The academic freedom behind American freedom
Today is July 4th, Independence Day in the United States. Historically, it’s a day that we celebrate the Declaration of Independence from England. But since the first celebrations in 1776 to today, the date has come to represent a celebration of freedom itself. And while the United States is by no means a perfectly free place, there’s still a lot to celebrate relative to past centuries of human civilization: in principle, I’m free to speak what I want, free to believe what I want, and free to do what I want, as long as it doesn’t bring harm to other people.
But freedom to speak, to act, and to roam this Earth depends on a few key resources. Without food and clean water, I wouldn’t be free to speak or act, because I would be dead. Without law and the ability to enforce it, I wouldn’t be safe to speak or act without risking injury or death. Without paths, roads, and bridges, I would would be less free to move about the world, obstructed by nature’s hazards. Without health—both personal and public, there’s a good chance I would be sick or dead. And without a vibrant, diverse economy, I wouldn’t be free to create value, and exchange that value for all of these things that make me free. True freedom comes from having our basic needs met.
(Note: I’m fully aware of just how miserably the United States succeeds at meeting everyone’s basic needs: I see the failures of our safety net every time I volunteer in not-for-profit shelters, food banks, and foster care; these only exist because we fail as a country to meet the basic needs of our most vulnerable. But this is not an essay about the civil liberties we still haven’t granted people after more than 200 years. It’s an essay about the liberties we do have, or at least the liberties we aspire for everyone to have, and where they come from).
But as essential as all of these basic resource are to freedom, there’s one resource I think is behind every other resource: knowledge. Without knowledge of how to grow food, we would not be free of hunger. Without knowledge of how to clean water, we would not be free of thirst. Without knowledge of the philosophical foundations of law and ethics, we would not have the social contract of law that protects us from anarchy. Without knowledge of technology, we would not have the freedom of shelter and mobility of our built environments. Without knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and disease, we would be dead. Therefore, freedom, while it derives from several essential resources, ultimately derive from knowledge.
Knowledge, therefore, is one of our most precious resources. We need to archive it, so that future generations have access to the freedom it provides. We need to deepen it in our to deepen our freedoms. And we need ways for every individual to acquire it, so that they may bring the knowledge to life in their everyday work. Without these methods of cultivating, storing, and sharing knowledge, the rest of the basic resources required for freedom would wither.
The founders of the United States knew this. They were born at a time when modern universities were appearing across Europe, and they were living in the U.S. colonies at a time when the British were exporting the German ideas of universities to the first universities in the United States, such as Harvard University, and the College of William and Mary. The founders, many of whom studied at these universities or universities abroad, learned the works of academic philosophers and used the foundational principles in these works to shape the U.S. constitution. U.S. democracy is therefore very much a product of academic scholarship.
But at the core of the idea of a university was another kind of freedom: academic freedom. Academic freedom is the notion that scholars have the right to study, teach, and share ideas without being silenced, punished, or imprisoned. This basic protection, typically granted to tenured faculty at universities, is the seed from which knowledge grows, and that knowledge is the seed from which everyone’s broader freedoms grow. And in the United States, academic freedom was also the inspiration for our most protected of rights: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of petition. In a sense, the U.S. constitution granted a form of academic freedom to everyone.
It’s not surprising, then, that in the past 243 years of of U.S. history, universities have been at the heart of our democracy. They have been the origins of our cultural change and civil rights activism. As they did for the founders, they have shaped the perspectives and ideas of our greatest leaders. And in a way, they were the inspiration for publication education in the United States, which has broadly engaged everyone in basic literacies that promise to empower them to pursue opportunity. Universities, and the fundamental academic freedom that powers them, are therefore the engine of progress in a civilized free world.
Lately, the role of universities in the United States is under threat, both internally, and externally. Internally, faculty like myself are ever more evaluated by industrialized notions of productivity, as if how much knowledge we produce—rather than what knowledge we produce—is an effective measure of our role in protecting and growing freedom. And we’re largely doing this to ourselves: our obsession with competing with other universities, rather than cooperating with them, erodes our core purpose of advancing and sharing knowledge.
Externally, our federal and state governments combine these same industrialized notions with short term budgeting, slashing university budgets, lowering salaries, and threatening erosion of academic freedom. The idea that universities should only be about teaching, and that such teaching should be done for the sole purpose of training people for jobs, threatens to destroy the very academic freedom that has brought prosperity and progress to America.
I recognize that I make these arguments from a privileged and bias position. I am tenured faculty; would I really argue against my security of employment? And that is why academic freedom is so fragile: most of the people who truly experience, exploit, and understand its privileges are the ones who possess its privileges. We need the public—and the representatives who serve them—to believe that the freedoms they enjoy derive partially from the freedoms we academics enjoy. When the public dismisses the value of facts, the essential role of experts in policy, and the foundational role of institutions of knowledge in progress, they are eroding their own freedom and the freedom of future generations.
What can you do? Properly fund universities and public education by electing representatives committed to discovering, disseminating, and archiving knowledge. But also, demand that tenured faculty like myself use our privilege of academic freedom to advance freedom of all kinds through our research, teaching, and public service. You are granting us a great privilege of freedom, and it’s our duty to transform it into freedom for all.
