Academic Freedom (Governing the University)

… The principle of academic freedom as now recognized in all civilized universities is that a university teacher must be able to discuss his problems and to express his conclusion, through publication and in the instruction of his students, “without interference from political or ecclesiastical authority or from administrative officials in the institution in which he is employed, unless his methods are found by qualified bodies of his own profession to be clearly incompetent or contrary to professional ethics.”

Practically all cases of dispute, in the matter of academic freedom, whether or not at law, have been to do either with wrongful dismissal or restraint of expression – often the two linked together, as in the notorious United College Affair of only a few years ago – the university usually claiming that all academic appointments are “at pleasure of the Board.”  Such a position is no longer easy or even possible – to maintain.  The McCarthy era produced some humiliating    instances of intrusion upon academic freedom.  Canadians, though still easily ruffled by such words as Communism and socialism, do not easily run to McCarthyite hysteria.  Yet freedom is never cheaply bought, nor is it ever won once for all.  The price of freedom is usually paid by a light but wary heart; and one is happy to record that this university, Queen’s University, has an: excellent record of defending its people against unwarranted attempts to interfere with the integrity of individual judgment and the decisions of the courts in matters outside university jurisdiction.  Academic freedom, unlike a union agreement, is not primarily intended to secure certain specific claims to pay both physical and personal benefits; rather it secures the conditions within which truth may flourish.  When academic freedom is denied or invaded, truth and the ways of truth suffer.  Academic freedom is essential to the good health of a university and to the good health of all activities that lead to inquiry into truth, and the passing of truth from one person to another, and the training and encouraging of young persons in the prosecution of truth as a value and as a way of life.  Academic freedom secures the good health and initiative of intelligence; it thrives upon emotional vivacity, and upon that ironic sense of humour that is simultaneously a sense of the proportion arid the disproportion in things.

… The worst vices of indifferent university government are (I think) paternalism, politics, and parsimony.  Only prayer and fasting are ever likely to protect us successfully from all these.  Academic freedom is to do with something quite different – the shaping of our thought and feelings, the determinate and dreamlike fashioning that happens to whatever we conceive rightly and make well.  I am not myself sure that this right-shaping arises out of conflict, debate, competition, or - to choose a word fashionable at present – dialogue.  Socratic dialectic is one thing, and salutary if one is capable of it.  But free uninformed discussion can still be very pointless and uninformative; and two people talking together are not necessarily better than one muttering fervently to himself.  The intellectual freedom that seems to me to matter is not simply the freedom to say anything we like, or to think anything that happens to wander into our minds.  Academics have no special license to be silly; on the contrary they have a strong responsibility not to lapse into the factitious and easy impressionism that might at first sight seem to an unsophisticated student a daring sense of contemporary affairs or a saucily astringent view of contemporary manners.  The artistry and exhilaration of the vigorous intellectual life is in the choosing of appropriate limits within which freedom makes sense by inducing form.  It is an academic’s business to be a good shot, not to indulge in blunderbus marksmanship, to be most fastidious in drawing minute distinctions – that is, once he has chosen his target he can be expected to be fussy in choosing his weapons and a correct line of fire.  To point at the follies of the world and the wickedness of our fellow-men, to laugh at what is gravely traditional and to cry for an empty moon of modernity is in a way much too easy to be worth doing, and anyway this having been done so well already is perhaps much too difficult even to dream of attempting.

Our duty is clear and our responsibility merciless; and this is what we must use our freedom for: to make it possible to discern, not once for all but over and over with the clarity of delight, the primary conditions of intellectual health and emotional sanity.  We must be able continuously, at least to try, to see and to show the difference between liberty and license (between what exhilarates and refreshes and what enervates and emasculates); between vision and desire (between, that is, what we can know and what we simply want); between what is true and what – through design, cynicism, ignorance, or chance – is an infective fraud; between truth as a value, and the inert circularity of fact; between judgment (which is worth dying for or living by) and opinion (which is neither here nor there and can be shuffled out of or into without too much tax of mind or tooth of conscience).  And all this must be done with the utmost simplicity of intent, even if simplicity of manner is not always possible.