Fear of Academic Freedom

This being the midway-point of my first semester in a higher education master's program, we have begun to study various aspects of learning and teaching. One of the greatest problems we have on college campuses today is fear. Students and faculty alike have many deep fears. Students fear that their ideas are poorly constructed and that they won't be taken seriously in the classroom. Faculty fear, among many things, that the students don't care about what they have to teach, and that their curriculum and therefore they themselves have become obsolete. Both of these kinds of fears are a detriment to education in America's universities, and only recognizing and understanding these fears can free colleges from the struggles of relating students to instructors.

An interesting thing has happened recently on the campus of Iowa State University. Professor of Astronomy Guillermo Gonzalez, who a year ago wrote a book about Intelligent Design entitled: The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery has come under increasing fire from the university faculty and other organizations, including recently the American Association of University Professors.

According to an article in the campus newspaper, the Iowa State Daily, in a letter to them the AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen, applauded Iowa State's faculty for a recent petition against the teaching and further inquiry into ID signed by some 150 faculty members.

By resisting external interference in a matter of scientific expertise, the letter said, "these faculty members have defended the academic freedom of all their colleagues in the professoriate."

Let's take a moment to examine the AAUP's definition of academic freedom:

Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition. (emphasis mine)

Let's explore further the idea of a "free search for truth." What is truth, in the academic sense? Some educational philosophies describe truth as what is discovered through scientific means and through empirical evidence. However, more recent schools of philosophical thought (such as pragmatism and post-modernism) advocate for a more holistic view of knowledge and truth. These philosophies acknowledge that all people, students and teachers alike, come about an understanding of knowledge through their own understanding of the world. In other words there is no objective teaching and/or learning of knowledge. Knowledge is constructed through joint interpretation of meaning. Now, this idea is a bit hard to grasp in more concrete studies such as mathematics and chemistry, but in other areas of academics to assume that both student and teacher are completely objective is both foolhardy and destructive.

Now let's return to this idea of academic freedom. If the AAUP's definition of academic freedom includes the "free search for truth," then how can they advocate the stifling of a certain train of thought and exploration? Isn't open inquiry about science, in any respect, the search for understanding and knowledge (and truth)?

The truth here is that the AAUP, and the faculty at Iowa State that signed the petition against ID, are afraid. They are afraid that a new and different line of inquiry about the sciences will destroy the paradigm from which they teach. They claim to have an objective respect for truth and "academic freedom," but they are blinded by their subjective fear of new and different ideas.

Their attempted silencing of inquiry about ID in the name of academic freedom couldn't be more contradictory.

The fact that ID is the issue here is also irrelevant. How can university educators ever attempt to silence free and individual though and exploration? If students were to explore other areas of foolish science wouldn’t these faculty surely encourage the students to continue with the understanding that they would come to their same version of "truth?" Evidently not, as ideas that are contrary to their idea of "truth" are things to be demeaned and denied.

The issue here is fear - and the faculty at Iowa State, as well as the AAUP, would do well to look past such fear and stop trying to hold back free thought in the name of preserving "truth."