Academic Freedom and the Mission of the University
This fall I participated in the annual Frankel Lecture symposium at the University of Houston Law School. The topic was on academic freedom and diversity, and the lecture was delivered by Jeannie Suk Gersen of Harvard Law School. I provided a response, along with Khiara M. Bridges of Berkeley Law School.
The articles from the symposium have now been published online and printed in the latest issue of the Houston Law Review. The full symposium can be found here.
My article, “Academic Freedom and the Mission of the University,” focuses on the relationship between the mission of the university and the commitment to and value of academic freedom to that university. A university dedicated to truth-seeking needs robust protections for academic freedom in order to properly fulfill that mission, and American universities embraced those protections as they reoriented themselves to that mission in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To the extent that universities deviate from that mission and prioritize other values and commitments, then academic freedom protections will seem less valuable and even counterproductive.
I particularly consider three competing understandings of what universities should be seeking to prioritize and show that in each case academic freedom will likely suffer. The article explores the implications of committing the university to a “patriotic” mission of promoting a rich set of substantive values seen as central to the nation, committing the university to a “neoliberal” mission of preparing students for career success, and committing the university to a “creedal” mission of promoting a rich set of substantive values seen as important to the campus community such as inclusivity or social justice.
From the conclusion:
Modern American univers
Article from Reason.com
