Who's Afraid of Academic Freedom?

by Akeel Bilgrami (Editor), Jonathan R. Cole (Editor)

In these seventeen essays, distinguished senior scholars discuss the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinize a variety of obstacles to such inquiry that they have encountered in their personal and professional experience. Their discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to speech codes, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, political pressure groups, and government policy, as well as phenomena of high generality, such as intellectual orthodoxy, in which coercion is barely visible and often self-imposed.

As the editors say in their "No freedom can be taken for granted, even in the most well-functioning of formal democracies. Exposing the tendencies that undermine freedom of inquiry and their hidden sources and widespread implications is in itself an exercise in and for democracy."

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy

448 pages, Hardcover

First published February 10, 2015

About the author

Akeel Bilgrami [(born 1950)] is an Indian-born philosopher of language and of mind, and the author of Belief and Meaning, Self-Knowledge and Resentment, and Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity (forthcoming), as well as various articles in Philosophy of Mind as well as in Political and Moral Psychology. Some of his articles in these latter subjects speak to issues of current politics in their relation to broader social and cultural issues. He has also increasingly joined debates in the pages of larger-circulation periodicals such as The New York Review of Books and The Nation. He has two upcoming books, "What is a Muslim?" and "Gandhi the Philosopher". Bilgrami is currently the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York.

Bilgrami received a degree in English Literature from Bombay University before switching to philosophy. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, leaving with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. He earned his Ph.D from the University of Chicago with a dissertation titled "Belief and Meaning", focusing on Michael Dummett's critique of realist accounts of meaning and on the indeterminacy of translation, in which he argues in support of Donald Davidson's thesis that meaning is a form of invariance between underdetermined theories of meaning. (He was supervised by Davidson while at Chicago.) He has been in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University since 1985 after spending two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Bilgrami is a secularist and an atheist who advocates an understanding of the community-oriented dimension of religion. For Bilgrami spiritual yearnings are not only understandable but also supremely human. He has argued in many essays that in our modern world, "religion is not primarily a matter of belief and doctrine but about the sense of community and shared values it provides in contexts where other forms of solidarity—such as a strong labor movement—are missing."

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley.

The term Academic Freedom is hardly a new one as this collection of essays makes quite clear. The term, however, is perhaps getting more of a workout along with the word bias today than it used to. From students complaining about teachers using only liberal reading material to teachers complaining about being silenced by students and trustees.

The truth is that murky line that always seems to be shifting, but really isn’t.

I went to a college run by nuns. It was (and is) a great school. I learned to speak in class, and I learned that just because you were conservative in some beliefs didn’t mean you had to be conservative in all beliefs.

In short, religion class taught by a former nun who believed in the church except for that bit about no female priests.

And you haven’t lived until you have seen a nun search for the French word for nymphomaniac.

On a more serious level, I knew of someone who had been talked down to in a sociology class (not taught by a nun) because she wanted to take her husband’s name upon marriage. More recently, I have seen flyers telling teachers to make it an assignment for students to go a protest something. I noticed that at one faculty computer room posting political posters and messages was fine, provided the message was in support of one political party. It was only when other political poster and flyers, promoting views of other parties were post that it became an issue – with the other parties have the posters torn down.

So I tend to find myself on the fence with the whole college and Academic Freedom issue. Teachers should be able to teach without the fear of interfere, and they should be able to challenge students and students’ views. Teachers should, however, also be aware of other views, especially about issues that are opinion based. In other words, grading a student based on the student’s belief that abortion is evil is wrong. Truth be told, what evidence I have of teachers doing that is second hand, a somebody told me, type of a thing.

And this book promotes that view of Academic Freedom. But does it also do that at the appearance of bias? The authors of the various essays in this collection all seem to have given serious thought to professor but also students. Several essays deal with the difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech and indoctrination. Granted this is a collection of essays for academics by academics and lawyers, but why is there a lack of essays from a possible student perspective (or even trustees)? The inclusion of such an essay would make the book a bit more balanced and at the very least do quickly away with those critics who are going to claim it is little more than a liberal left wing piece.

Which is a shame because it isn’t.

This collection of essays traces not only Academic in its modern context (so yes, Ward Churchill is mentioned and dealt with) but also the history of Academic Freedom as well as the reason why we need it. Furthermore, the difference between Academic Freedom and indoctrination, manipulation, abuse of power, is deftly shown several times.

And that’s important because too often the terms get confused and caught up in argument. Few people in the media who actually talk about the issue take the time to define the terms, and this book does definition extremely well. The essays range from the legal view to the professor view. The most interesting (and perhaps most limited) is the inclusion of a case study on professors and Academic Freedom as applied to students. (It would have been more interesting and less limited if it applied to more campuses. I also want to know if there is a difference based on where the college or university is located or what type it is).

The book is also timely in the sense that a reader can start to see connection between Academic Freedom and the current “review wars”. Both beggar the question – “can’t we deal with conflicting opinions?”

[Craig Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a thought-provoking collection of essays on the subject of academic freedom. The focus, though, is rather narrowly American.

[Jón Ólafsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a useful and diverse collection of papers around the important but in many ways confused issue of academic freedom. Especially interesting I find the link made in some of the papers (Bilgrami, Elster) between academic freedom/unfreedom and various kinds of academic dishonesty.

[Mills College Library]

378.1213 W6286 2015