WHAT ACADEMIC FREEDOM
MEANS
Abraham Sarmiento, Jr.
1975-1976
The argument is strong enough that on
matters of student concern, the administration must not fail to consult the students. That
is one lesson, the truth of which clear notions of fair play would have been enough to
drive home, without the recent sorties against authority which participants in the recent
Rollback Movements found effective.
But to found it unqualifiedly upon academic
freedom as one other supposed inherent right of the students, is error that should not be
made, if only to avoid disparaging attacks from the authorities that the vocal critics
among the students do not know what they are talking about.
Often used as the concept may have been,
academic freedom is obscured by the failure of the to distinguish between collective and
individual liberty. To claim that academic freedom pertains to the students and as such
may be raised against the authorities is only partly right. To claim exactly the opposite,
that it belongs to the university and not to the students, shares the same deficiency.
Academic freedom, the enjoyment of which by
all institutions of higher learning is guaranteed by the constitution, pertains to the
university as an institution. What is removed by one hand from state regulation, and by
the other, granted to the university, that it may transmit by critical teaching higher
education and create an atmosphere conducive to scholarship, is academic freedom. It
consists in the right of the university to determine who may teach, what may be taught,
how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.
But academic freedom has also its personal
aspect. Though not guaranteed by special constitutional provisions, it is, if properly
viewed, a limited field of the more general freedoms of speech and press. In a
questionably over-narrow treatment, academic freedom of the scholar as distinguished from
academic freedom of the university, has been limited to the freedom of the teacher or the
student to inquire into the problems of his science and to impart his findings either
through publication or instruction without interference from the authorities, unless the
scholars of his own profession finds his method professionally unethical or incompetent.
But it has a broader scope than that. In
supplanting outmoded ideas with new ones, the status of the scholar as an academician is
irresponsible from his status as citizen. One is at least as important as the other, and
in considering academic freedom, both are as important as the status of the university.
There is too much truth in society that
will be left unexposed if the academic freedom to seek and to express the truth as one
personally sees it is unduly limited to the confines of laboratory walls. And to so
construe the concept as a right pertaining to the university as an institution and not to
the scholar as well is plain confusion.
Arguments are understood and refutable
least when words are not given their accepted meaning, and convenient shifts in meaning
made as often as arguments are threatened with refutation make the resolutions of conflict
unduly postponed. |
