his responsibility. No one, however, has more than a courtesy right to participate in academic freedom who does not believe in the natural law which sanctions it. Since academic freedom is a kind of “benefit of clergy,” the non-cleric can hardly expect to enjoy its protection.
Mr. Kirk’s first line of defense for this position is historical. He discusses Plato’s Academy as an early example of academic freedom, and quotes from the Apology of Socrates. But the Apology is not a defense of academic freedom; Socrates makes that clear at the outset. Emphatically and repeatedly he denies “that he is a teacher, and takes money.” In this conjunction of ideas he puts his finger right on the issue. Whatever else academic freedom may be, it is a professional right, a right to accept payment for services while maintaining some independence of judgment about how those services are to be executed. Whether Socrates favored academic freedom is not clear from the Apology, but certainly he did not claim it for himself. He defended his right to free speech, which both Mr. Kirk and I think is a different thing from academic freedom.
Far more central to Mr. Kirk’s argument from history is his opinion that the modern idea of academic freedom derives from the medieval university. This is of the greatest importance to his position, since the medieval university was the home of that conception of natural law which he considers the only sound philosophical basis for a defense of academic freedom. If it can be demonstrated that academic freedom comes out of the medieval university, that it has been for centuries symbiotically linked with natural law, and that the two ideas come to us in direct historical continuity from the Middle Ages, then his position must be taken very seriously.
But Mr. Kirk does not demonstrate this. In the brief compass of his book so much could scarcely be expected, but Mr. Kirk ought to be expected to do more than he has done. The line of descent he traces for academic freedom from the Middle Ages to 20th-century America seems to be mostly missing links. His description of the institutional framework of the medieval university is too sketchy to enable the reader to find out if key elements of academic freedom—tenure, for instance—were in force. He does not discuss, indeed he does not even cite, a single specific instance of how a problem involving academic freedom was handled in a medieval university.
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The more usual historical view is that the idea of academic freedom derives from Germany and from a period well after the close of the Middle Ages. Arthur O. Lovejoy puts the evidence for this view succinctly in his admirable article on academic freedom in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, and Mr. Kirk’s attempt to dispose of it by claiming that American professors did not accurately understand what academic freedom meant in Germany is not to the point. To say that American professors misunderstood the idea as it was held in Germany is not to deny that they got it from there, and Professor Lovejoy is too careful and too experienced an historian of ideas for his conclusions to be brushed aside as a misunderstanding. This much seems to be indisputable: it was only after American universities began to feel the influence of German universities (about 1870) that academic freedom began to be talked about in this country. Mr. Kirk has various ingenious ways of accounting for such a delay in the discussion of an idea that he regards as continuous from the Middle Ages, but certainly the view that the idea came from Germany looks more convincing by the usual standards of historiography.
Investigation of the origin of academic freedom is by no means idle. Like others interested in its defense, I would rather find its origin in the medieval universities than in the German universities of later date, because I would rather think that it led to the atmosphere of modern Oxford and Cambridge than to the atmosphere of the German universities of the 30’s. But history is not whatever we wish it to be, and if the idea of academic freedom comes to us from Germany we shall be doing ourselves no service by pretending that it comes from some other source; because we ought then to recognize, for our own good, that the idea may contain within itself the possibility of abdication of moral responsibility, and be on our guard against it. My own, not very well-informed guess is that the contemporary idea of academic freedom has several sources, and that this multiplicity of sources contributes a good deal to the vigor of the idea at the same time that it complicates the problems of defining, applying, and defending it.
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Mr. Kirk’s second line of defense for his position is philosophical. In a sense, the philosophical defense of academic freedom based on natural law is incontrovertible. It is impossible to study anything, to teach anything, or for that matter to lead our lives without assuming that nature—whether the nature that surrounds us or the nature that is ourselves—exhibits some kind of regularity that can be called, however roughly, natural law. And academic freedom certainly derives from that assumption. There would be no reason to be free to study and teach if nothing could be studied or taught, and nothing could be studied or taught if we were random beings in a random universe.
If Mr. Kirk based his defense of academic freedom on the concept of natural law just described we would have to agree with him that to deny the reality of natural law is to deny the reality of academic freedom. But in fact what Mr. Kirk means by natural law is a particular historical formulation of moral principles which many members of the academic community can no longer embrace. While Mr. Kirk tends to be a natural-law fundamentalist, believing, like the religious fundamentalist, that the whole of revelation is contained in the ancient documents, they tend to be committed to a belief in progressive revelation, a belief that we can discover more of nature’s laws than our ancestors knew. Since they hold such a belief, they attach great importance to standards of procedure, the means by which they hope to make discoveries, and, in order to be true to themselves, they must in turn measure the discoveries of the past by the same standards. To a man of Mr. Kirk’s persuasion all this is likely to seem an impious concern with mere methodology to the neglect of principle, but those that I would call the best modern scholars and teachers do not make such a distinction between means and ends; they do not expect their results to receive any sanction that is not implicit in their methods.
Probably the most important difference between Mr. Kirk’s position and the position that seems to me to prevail in the academic world is this: he believes (I infer) that the natural moral law is finished and complete and beyond the need of traffic with natural physical law, while a good many of us in academic life believe that there ought to be a continuous exchange between the two. To take a simple example: for many centuries left-handedness was considered morally reprehensible in our society, as it still is in much of the world. When I was a boy I was told by an old lady that any mother ought to be ashamed of herself who would let a child of hers grow up left-handed. I have no doubt that the old lady (who was no fool) would have defended her position on grounds of natural law: the right hand is simply the natural hand to use. But now most mothers would no more regard the handedness of a child as a moral problem than they would regard the size of his feet as one. The reason for this is that a considerable body of research has increased and altered our knowledge of the “natural laws” of handedness.
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Mr. Kirk’s book is marred by several errors of fact, and by exaggerations and inconsistencies. Many of these lapses are of little consequence to his main argument; some result from haste, and others arise from the impatience with qualification that often accompanies a vigorous and aphoristic style. One line of reasoning is in serious error. In the second chapter Mr. Kirk tries, unfairly and unpersuasively, to make progressive education and the ideas of Sidney Hook and John Dewey on the subject of democracy responsible for a particular piece of academic misbehavior. And how Mr. Kirk can think that he has disposed of progressive education in a chapter in which he never discusses the subject escapes the most attentive reader.
Yet for all that I remain finally unconvinced by Mr. Kirk’s historical account of academic freedom, for all that I regard his philosophical position as too narrow and (as he would say) too doctrinaire, for all that I am annoyed by occasional inaccuracies, when I called his book valuable at the beginning of this review I meant it. I think the book makes a major contribution to the discussion of academic freedom in this country.
For one thing, it is all written out of conviction, conviction based upon wide reading, considerable first-hand investigation, and (usually) careful thought. Mr. Kirk provides a moral force where one is needed. He has formulated a conservative position on academic freedom that is a challenge not only to other conservatives but to all who are concerned for the subject. He has reminded the conservative of his role in defending academic freedom, and in fact placed upon him the chief burden for its future care. If the academic world has concentrated on breaking the tyranny of the past where the past was mistaken, at the expense of reaffirming those values in the past that have stood the test of time, Mr. Kirk provides a powerful reminder that the balance needs to be redressed.
There are many admirable passages in Mr. Kirk’s book. His rebuttal of William F. Buckley’s position on academic freedom is a model of analysis, charitable but incisive, terse but thorough. Though Mr. Kirk’s manners fail him sometimes, as when he speaks of Professor Commager, he is nearly always an astute critic of previous writers on the subject. Some of the accounts of particular instances where academic freedom has been allegedly violated are equally good. I doubt that a better brief relation of the principles involved in the California controversy over the teachers’ oath has been or can be written.
On the subject of the Communist teacher Mr. Kirk writes very intelligently. He recognizes that the defender of academic freedom cannot supply a simple yes or no answer to the question, “Should Communists be permitted to teach?” because the defender of academic freedom supports a whole context of values that makes him pose other and prior questions: Who is making the decision about a particular Communist teacher, the responsible officers of the educational establishment or political figures? On what grounds is the decision being made? What procedures have been employed? What rights are involved? Has the question of quality—the quality of the teacher’s assent or dissent, the quality of the man himself—been regarded? And so on. On this whole subject Mr. Kirk takes a sensible position, and incidentally one considerably more latitudinarian than many writers otherwise well to his left have taken. Mr. Kirk believes, as I do, that academic freedom may be worth the price of some abuse of it.
Unlike many writers on academic freedom, Mr. Kirk is aware that we have a system of educational pluralism in this country, and it is a tribute to the accuracy of his insight, if not to the consistency of his argument, that he is an ardent champion of such pluralism. Because he knows and values the differences among our educational establishments, Mr. Kirk is saved from the common error of defenders of academic freedom, the supposition that they can talk about academic freedom in “the college” as if the history and purpose and problems of every college were exactly the same as those of every other college. At the same time, Mr. Kirk does not for a moment suppose that academic freedom is whatever the president or trustees of a particular college choose to call by that name. Academic pluralism very considerably complicates the problem of defining academic freedom, but the reality of academic freedom would be very considerably lessened if our academic pluralism were lost.
Perhaps no other single contribution Mr. Kirk makes is so valuable as his emphasis on the importance in academic freedom of academic dignity and, by implication, academic trust. Too often earnest defenders of academic freedom speak as if the academic community were full of Einsteins about to be prevented by Grand Inquisitors from announcing intellectual discoveries of the greatest magnitude. This tends to make the whole idea of academic freedom ridiculous, because anyone can glance at the academic community and see that it is not full of Einsteins. The rights of the Einsteins and the potential Einsteins must be looked to, of course, but so must the day-to-day rights of the mass of teachers, including the right to be treated as dignified and trusted members of a community of learning. Mr. Kirk recognizes that academic freedom ought not to be only a code by which the academic community can defend itself against depredators from without, but that it should also be a code by which members of the academic community can live together in seemliness.
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