The Vanderbilt-WashU Report Doesn’t Threaten Academic Freedom. It Defends it.

Who should intervene when scholarship turns political? The AAUP had answers.

The chancellors of Vanderbilt and WashU recently charged a national committee of disciplinary experts to assess the state of scholarship in the humanities. The committee’s Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences found that humanistic disciplines have become increasingly politicized, with some whole fields substituting political criteria for scholarly ones.

The Report, and the follow-up disciplinary reports now being issued, raise uncomfortable questions for professors and for university leaders alike. Are there limits to professors’ freedom to conduct research and teach courses however they think best? Do university leaders dare intervene if scholarship becomes excessively politicized?

Some professors see the Report as a new line of attack on academic freedom. At Vanderbilt and WashU, the leaders of the faculty chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) write that the Report: “proposes a shocking intrusion of university administration into faculty governance and portends greater threats to academic freedom that should concern all faculty.”

However, academic freedom does not prevent university leaders from reforming wayward scholarship. Indeed, if professors abandon scholarly norms to pursue purely political projects, university leaders may have a duty to intervene.

Perhaps surprisingly, this duty of intervention is set out in the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure — the classic defense of academic freedom, written by the founders of the AAUP.

The post-Civil War era saw an explosion of new colleges across America — many founded by patrons with narrow purposes or idiosyncratic goals. Governance questions loomed. Should a donor with theological commitments determine how biology is taught at his university? Should Jane Stanford dictate teaching at Stanford?

The AAUP’s founders said no — at least not at truth-seeking universities. Such universities, they argued, are a public trust. Not “public” in a democratic, head-count sense. But public in a sense that transcends the sectarian interests of any founder or donor. The primary purpose of the university is to advance human understanding, to teach, and to prepare citizens to live freely.

If a university’s function is truth-seeking, the experts doing the seeking — sociologists, cell biologists, Egyptologists — must be free to follow their studies wherever they lead. Professors have academic freedom. So university leaders operate under a strong principle of deference to the expert judgement of professors.

This part every professor knows. What gets overlooked is that the AAUP also set limits to academic freedom.

According to the 1915 Declaration, academic freedom is not a freestanding entitlement. It is a privilege grounded in specific professional responsibilities.

Thus, freedom of research only protects conclusions “gained by a scholar’s method and held in a scholar’s spirit.” In the classroom, the professors should “set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.” Students should encounter “the best published expressions of the great historical types of doctrine.” The professor’s business, in short, is to present students with a variety of views, so that they might think for themselves.

Scholars who retreat into an ideological monoculture — conducting research merely to serve political interests, assigning students one-sided readings, hiring only like-minded colleagues — abandon the duties that give academic freedom its life.

This is where university leaders come back in.

The 1915 Declaration does not simply raise the flag of academic freedom and tell university leaders to stand down. Instead, it pours the foundation for a system of shared governance. The university is a public trust. A share of responsibility for that trust is given to professors, in the form of academic freedom. But ultimate responsibility runs through the trustees to the people who oversee and govern academic life on a day-to-day basis: presidents, provosts, and deans.

Thus, the 1915 Report aims “to protect college executives and governing boards against unjust charges of infringement on academic freedom.” Ultimately, this involves university leaders in judging whether professors are fulfilling their academic duties. If not, university leaders may intervene without violating academic freedom.

This is not a license for university leaders to dictate research agendas or rewrite syllabi by fiat. Judgement requires discernment, dialogue, and, likely, push-back against external pressures. Judgement of this kind would also likely require expert advice from multiple sources — including sources such as the Vanderbilt-WashU Report.

From there, the range of action available to university leaders runs from gentle incentives — new prizes for open-minded teaching, special funding for neglected topics — to the creation of new centers and new hiring initiatives, to stronger interventions when existing units systematically violate their academic duties.

The professors who drafted the 1915 Declaration understood something that gets lost today: academic freedom is a privilege that only exists within a wider system of roles and responsibilities. Those responsibilities spring from the university’s public purpose: to seek knowledge.

So the real question facing professors in the wake of the Report is not whether they can go on teaching and conducting research however they like. The question is whether they are willing to remember their scholarly responsibilities and take steps to fulfill them.

So too, the question raised by the Report for university leaders is not whether they dare infringe on academic freedom. The question is whether university leaders will remember the public purpose of academic freedom, and do their part to preserve it.

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