Academic freedom, the ‘teacher exception’, and the diminished professor

F Donoghue

doi:10.3354/esep00162

Abstract

ESEP Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics Contact the journal RSS Mailing List Subscribe to our mailing list via Mailchimp HomeLatest VolumeAbout the JournalEditorsTheme Sections ESEP 15:7-15 (2015) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/esep00162 Academic freedom, the ‘teacher exception’, and the diminished professor Frank Donoghue* The Ohio State University, Department of English, 164 W. 17th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA *Corresponding author: donoghue.1@osu.edu ABSTRACT: This essay seeks to place the subject of academic freedom in the larger context of the management of the contemporary university. It does so first by reviewing the legal history of academic freedom, a narrative that reveals its steady erosion over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The second section of the essay explores incursions by university administrators into the ownership of teaching materials. Though it was long taken for granted that instructors owned the content of the courses they taught, the transformation of pedagogy through technology has changed that, as administrators can now monitor, control and indeed commodify the courses they offer. Taken together, the legal redefinition of academic freedom and the erosion of what used to be called the ‘teacher exception’ to the work-for-hire rule have turned universities into more manageable workplaces and university instructors into ordinary workers. KEY WORDS: Academic freedom · ‘Teacher exception’ · Intellectual property · Online learning Full text in pdf format PreviousNextCite this article as: Donoghue F (2015) Academic freedom, the ‘teacher exception’, and the diminished professor. Ethics Sci Environ Polit 15:7-15. https://doi.org/10.3354/esep00162 Export citation RSS - Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in ESEP Vol. 15, No. 1. Online publication date: October 01, 2015 Print ISSN: 1863-5415; Online ISSN: 1611-8014 Copyright © 2015 Inter-Research.

Highlights

Perhaps no term is used with such veneration by university professors and at the same time is so misunderstood as ‘academic freedom’
The institutional history of the concept reveals that it never existed in reality, and even as a rhetorical concept, academic freedom has steadily eroded since it was introduced in the USA in 1915
The legal history of academic freedom has only accelerated that erosion. This process has gone hand in hand with an steady erosion of the control that professors have over the materials they produce for the purposes of teaching

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps no term is used with such veneration by university professors and at the same time is so misunderstood as ‘academic freedom’. That occupation is being diminished and degraded by university administrations so that universities themselves can be more manageable institutions, so that they can function even more like corporations than they currently do. It has been commonplace since the early 1990s to refer to the ‘managed university’, but that term is often used quite abstractly (Martin 1998). The process begins and ends with mechanisms that high-level administrators use to control their most essential employees: their instructors

ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Findings

LITERATURE CITED