Academic Freedom Without Limits

Chicago, Ill.—In arranging a series of panels on academic freedom in the classroom, the Modern Language Assocation (MLA) hosted a panel on French and Francophone studies, Chicano literature, and Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transsexual Queer (LGBTQ) issues to discuss barriers to academic freedom. Largely avoiding discussions of students’ academic freedom, the panel argues that, especially among politicized subjects, professors’ academic freedom is threatened by student evaluations, scarce tenure, and even their own professional code of ethics.

Code of Ethics

“Professional ethical standards, in other words, can be put into service when an institution deems fit to curtail academic freedom when it comes to controversial or unpopular issues such as [the Ward Churchill] case,” said Jesse Alemán, a Professor of Chicano Literature at the University of New Mexico (UNM). He argues that there is an inherent conflict between the professional (academic) code of ethics and affiliation with outside communities, and “this is where our ethical responsibility as that small minority of tenured, Ph.D. but colored, might run counter the ethical limits of academic freedom that seek to determine the best behavior of the academic community…”

However, some might wonder how professional codes of ethics hinder honest academic inquiry, especially when they deal with mainstream issues of honesty and avoiding conflicts of interest. The University of Virginia code of ethics requires professors to conduct communications on behalf of the university “professionally and with civility” and to perform their duties “ethically, competently, efficiently and honestly” in accordance with the law. Similarly, the Concordia University code of ethics ascribes to the “six principles” which are the “pursuit of knowledge and truth, academic freedom, collegiality, accountability, justice, and integrity.”

As the only speaker on the panel to address student academic freedom, Alemán described it as a strategy by which radicalized students can audit the classroom for race discrimination. “But—and this is my main thesis—we must also foster an open intellectual space for students of color to challenge, critique, and expand on the notions of race that are circulating in the classroom, be it fellow students, course curricula, and reading materials, or the assumptions of even the most well-meaning of them,” he said.

Student Evaluations

Alemán objected to the negative effect that student evaluations had on his tenure confirmation. “Why, out of a large stack of fairly positive—I’m not saying that [there wasn’t the] exception, but fairly positive—evaluations, was this one evaluation, clearly a racist one, worth attention, let alone explanation?” said Alemán. The aforementioned assessment read “HE DON’T LIKE THEM WHITE FOLKS, TOO MUCH. TOO MUCH DOWN WITH WHITES,” written in pencil and capital letters. Alemán argues that race-centric curricula, mistakenly, “seems to many students, peers, and administrators to have a political agenda, rather than a legitimate—and even ethical—academic inquiry.”

Limited Tenure?

According to Professor Robert Samuels and Professor Linda Garber, professors teach in an ongoing environment of fear. “The bigger problem I think, of academic freedom, are the people who don’t have this sense of tenure, and have a lot of anxiety about teaching,” said Professor Robert Samuels, Faculty President at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Samuels asserted at another panel on global conflict that student evaluations “can really limit your academic freedom” and causes professors to “deploy a lot of self-censorship,” especially when they are worried about bringing political issues into the classroom.

Professor Linda Garber, who teaches LGBTQ studies at the Catholic Santa Clara University (SCU), argued at the academic freedom panel that receiving tenure made her more equipped to fulfill her “larger life’s work, critical work” “So for me the stakes are simply too high to do nothing, to play it very safe and teach sexuality without sex, for example, and that certainly, of course, feels safer post tenure,” she said.

Professor Garber felt frightened about quitting her former tenured position because she “didn’t know what would happen.” “I was fond of saying in my first few untenured years at Santa Clara that shortly I would either be tenured again or I would be on the news, because I would be suing the university, which has a nondiscrimination clause,” she added (emphasis added).

The Pleasure Now! manifesto, organized by professors wishing to reintegrate enjoyment and excitement back into teaching, states that “mounting workplace pressures on professional scholars and teachers endanger the vitality of intellectual and cultural work.” Under such circumstances, “The corporatization of the university, escalating expectations for productivity, external monitoring of outcomes, scarcity of resources, and the structural undermining of the tenure system make us miserable,” asserts the manifesto. For them, accountability seems to produce an emotional malaise.

Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia