The Architecture of Intellectual Freedom: A Statement of the National Association of Scholars

Abstract

“Intellectual freedom” belongs to a cloud of terms with related meanings that are sometimes, incautiously, used interchangeably. There is, however, value in distinguishing them. Academic freedom. A doctrine that pertains to the rights of faculty members within particular colleges and universities. Academic freedom has been mentioned in several Supreme Court decisions, but it is not a legal right except to the degree that it is embodied in contracts that colleges and universities have made with faculty members. These contracts define the right in various ways, though many follow the AAUP’s 1940 revision of its statement on academic freedom and subsequent emendations. As a general definition, it suffices that academic freedom guarantees the independence of faculty members to pursue research, publication, public speaking, and teaching free from pressure by their institution’s administrators and trustees to conform to a particular doctrine. Academic freedom is, in fact, a more complicated idea than this, but this will serve for the moment. Intellectual freedom. This is a broader concept than academic freedom. It refers to the human capacity to escape from received ideas. The term can be used in two quite different ways. It may refer to the existential condition of the individual who, even under duress and confinement, can enjoy the intellectual freedom of his own mind. Or it may refer to a community in which respect for free inquiry is a superintending value. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn enjoyed intellectual freedom of the first kind even while in the Gulag. The Woodward Report and the Stone Report hold up the ideal of the second kind of intellectual freedom. First Amendment Freedom. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press, among other freedoms. Centuries of litigation have established a well-developed body of First Amendment law that protects Americans from government interference with their right to self-expression in most circumstances. First Amendment rights are much broader than the academic freedom doctrine. Academic freedom is a context-specific idea with limited legal basis outside contract law. The First Amendment is pervasive in situations where the individual deals with governmental authority. In public colleges and universities, which are operated by the state, college administrators are effectively government authorities, which means that First Amendment considerations can enter into situations where academic freedom is also at issue. Other freedoms. Intellectual freedom in the context of higher education, as suggested above, entails a combination of more particular freedoms: the freedom to ask questions; the freedom to challenge assumptions and doctrines; the freedom to criticize; the freedom to speculate; the freedom to reexamine old evidence and to search for new evidence; the freedom to express what one has found; the freedom to hear others who seek to express what they have found; the freedom to engage in dialogue with informed peers; the freedom to read and consider the views of people who lived before one’s own time; the freedom to teach what one has, by diligent effort, learned; and even the freedom to refrain from speaking. It is important to add that all of these are heavily dependent on context. There is a time to ask questions aloud and a time to note them quietly to ask later, and so on. A major object of this report, in contrast to those we’ve cited, is to clarify some of these contextual matters.