What is Academic Freedom? – Florian Meinel
While the importance of academic freedom is widely acknowledged, its meaning can all too easily be diluted in intra-academic conflicts. Professors see their academic freedom threatened by student protests; early-career scholars feel threatened by the privileges of tenured professors; both see their freedom infringed by higher education reforms, peer review, open access, and the pressure to obtain external funding. Some perceive the freedom of their research as being oppressed by the hegemonic dictatorship of a neoliberal orthodoxy, while others see it being subjected to a supposedly forced agreement on the topic of gender. Oh yes! Hell, the mainstream, always really is other people.
All of these debates are crucial for the future of academia. Yet, they all take the freedom of research and teaching for granted. Given that academic freedom is anew under pressure, both within and outside of the academic community, it seems useful to draw a clear boundary between what academic freedom is and what it is not.
"Without intra-academic procedures for ensuring standards and for sanctioning violations of those standards freedom would soon come to an end"
In a democratic society, academic freedom does not release scholars from the obligation to apply for and justify the use of public funding. Equally, academic freedom is not synonymous with the right to a financial status quo. And yes, most would have loved to join in the protest on behalf of colleague X, whose reputation was publicly and unjustly pulled into disrepute for political reasons, but look, there is that major funding application currently in the review process … it might be dangerous to support something controversial… Really? Not very dangerous at all, in fact. Academic freedom is also neither an individual freedom from institutionalised self-control in academia, nor freedom from the rules of good scientific practice, nor freedom to promote tendential interpretations of data, nor freedom from criticism by peers. Quite the contrary: without intra-academic procedures for ensuring standards and for sanctioning violations of those standards, i.e. without a constant engagement with the question of what good scientific practice is, freedom would soon come to an end. Finally, as article 5 of the German Basic Law puts it, the freedom of academic teaching does not release anyone from allegiance to the Constitution.
"Those who seek to keep academia apolitical and quietist seek to keep it unfree"
What academic freedom does mean, however, is the freedom to choose research topics and methods, the freedom to choose the type and format of publications for presenting results, the freedom to work with colleagues regardless of their background, religion or political opinions. And most of all, academic freedom means the freedom from persecution or denunciation and from arbitrary discharge for political reasons. Those who seek to keep academia apolitical and quietist seek to keep it unfree. However, what freedom means is perfectly clear only where freedom is being overtly violated, such as in Hungary or Turkey. The further one moves away from these hotspots, the more ambivalent and nuanced the distinctions are. Do academic protest letters from safe places on Western Europe simply make things worse? What could we do to really help the affected colleagues in those countries? What is even more ambivalent is a frequent attitude towards democratic politics: how apolitical are those who claim that science provides society with the so-called facts with which policies then have to comply? From the perspective of academia, people who join science marches shouting that everyone has to believe in climate change are in frightening unison with those who take climate change as fake news, as both sides promote an authoritarian positivism that offers only two options: join in or rebel.
The struggle against the enemies of academic freedom will have a greater chance of success when the proponents of academic freedom not only defend the right of academia externally, but also persuasively demonstrate how academic freedom is being put to use. Every individual bears responsibility for safeguarding freedom and must work to defend it. The American lawyer and civil rights activist Michelle Obama put it best: when they go low, we go high.
Florian Meinel is a legal scholar and researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He joined the Junge Akademie in 2014.
