Is academic freedom in peril?

Abstract

Furedy, Kimura and Klatt see political correctness (PC) as a threat to academic freedom, which they equate with freedom of expression, while Dobson and Stark hold that academic freedom includes responsibilities. Klatt even sees the maximum position as an obligation, alleging that PC imposes self-censorship however, civilization depends on self-censorship. Anderson (1995) points out that the academy is our most regulated idea market: Faculty and student is ... minutely regulated for content and quality, and subject to... rewards and punishments. Grades, honors, probation, employment, pay, promotion, tenure, letters of recommendation grants and scholarships all hang on what students and faculty say, and how well they say (p.207). This is how academic standards are maintained. When Furedy contests an administration's preference for classroom order over academic freedom, I, for once, sympathize with the administration. It is easy to imagine words that would disrupt any classroom without contravening the criminal code. debate ought not be about whether to regulate academic speech, but about choosing regulations.Furedy and Klatt feel that teaching is inhibited by speech which, Furedy alleges, have been instituted at all Canadian campuses. This is puzzling, since an informal check on a few Canadian universities has yielded no document labeled Speech Code. Even more puzzling is how to engage a debate about speech codes when the only one cited at length was never adopted. Do these authors object to conduct policies as such, or to the specific wording of existing ones -- but what wording? Klatt claims that harassment is defined as perpetrated by men towards women -- my university's definition applies to any combination of people of same or different sex and status. He also questions whether sexual harassment is pervasive, which is irrelevant to whether it should be proscsribed -- murder is rare, yet we stubbornly maintain laws against it. Klatt's unhappy experience with harassment regulations seems not an example of the danger of conduct codes, but rather a case of wrongful accusation, which does not imply that sanctions should not exist, but instead demonstrates the need for procedures to protect the rights of all involved, as Dobson proposed. Anderson (1995) points to a subtle relation between harassment and freedom of expression: vilification silences the of the vilified. The equality of speakers is a ... condition for free and open discussion, which in turn is a condition for successful inquiry. (p.187). A coherent debate requires empiricism: What are the existing regulations? How have they been implemented? What safeguards are provided?Furedy, Kimura, and Klatt frame biological determinism as an issue of academic freedom, claiming that PC inhibits scholarship on innateness. However, since adequate controls are impossible (Favreau, this issue), it is epistemically incorrect to infer innateness without taking account of experience. I welcome Furedy's call for assessing positions epistemically rather than ideologically, despite intense discomfort [produced] as cherished beliefs are critically examined - discomfort may well result from my critique of the epistemic foundation of biological research. His claim that the current atmosphere is one of extreme environmentalism is contradicted by numerous recent publications affirming, for example, that genes have turned men into rapists (Thornhill and Thornhill, 1992) and women into golddiggers (Buss, 1994). Environmentalism is often a reaction to these. Kimura rejoices that psychology has escaped ideology to the extent that it has become a biological science, a view which highlights the unfortunate gulf between neuroscience and social science. Neuropsychologists often ignore the growing literature on how humans from birth onwards are treated differently as a function of sex. When Hubel and Wiesel discovered visual feature-detecting cells, it was at first believed that these were hard-wired, however, subsequent research showed their development was guided by early visual input. …