Sulis Academic Press kindly agreed to make Chapter 12 of my new book available free for download. Chapter 12 summarizes the book’s conclusion and makes four practical suggestions for Christian Universities. I believe reading these nine pages may peek your interest enough to read the whole book. Feel free to download this chapter, read it, and pass it on to others.
This is the first essay I’ve posted since April 27. In the intervening two months, I’ve given all my literary energy to finishing my next book, The Christian University & The Academic Establishment. I expect it to be published sometime in August. I will have more to say about it then.
As always happens when you are reading and formulating your thoughts on one topic, other issues come into view that you must set aside for the moment. In writing the The Christian University & The Academic Establishment, I read much about the history and the current state of higher education in America, and this concentration forced me to ask other questions: What is education? What is learning? What part do schools play in learning? What does it mean to be an educated person? How does one gain a good education? And specifically, how does one gain a good education in Christianity? In the next few months, I hope to address these questions and more. This essay sets the table for that discussion.
We will never know everything. We must be satisfied with (1) learning what we need to know for living the life we want to live; and (2) doing the best we can to make sure that the knowledge we gain—partial though it is—cannot be completely falsified by future discoveries.
We don’t know what we don’t know. Remember the old saying “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”? Why is that? Because that little knowledge is surrounded by a lot of ignorance! But we can know that we don’t know. So, be humble and careful. Strive to distinguish between beliefs that are firmly grounded in evidence and thus are likely to withstand scrutiny and those that are supported solely by our desires, vanity, wishes, and feelings.
No individual knows everything that is known. Human knowledge is a communal possession. Unlike animals, human beings can learn from the thoughts, discoveries, and experiences of other people and pass that knowledge on to future generations so that the body of knowledge grows with the passage of time. Each new generation benefits from this heritage of wisdom, knowledge, and skills. The process of passing on this knowledge is called education.
There is a difference between schooling and education. One can attend a school, college or university—even get a degree—without acquiring a good education. To gain an education, one must learn.
Learning is always something we do. We can sit at a desk while a teacher lectures, but learning involves assimilating new information into the body of knowledge and the patterns of understanding we already possess. It changes us.
The sum total of human knowledge can be refined and extended only by those who have mastered traditional knowledge. You need to learn what is already known. Even though this body of knowledge is incomplete and may contain errors, it is the best starting place for learning more. Only from this vantage point can an individual see unanswered questions and the limits of inherited theories, methods, and procedures.
A good education is one that enables us to live well in the society in which we dwell. As I said above, no one can know everything. It is the business of educators to create programs of study that provide students with the opportunity to gain a good education. Unsurprisingly, educators do not agree completely among themselves on what that program of study should be, and it is always changing as society changes. But in general, educators agree that it is a great advantage for a person to gain basic proficiency in language, history, natural science, economics, and political and social institutions.
How can you make sure that you get a good education? Whatever subject you want to study, place yourself under the tutelage of teachers who can direct you to the best of what is known and guide you through a maze of crackpot ideas, fancies, and conspiracies. As I emphasized above, there is a difference between going to a school and getting a good education. The most important thing about becoming an educated person is not where you learn but that you acquire the best knowledge available and become a discerning and critical student. However, for most people, the best place to begin this journey is in an educational institution—a high school, college or university. Why here? Because these institutions gather in one place teachers who have given many years to mastering their disciplines and are responsible to their professions. It is their duty to direct your attention to the best knowledge available—ideas and practices that have been critically examined by many thinkers and have proven themselves useful and reliable.
Almost every book I’ve read on the subject—whether coming from the right or the left or from inside or outside the university—complains that higher education in America is a mess. Universities are too expensive, too inefficient, sold out to the political left, or in danger from the political right. They encourage students to take on huge debt to earn useless degrees. They are run too much like corporations. Needed change proceeds at a glacial pace. Professors care more about their research than their students. Tenure and academic freedom shield incompetent faculty and serve as cover for anti-academic, political activism.
I agree. Education in America at all levels is a mess. Reforms are needed. Alternative paths to a good education are desirable. But my point in this essay is this: Whatever reforms in existing educational institutions we enact or new ways of securing an education we envision, at the core of all of them must lie the process of learning an accumulated body of knowledge and skills from those who already know them. And this is the answer to the question posed in the title: What is Education?
Today, I want to propose some answers to the questions I asked in my previous post. But I want to make it clear up front that it is not my purpose to propose simple (or complex) solutions to complicated and likely intractable social problems. My goal is to shed light on these social problems so that we as individuals, families, and churches can make the best decisions in areas over which we have some immediate control.
I am recalling this from my reading in the history of education in America, but I remember that the literacy rate in Massachusetts in 1780, when all schooling was private, was about 90% . Clearly the Massachusetts Puritans valued universal literacy. I can only speculate about the deterioration.
I think the decline probably reflects an underlying social, moral, and spiritual breakdown in culture: (1) the breakdown of the traditional family—divorce, fatherlessness, and decline of church going; (2) the decline of the buying power of the average income and the accompanying increase of two-income middle class family; (3) the increase of an entitlement mentality and the decrease of the notion of sacrifice; the rise of “I-deserve-a-little-happiness” thinking; (4) the transformation from thinking of education as a privilege to be treasured to a right that can be taken for granted; (5) the rise of the permissive society, especially permissive parenting. Very few children are self-motivated. They need guidance and discipline; (6) The fatalism and lost of hope in some subcultures that getting an education is the way toward economic and cultural advancement.
I am certain that I could have learned everything I learned in 12 years in half the time. I wonder why such a waste of time? This 12-year calendar must be more about modern theories of child psychology and development than intellectual progress. Nowadays, kids don’t grow up until 30 years of age, at least the ones that go to college. What’s the problem?
If the entire 12 years were spent efficiently on academics, high school graduates would be prepared for professional and graduate schools right out of high school. They would not need to take remedial English and math courses or learn basic history in colleges. However instead of academics, schools seem to take on the general task of parenting children through the developmental stages of their lives. Not only so, schools take on the quasi-political role of socializing children into their vision of a diverse and pluralistic society viewed through the lens of the oppressor/oppressed and privilege/prejudice analysis. In obvious ways, those who benefit from expanding the scope of the public school system, promote such a whole of life philosophy.
High school was called “high” because it taught advanced subjects and skills beyond those learned in grammar school. The term, though not the modern institution, originated in the Middle Ages. In colonial times most college students were minors from 13 to 16 years of age. Their main preparation for college was learning math and language skills in schools or via private tutoring. Colonial and early American colleges prepared students to study for the professions in medicine, the ministry, and law. High schools in America were not originally designed for college preparation but to prepare students to transition to professions that required literacy and mathematical skills but not classical professional training.
Needless to say, modern high schools are no longer “advanced” and many students graduate with a high school diploma but not a “high” school education. Moreover, high schools differ dramatically in the quality of education they provide. Clearly, grade and degree inflation have eroded the value of high school and four-year college degrees.
Why has this happened? I think it has to do with the six problems I dealt with in question #1. When education becomes a right, it will be taken for granted. Schooling will replace education and diplomas will replace knowledge and skills.
Let’s face it. We are not all born equal in every respect. Each person has their own gifts, and there are different kinds of intelligence. But calculus, chemistry and logic are not for everyone. Some children can be amazing mechanics and plumbers. We need them and should celebrate their skills. But not everyone will make a good Wall Street analyst. So, let’s help each child find their gifts and make their particular contribution to the common good.
Perhaps we should rethink our naive view of the meaning of equality, democracy, and equal opportunity. We could begin to direct and track children at an early age—always leaving open each track to all in case we misjudge a child’s abilities and interests. Every child is precious, but it does not honor their value to press them all into the same shape.
Why are schools so political these days? And why does their politics lean so heavily to the left? I have lots of opinions on why this is the case. But first, we need to remember that the political public school classroom is not a recent development. The public school system has always been political, but explicitly so at least since around 1830 when Horace Mann succeeded in getting the State of Massachusetts to set up its public school system modeled on the German state system. Public schools were designed from the beginning to serve the purposes of the state. It may not seem like it, but measured by the culture of their day, the first public schools were progressive, and they are still that way today. Only what counts as progressive has changed.
Public schools were never primarily tailored for students’ and parents’ aspirations as individuals and families. Their function has always been to serve the socio-economic interests of the governmental and business classes. “Public” means publicly funded and administered and designed to serve the “common good” as defined by those in power. Again: nothing “public” is designed specifically for you, your kids, and your family. Once set up, however, the public system, like all institutions, takes on a life of its own and puts its survival and comfort above all things. Public school teachers, whatever noble motives many of them have as individuals, are trained in teacher education colleges, which are some of the most liberal/progressive places in left-leaning American academia.
The lives today’s parents want to live is built around having their kids from years 5-18 occupied for 8 hours per day five days a week by schools. They seem to think they have no alternative. Parental abdication gives schools too much power over your flesh and blood. Schools become the defacto (and while they are on school grounds the legal) guardians and protectors of your children. But who guards the guardians? Who teaches them what is good and bad, right and wrong, normal and perverse while you are not in the room? Again, why don’t parents demand a better education for their children? Some do, but those who don’t avoid it because it’s easier not to do so.
Next Time: Who Needs A College Education and Why?
Today, I want to ask some questions about the way we educate our youth in the United States. In a follow up post, I will present my perspective on those issues. As you have opportunity, think about how you would answer these questions.
I come from a family of educators. My mother taught junior math for 30 years in the public school system. One of my brothers, my sister and my sister-in-law also taught in public schools. I admire them and others like them for their competence as teachers, their dedication to the public good, and their love for their students. I spent twelve years as a student in public schools and 13 ½ years in private universities. I am about to finish my 36th year teaching in a university. My opinions about education have been percolating from my junior high days. In view of the huge ferment that is roiling higher education these days I’d like to reflect on the context in which we must exercise our God-given responsibility as parents, learners, teachers, and citizens.
1. Why are there more illiterate people today than before the government took over most children’s education?
2. Why does it take 12 years to educate a child?
3. Why is high school called “high” school?
4. Why do public schools teach to the average student when this practice results in intelligent and interested students not learning up to their potential and the less than average students getting overwhelmed?
5. Why do the sociopolitical aims of the public education system rank so high among its priorities?
5. Why don’t parents demand a better education for their children?
1. Do you think that 62% of high school graduates belong in college?
2. What is a college education for?
3. Why does a college education cost so much?
4. Why are there are 1.4 million college teachers in America?
Coming Soon: Part Two
Today I continue my series on the contemporary challenges to the viability of the Christian college. In past essays I’ve focused on academic freedom. In this essay I want to explore the concept of “shared governance,” that is, faculty participation in the decisions that determine the academic quality and educational effectiveness of the college. In the literature I’ve read, academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance are held to be the mutually entailed rights that transform college teachers from employees into professionals. Apologists for the profession justify granting professional status and bestowing these three privileges on professors by appealing to their disciplinary expertise and their unique contributions to democratic society.
It should come as no surprise that even professors in Christian colleges desire such privileges. But will giving them such powers tend to preserve or erode the Christian character of the Christian college? I am a professor and have never served as an administrator or on the board of trustees of a college. I am content in my role as a thinker, teacher, and researcher. For many reasons and much bitter experience, I am very clear that the faculty is not a reliable guardian of the Christianity of a Christian college. Boards of Trustees and administrators—especially presidents—must serve as the guardians of the Christian mission of Christian colleges. That is where I am headed, but first we need to get clear on the history of the concept of “shared faculty governance.”
I will get us into this subject by reviewing, analyzing, and applying Larry G. Gerber’s The Rise & Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University (Johns Hopkins, 2014). Gerber is a historian of twentieth-century America with a long-term interest in faculty governance and a career of involvement with the American Association of University Professors. The book contains an introduction, five core chapters, and a conclusion. Typical of history books, each chapter covers a time span marked off from the preceding and the following by a turning point of some kind. The periods are; before 1876, 1870-1920, 1920-1940, 1940-1975, and 1975 to the present.
In the Colonial era and beyond, American colleges were organized under governing boards of trustees and “strong presidents” (p. 15), a pattern that continues to exert strong influence today. Education at these colleges focused on character formation rather than “on intellectual inquiry and discovery” (p. 16). The faculty were usually younger, recent graduates headed for the ministry or another profession with no plans for a lifetime career as a professor. In 1817, Yale president Jeremiah Day took a significant step toward shared governance by inviting the Yale faculty to participate in the appointment of new faculty (p. 17). As more and more faculty studied abroad and came to see themselves as subject area experts, they began to expect more respect from administrators and boards of trustees. Under the influence of the German model of higher education, Henry P. Tappan, president of the University of Michigan, speaking before the university senate in 1861, urge that “no laws or regulations should be made without the concurrence of the faculties; and the appointive power should rest with the University Senate” (p. 21). Even into the 1870s, however, “the idea of a formal academic career was still in its infancy” (p. 25).
Between 1870 and 1920 several factors contributed to the growing professionalization of the professorate and the corresponding demand for greater faculty control over the academic aspects of the university. Over 5,000 American scholars studied in Germany between 1870 and 1900, and they returned intent on implementing the German model in American universities. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins University patterned itself on German educational principles to a great extent. The newly founded universities of Cornell and the University of Chicago as well as the older universities, Harvard, Columbia and the University of Michigan, competed for faculty from the best scholars available. Because of their growth in size and increasing specialization, the university department became the center of day-to-day academic life. Professors began to root their identity more in nation-wide specialty areas of study and professional organizations than in their local college or university. It was in this era that the PhD became the required credential for teaching at elite universities. Under pressure from these forces, boards of trustees and administrators began to acquiesce to professionalized faculty demands for more shared governance, academic freedom, and tenure. Gerber summarizes these changes in words that focus on academic freedom but apply to faculty shared governance:
The more rigorous and specialized postgraduate training required to become a faculty member at American’s emerging universities provided a basis for claiming both the right to, and the need for, a more robust form of academic freedom than had been known in America’s antebellum colleges. Expertise was thus a crucial component of the emerging concept of academic freedom (p. 46; emphasis added).
This era saw the founding of the American Association of University Professors, about which I have written in previous essays.
In this chapter and in the rest of the book the newly founded AAUP takes center stage. Gerber recounts the three stories of what he and the AAUP consider arbitrary and authoritarian conduct by university presidents and boards. These episodes take place at Washburn College, Clark University, and the University of California (pp. 61-65). In 1940, the AAUP’s Committee T on Place and Function of Faculties in College and University Government report highlighted four areas of concern voiced by faculty nationwide:
(1) opportunities for direct faculty communication with trustees; (2) faculty involvement in the selection of administrators (president, dean, department chair or head); faculty exercise of primary responsibility for appointing and promoting colleagues; (4) meaningful faculty participation in the budgetary process (pp. 75-76).
According to Gerber, in 1940 very few faculty in American colleges enjoyed these rights, which are clearly aspirational for the AAUP.
The years between 1940 and 1975 saw unprecedented growth in student population, public financing, and world-wide prestige in American colleges and universities. Demand for qualified professors outstripped supply. By 1973, a “consensus” had developed within higher education of “the advisability of granting faculty primary responsibility for making most academic decisions” (p. 82). One of the most significant landmarks of this era was the publication of the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, a joint statement of the AAUP, the ACE (the American Council on Education, and the AGB (the Association of Governing Boards).
Section 1 introduces the document. Section 2 deals with the “joint Effort” in which the trustees, administration, and the faculty participate jointly. These include general education policy, internal operations, and external relations. Sections 3 and 4 deal with the duties of the governing board and the president respectively. Section five lays out the scope of faculty duties and privileges:
The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process…
The faculty sets the requirements for the degrees offered in course, determines when the requirements have been met, and authorizes the president and board to grant the degrees thus achieved…
Faculty status and related matters are primarily a faculty responsibility; this area includes appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure, and dismissal. The primary responsibility of the faculty for such matters is based upon the fact that its judgment is central to general educational policy. Furthermore, scholars in a particular field or activity have the chief competence for judging the work of their colleagues; in such competence it is implicit that responsibility exists for both adverse and favorable judgments.
The chair or head of a department, who serves as the chief representative of the department within an institution, should be selected either by departmental election or by appointment following consultation with members of the department and of related departments; appointments should normally be in conformity with department members’ judgment.
Agencies for faculty participation in the government of the college or university should be established at each level where faculty responsibility is present. An agency should exist for the presentation of the views of the whole faculty.
For most of its existence the AAUP stood firmly against faculty unionization. Indeed, most faculty at elite research universities shared this rejection, because the notion of professional expertise and faculty shared governance, which focus on quality of education and the common good, seems incompatible with the self-interested goals and adversarial methods of trade unions. In 1971, however, the AAUP relented and accepted collective bargaining as one way to achieve its goals. The debate about the compatibility of the two approaches still rages within higher education.
This era saw the high watermark of faculty shared governance. But by 1975 storm clouds began to darken the horizon: the dramatic rise in the use of “contingent faculty,” the advent of the “for profit” university, and the influence of the market, consumer, and corporate model on higher education.
By the mid-1970s, the flood of students from the baby boom generation slowed to a trickle. Just as the undergraduate student population declined, a glut of new job-seeking Ph.Ds. entered the job market. States like California and Michigan that had poured money into their systems of higher education in the booming post-World War Two era reduced their support by a third. At the same time, states and the federal government imposed a huge number of new regulations, which diverted funds from professors to the ranks of new administrators, compliance officers, and support staff (p. 155).
Responses to these challenges were predictable. Cost-cutting, reorganization, competing for students by appealing to their and their parents’ immediate wants, and turning to lower-paid graduate students and other contingent faculty to teach courses. By the 2010s, when you include graduate students, 60% of teaching was done by part-time faculty (p. 147). Currently, less than one third of faculty in American colleges and universities serve in tenured or tenure-track positions (p. 9). According to Gerber, this shift amounts to the “deprofessionalization” of the faculty (pp. 146-147). Contingent faculty do not have the benefits of tenure, full academic freedom, or participation in faculty governance.
In his highly influential book, [Academic Strategy: The Management Revolution in American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983], George Keller argued that American colleges and universities faced “the specter of decline and bankruptcy” (p. 123). This crisis was brought on by a “leadership crisis,” a “breakdown of leadership” (p. 123). Governance must not be divorced from “concerns about an institution’s financial condition and future economic viability” (p. 123). Keller “criticized the effectiveness of faculty senates and the increasing tendency of faculty members to focus on their own individual interests rather than the collective well-being of the institutions in which they worked” (p. 123). According to Keller, the AAUP’s view of faculty governance was “stuck in a historical freezer” (p. 123). Every organization needs “a single authority, someone or some body of people authorized to initiate, plan, decide, manage, monitor, and punish its members” (p. 123). For colleges and universities, this authority naturally falls to the president and the board.
As we discussed above, drives to unionize college faculty seemed to many professors to be at odds with the push toward greater faculty participation in governance. This tension factored heavily in the Supreme Court case NLRB v. Yeshiva University (1980). The Yeshiva University Faculty Association appealed to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for the right to represent the Yeshiva faculty in collective bargaining. Yeshiva University argued that the faculty already enjoyed a share in the governance of the University and therefore it should be considered management instead of labor. The Court agreed with Yeshiva. Private college faculty members are not eligible for collective bargaining under the rules of the NLRB; they are “managerial employees” “involved in developing and enforcing employer policy” (p. 132). This case effectively ended efforts to establish collective bargaining at private colleges and universities in America.
The rise of for-profit colleges and universities (e.g. University of Phoenix), which hire mostly part-time faculty to teach administratively designed curricula, is a huge thread to shared governance and to the ideal of a liberal arts university, which views education to be a service to the common good (pp. 145-146).
To make adapting to changing economic circumstances easier, some administrators wish to shift tenure from being a university-wide status to applying only to a department (p. 153). Should a department prove economically unviable and become subject to reduction or closure, tenure will not protect a faculty member from being released. In another development weakening tenure, and consequently academic freedom, most universities now require tenured faculty to undergo periodic post-tenure reviews.
Recently, the Association of Governing Boards, which joined the AAUP and the American Council on Education in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, retreated from full-throated support of faculty shared governance (pp. 155-156 ff). The AGB’s 1998 Statement on Board Responsibility for Institutional Governance, lamented “academia’s appetite for the kind of excessive consultation that can bring the institution to a standstill” (p. 156). The Statement calls for giving greater authority to the president to reshape the university in situations wherein changes must be made rapidly.
In his conclusion Gerber again laments the “commercialization” of higher education and the threat it poses to “the validity of ideal professionalism—and ideal premised on the possibility of individuals using their expertise in a disinterested way to advance the common good” (p. 165-166). In a final call to action, Gerber urges
If any group is to take the lead in standing up for academic values and the importance of a liberal education and trying to prevent the further degradation of the quality and narrowing of purpose of our colleges and universities, it must be the faculty, who must reassert their commitment to a broad conception of their professional rights and responsibilities…The practice of shared governance that developed in American colleges and universities were thus not simply a privilege and perquisite of the professorate; they were a necessary condition for the development of a system of education that became the envy of the rest of the world. Reinvigorating the practices of shared governance on American college and university campuses will be critical if the United States is to maintain its position of global leadership in higher education (pp. 169-170).
Next Time: How does the concept of “shared governance” apply to Christian colleges?
In this post, I will follow up on my previous essay of January 13, 2025, “Can Christian Colleges Survive.” In that essay, I reviewed and responded to a new book by David Rabban: Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right (Harvard, 2024). I want now to explore a connection I noticed when reading Rabban’s book, that is, the connection among the State of New Hampshire’s rationale for rewriting the Dartmouth College charter, the American Association of University Professors’ rationale for asserting its theory of academic freedom, and David Rabban’s argument for making academic freedom a First Amendment right.
As with the earlier post, I hope you will read it and pass it on to other interested parties, especially to trustees, administrators, and faculty in Christian colleges.
Legally, there were two issues in this case: (1) Is Dartmouth’s charter (1769) a “contract” under the “impairment of contracts” clause of the US Constitution (Art. I. 10. 1); and if so, (2) did the NH legislature “impair” said contract in its 1816 legislation changing the charter of the college?
In its legal defense of the legislation, New Hampshire denied that Dartmouth’s charter is a contract subject to constitutional protection or that the legislature impaired the “contract” through its action. The Trustees argued in the affirmative in both cases. In this essay, however, I want to focus not on the legal but on the moral/social utilitarian arguments made by the NH legislature to justify the legislation.
The NH legislature argued that the Dartmouth charter was granted for the public good, therefore Dartmouth is a public institution and falls under the authority of the state of NH to regulate matters involving public welfare. The first paragraph of the New Hampshire law in question reads as follows:
WHEREAS knowledge and learning generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government, and extending the opportunities and advantages of education is highly conducive to promote this end, and by the constitution it is made the duty of the legislators and magistrates, to cherish the interests of literature, and the sciences, and all seminaries established for their advancement—and as the college of the State may, in the opinion of the legislature be rendered more extensively useful ; Therefore…(p. 539).
Then follows a series of changes that amount to confiscation of the college by the State of New Hampshire.
Daniel Webster presented the case for the Trustees against the State of New Hampshire. Webster refutes the idea that a contract among private parties to carry out education and other works advantageous to the general public makes an institution a public institution in the legal sense. Webster emphasizes this point over and over in different contexts:
The granting of the corporation is but making the trust perpetual, and does not alter the nature of the charity. The very object sought in obtaining such charter, and in giving property to such a corporation, is to make and keep it private property, and to clothe it with all the security and inviolability of private property. The intent is; that there shall be a legal private ownership, and that the legal owners shall maintain and protect the property, for the benefit of those for whose use it was designed. Whoever endowed the public? Whoever appointed a legislature to administer his charity? Or who ever heard, before, that a gift to a College, or Hospital, or an Asylum, was, in reality, nothing but a gift to the State? (p. 574).
…
The case before the Court is not of ordinary importance, nor of everyday occurrence. It affects not this college only, but every college, and all the literary institutions of the country. They have flourished, hitherto, and have become in a high degree respectable and useful to the Community. They have all a common principle of existence, the inviolability of their charters. It will be a dangerous, a most dangerous experiment, to hold these institutions subject to the rise and fall of popular parties, and the fluctuations of political opinions. If the franchise may be at any time taken away, or impaired, the property also may be taken away, or its use perverted. Benefactors will have no certainty of effecting the object of their bounty; and learned men will be deterred from devoting themselves to the service of such institutions, from the precarious title of their offices. Colleges and halls will be deserted by all better spirits, and become a theatre for the contention of politics. Party and faction will be cherished in the places consecrated to piety and learning. These consequences are neither remote nor possible only. They are certain and immediate (pp. 598-99).
In sum, Webster’s point is this: charitable institutions (a college in this case) aim to benefit the public. The state has an interest in promoting the public good. But this overlapping interest does not give the state a legal right to assert control and manage the institution.
Mr. Joseph Hopkinson, Webster’s co-counsel, drives the same point home quite vigorously:
It is true, that a college, in a popular sense, is a public institution, because its uses are public, and its benefits may be enjoyed by all who choose to enjoy them. But in a legal and technical sense, they are not public institutions, but private charities. Corporations may, therefore, be very well said to be for public use, of which the property and privileges are yet private. Indeed, there may be supposed to be an ultimate reference to the public good, in granting all charters of incorporation; but this does not change the property from private to public. If the property of this corporation be public property, that is, property belonging to the State, when did it become so? It was once private property; when was it surrendered to the public? The object in obtaining the charter, was not surely to transfer the property to the public, but to secure it forever in the hands of those with whom the original owners saw fit to entrust it (pp. 616-617).
Chief Justice Marshall writes for the Supreme Court in its decision favoring the Trustees of Dartmouth College against Woodward. In his carefully reasoned opinion, Justice Marshall argues that the New Hampshire legislature violated the US constitution’s stricture against the impairment of contracts. Dartmouth is a private charitable institution and not a public institution subject to state control:
That education is an object of national concern, and a proper subject of legislation, all admit. That there may be an institution founded by government, and placed entirely under its immediate control, the officers of which would be public officers, amenable exclusively to government, none will deny. But is Dartmouth College such an institution? Is education altogether in the hands of government? Does every teacher of youth become a public officer, and do donations for the purpose of education necessarily become public property, so far that the will of the legislature, not the will of the donor, becomes the law of the donation? These questions are of serious ‘moment to society, and deserve to be well considered. (p. 634).
Marshall concludes:
But the Court has deemed it unnecessary to investigate this particular point, being of opinion, on general principles, that in these private eleemosynary institutions, the body corporate, as possessing the whole legal and equitable interest, and completely representing the donors, for the purpose of executing the trust, has rights which are protected by the constitution.
It results from this opinion, that the acts of the legislature of New-Hampshire, which are stated in the special verdict found in this cause, are repugnant to the constitution of the United States; and that the judgment on this special verdict ought to have been for the plaintiffs. The judgment of the State Court must, therefore, be reversed (p. 654).
It would be hard to overestimate the importance of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward for the freedom of private institutions to conduct their business free from state interference. And as we shall see, the principle established in this case is still of great importance today. The insidious logic of the NH legislature is still being employed—under different guises to be sure—to reduce the autonomy of private non-sectarian and Christian colleges. And Daniel Webster’s argument and Justice Marshall’s decision are still the most potent responses to a government’s assertion of a right to control higher education in private colleges.
In the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 “Declaration on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” we meet again, I shall argue, the NH equivocation between the word “public” used to mean “people in general” and to mean “publicly owned and governmentally controlled.” The Declaration argues that institutions that call themselves colleges and claim to promote the public good are “public trusts” and must therefore accept a definition of academic freedom and tenure commensurate with their self-incurred obligation to serve the good of the public as a whole. That is to say, a college’s claim to promote the good of society obligates it to adopt a non-sectarian stance. Like the State of New Hampshire of 1816, the Declaration imposes its own definition of the “public good” on all institutions that lay claim to the title of college or university. All other ways of serving the public are “proprietary” (“private trusts”), not true universities. The Declaration does not argue that a college’s claim to promote the common good places it within the sphere of direct state control (as in the Dartmouth case). It asserts, rather, that “proprietary” colleges are not truly academic institutions and that their claims to benefit the public, and therefore to be worthy of public support, are misleading or false:
Trustees of such universities or colleges have no moral right to bind the reason or the conscience of any professor. All claim to such right is waived by the appeal to the general public for contributions and for moral support in the maintenance, not of a propaganda, but of a non-partisan institution of learning.
Colleges that do not acknowledge “unfettered” academic freedom are not truly academic, not truly a benefit to the public; they are second rate at best.
The Declaration argues that any college that claims to benefit society at large and appeals to members of the public for support is a “public trust” and therefore must become truly “non-partisan” and free from all religious, political, or commercial interests. Hence it must allow unfettered academic freedom to its professors. This is the same argument made by the New Hampshire legislature for its right to confiscate Dartmouth college and rejected by the Marshall Supreme Court. However, in this instance the argument is used not by a state to justify confiscating private colleges, but by an elite professorial class to discredit, intimidate, and shame colleges founded to serve the church or other private causes.
David Rabban in Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right,** intensifies the AAUP’s argument outlined above and transforms academic freedom from a professional norm into a First Amendment right, thus justifying (like NH in the Dartmouth Case) the intrusion of the government into the heart of the university–private as well as state owned .
As I documented in the previous essay,** Rabban argues (1) that the public benefit generated by professors justifies protecting their academic speech as a special First Amendment right; and (2) that since 1957 the Supreme Court has steadily moved toward asserting a First Amendment right of academic freedom.
Without explicitly saying so, Rabban in effect argues that the claim by a college to be an institution of higher learning that provides a good to the public and employs “professors” to function in this role should come under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment. Clearly, Rabban resurrects the utilitarian/quasi-legal reasoning used in the New Hampshire legislature’s legislation in the 1816 takeover of Dartmouth college. Professors, precisely as members of the professorate, Rabban argues, should have the constitutionally protected right of academic freedom against state or institutional abridgment.
The academic speech of individual professors, no matter where they teach, has become legally protected speech as long as it is truly “academic,” which determination must be made solely by the professorial community. Whether or not a professor’s speech is academic cannot be decided by trustees, judges or administrators. Therefore, the authority to regulate professorial expression has been transferred from the trustees of the college to the government, specifically the US government. States may also decide independently to give academic freedom special state constitutional protection.
This theory aims to achieve what the New Hampshire legislature attempted to achieve in Trustees v. Woodward. However, instead of taking a top-down approach, using the sovereign power of the state, opponents of private institutional autonomy start from the bottom, pitting individual professorial constitutional rights against state legislatures and college trustees. By freeing professors from responsibility to the trustees in the use of their “academic” speech, the profession, backed up by the federal courts, takes control of the core activity of the college. It’s a kind of nationalization of a college’s faculty backed up by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Academically, it levels or homogenizes all colleges and universities in the US.
In other words, treating academic freedom as a special First Amendment right accomplishes what the NH legislature attempted to do to Dartmouth in 1816 and failed to accomplish. But instead of handing control to state legislatures, it places it in the hands of the federal courts. It gives constitutional backing to the AAUP Declaration’s utilitarian and moral arguments.
*This hyperlink takes you to the complete, 199-page record of the case, including the original 1767 charter, the full texts of the 1816 New Hampshire law taking over Dartmouth college, the arguments of the plaintiff (Trustees of Dartmouth College) and the defendant (Woodward, New Hampshire’s recently appointed treasure of Dartmouth University), and Chief Justice Marshall’s decision.
**See my previous post “Can Christian Colleges Survive” (January 13, 2025).
This post consists of a review and response to David M. Rabban, Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right (Harvard University Press, 2024). PP. 369.
From the founding of Harvard College in 1636 to today, higher education has been of huge concern to American society. And until a hundred and twenty-five years ago, most colleges were connected to the church and in one way or another promoted Christianity. Over the course of the past century, however, colleges and universities have disengaged first from orthodox Christianity to adopt liberal Christianity, then on to promoting rationalistic secularity. Now the postmodern university as an institution no longer pursues truth, quests for knowledge, believes in humanity, or possesses a vision of the good. It’s about the quest for power through ideology and social activism. As I said in a previous post, a university that no longer believes in truth no longer believes in itself. It is lost. Students leave knowing less than when they arrived.
In my view, now more than ever, from a social point of view as well as a religious point of view, we need Christian colleges and universities. These institutions may be, along with the church, among the last refuges of belief in the objective reality of the good, true, and beautiful. Now is not the time for Christian colleges to give up their faith and assimilate to the already lost cause of the secular/postmodern university. And this is the reason I have written so much about academic freedom and other higher education topics on this blog.
This “review and response” is longer than my usual posts, and not everyone will wish to work through it in one sitting. But if you are interested in the future of the Christian college, I hope you will read it and pass it on to other interested parties…especially trustees, administrators, and faculty in Christian colleges.
Review
Rabban traces the transformation of academic freedom from a generally accepted professional norm without a special legal grounding to a First Amendment right. In its 1819 decision in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the Supreme Court adjudicated the case through the “impairments of contracts” clause of the US Constitution (Art. I. 10. 1). In the late nineteenth century, the Court used the “due process” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as a doctrinal basis in some cases, but from 1957 onward it has increasingly used the First Amendment (Sweezy v. New Hampshire). Though in the 1960s, the Supreme Court identified academic freedom as “a special concern of the First Amendment” (Justice Brennen in Keyishian v. Board of Regents), Rabban notes that the Supreme Court has yet to clarify and elaborate its meaning. Because of its unsettled status, “judges sometimes refer to the First Amendment right of academic freedom, sometimes to the First Amendment generally, sometimes to employee-speech jurisprudence, and sometimes to all three simultaneously without differentiating them” (p. 301). Rabban writes this book to clarify this confusion and establish academic freedom as a special First Amendment right.
The AAUP’s 1915 “Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” set forth a definition of “academic freedom” that is still used today. Academic freedom concerns the professional necessity for professors to research, write, and teach within their academic expertise (and only that expertise) without hindrance from within or without the university. This special freedom given to professors is justified, the Declaration contended, because it serves the advancement of knowledge and the common good of society. The question of what qualifies as “academic speech” must be settled by one’s peers, not administrators, board members, or judges.
The most famous case dealing with higher education is that of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819). This case established the distinction between public and private corporations, limiting state actions in relation to the latter. In Berea College v. Kentucky (1908), the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Kentucky state supreme court’s decision affirming the state’s right to forbid Berea College from conducting classes with blacks and whites together. Though the Court dealt with the case under the “impairments of contract” clause of the US Constitution, it denied that Kentucky had in fact violated that clause. Justice Harlan’s dissent, in contrast, relied on the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause.
Rabban introduces the chapter with these words, noting a decisive shift in the jurisprudence of academic freedom from conflicts between state and the trustees to the relationship between the state and professors.
Whereas the 1915 Declaration focused on the relationship of professors to trustees, and the earlier application of the Constitution to the university under the impairment of contracts clause focused on the relationship of the state to the trustees, these cases focused on the relationship of the state to professors (p. 52).
Many of the cases of the 1950s and 1960s dealt with the perceived threat of communist infiltration of American universities.
The first mention of “academic freedom” in a Supreme Court case was a dissent by Justice Douglas in Adler v. Board of Education (1952). The first Supreme Court decision in which the majority opinion included academic freedom within First Amendment rights was Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 1957. Chief Justice Warren wrote for the majority. Justice Frankfurter wrote a concurring opinion that speaks of “the dependence of a free society on free universities” (p. 69). Frankfurter (quoting a document written by a South African group of scholars in protest of apartheid) lists four freedoms essential to a university: “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study” (p. 69). This list of freedoms was quoted many times in the subsequent history of Supreme Court and lower court academic freedom cases. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), Justice Brennan “identified academic freedom as a First Amendment right more clearly than had any previous opinion” (p. 76). “Sweezy and Keyishian soon became the starting point for judicial analysis of academic freedom as a First Amendment right” (p. 80).
Rabban puts his finger on the most serious difficulty that arises with giving academic freedom First Amendment status:
Differentiation [between academic freedom as a special and others as general First Amendment rights] would require confronting the argument that a distinctive First Amendment right of academic freedom protects professors more than general First Amendment rights protect everybody else and more than employee-speech jurisprudence protects other public employees (p. 99).
Indeed, this argument was raised as an objection to a special right of academic freedom in a fourth circuit court case, Urofsky v. Gilmore (2000).
In every area of professorial expression (teaching research, publication, intramural speech, etc.), the decisive question about the applicability of academic freedom is whether or not such expression is “academic” and falls within the professional expertise of the professor. Of course, as Rabban discusses later, universities have the institutional academic freedom to determine the curriculum, areas of study, majors offered, budgets, and many other academic aspects of the university. Disputes about extramural speech do not usually fall under academic freedom; they are usually dealt with under general First Amendment jurisprudence.
In his conclusion to this chapter Rabban summarizes the status of the First Amendment right to academic freedom:
As in the cases through Keyishian, the Supreme Court continued to base its decisions on other doctrines even when it recognized and extolled the First Amendment right of academic freedom. But many lower-court decisions relied on this right as the doctrinal vehicle for analyzing and resolving concrete disputes…they generally agreed that the First Amendment right of academic freedom protects the academic content of scholarship and teaching (p. 111).
As we noted in the above quote, even though the courts recognize a First Amendment right of academic freedom, they have not used this doctrine as the basis of their decisions. Instead, they use general First Amendment principles or employee-speech jurisprudence as the doctrinal basis for deciding cases that could have been treated under the First Amendment right of academic freedom.
In cases applying employee-speech jurisprudence, which protects speech by public employees only if it is about a matter of public concern and is not made pursuant to official duties, judges have evaluated whether speech fits within these categories (p. 113).
Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) differentiated for the first time the distinction between the government’s regulation of speech as an employer over employees from its regulation of the speech of citizens in general. It differentiates between “a citizen in commenting upon matters of public concern and the interest of the State, as an employer in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees” (p. 120). Connick v. Meyers (1983) “narrowed the concept of public concern” to avoid a proliferation of constitutional cases. In Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), the Supreme Court limited protections for government-employee speech by excluding speech that pertains to their “official duties” (p. 121).
Highfield Observation: clearly employee-speech jurisprudence does not conform to the professional norm of academic freedom, because academic freedom must cover speech delivered in the course of carrying out the professor’s official duty.
In this chapter, Rabban attempts to show that the only way to do justice to academic freedom is to differentiate it from the general First Amendment right to citizen free speech and employee-speech jurisprudence. The general First Amendment right of free speech is too broad to do justice to the special circumstances of the professorate; it is “egalitarian and individualistic” whereas academic speech is “meritocratic and communitarian” (p. 139). Employee-speech rights are limited at the very place where academic freedom is needed most. Rabban draws on the 1915 AAUP Declaration in crafting his justification for giving professorial academic speech a special status: (1) Professors cannot perform their socially important function, at the heart of their duties, without freedom to teach and write their academic discoveries and theories without hindrance. 2. Academic peers and co-experts alone should determine whether a disputed instance of professor speech is indeed “academic.”
Rabban summarizes crisply:
The distinctive First Amendment theory of academic freedom I propose is justified by the societal value of protecting the expert academic speech of professors whose boundaries are determined through peer review (p. 168).
Highfield Observation: Here we encounter the decisive issues in dealing with academic freedom questions. What counts as “academic” and who decides? Answer: “Academic” is whatever peer professors decide it is. Question: who are these peers? And what academic community are we speaking of and who selects them? These issues become decisive when dealing with academic freedom in Christian higher education. And combined with the institutional side of the equation (institutional academic freedom, the established distinction between private and public, the First Amendment rights of association and religion, institutional autonomy, etc.), it is central to defining academic freedom in a Christian school.
In the 1970s, the Supreme Court extended First Amendment protection of academic freedom to universities as institutions. This extension was anticipated by Justice Frankfurter’s enumeration in Sweeezy (1957) of the right of the university “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study” (p. 171). This list of institutional academic freedom rights forms the basis of the Court’s recent thinking on institutional academic freedom.
In this chapter, Rabban reviews cases in which universities “have asserted their institutional academic freedom to evaluate students and faculty, to regulate scholarship and teaching, and to resist interference from the state” (p. 172). In the famous University of California v. Bakke case (1978), the Court invalidated (by a 5 to 4 margin) the university’s affirmative action program at its medical school. Justice Powell provided the 5th vote for the majority but disagreed with the reasoning of both parties (14th Amendment versus statutory law). Powell recognized [drawing on Frankfurter in Sweezy: “who may be admitted to study”] that a “First Amendment right of institutional academic freedom was the only legal basis for his support of affirmative action for universities” (p. 174).
In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Justice O’Connor drew on Powell’s brief in Bakke to justify the use of race as a factor in college admissions at the University of Michigan. However, O’Conner used the term “educational autonomy” instead of institutional academic freedom. In his dissent, Justice Thomas argued that the First Amendment does not “authorize a university to do what would otherwise violate the Equal Protection Clause.” (p. 178). In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), the Supreme Court invalidated Harvard’s use of race as a factor in student admissions on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, a belated victory for Justice Thomas.
As the cases within the last half century demonstrate, institutional academic freedom (or educational autonomy) and professor academic freedom can conflict; and those conflicts are not easily resolved. In truly academic matters universities may assert many rights against state encroachment and in the broad academic policies (qualities required for appointment and tenure, courses of study, etc.), individual professors do not have an unlimited academic right to do whatever they like, even if it could be construed as an academic judgment.
After examining cases wherein institutional academic freedom came under scrutiny, Rabban concludes,
Through numerous decisions about educational issues as well as by protecting the academic freedom of their faculties, universities foster the production and dissemination of knowledge and the education in democratic citizenship that justify First Amendment protection for academic freedom. To qualify for the protection of institutional academic freedom, universities must demonstrate that they have based a decision on educational considerations related to these First Amendment interests. This demonstration depends on convincing evidence that the person or group assessing educational considerations on behalf of the university has sufficient expertise to do so. Assessment of academic quality is the primary responsibility of the faculty, whereas the administration and governing board have a major role in the development of general educational policies…the state may have more legitimate interests in regulating public universities than private ones. To this extent, public universities have less institutional academic freedom (p. 230).
Highfield Observation: Rabban focuses almost totally on public universities. He admits that private universities have more institutional academic freedom (or institutional autonomy) than public ones. He does not attempt to delineate how that greater freedom may be exercised in contrast to state-established universities. Also, he focuses on “academic” institutional freedom and the procedural limits this focus places on universities. But “institutional autonomy,” which includes, but is a broader concept than, institutional academic freedom, may be a better category to protect private, and especially religious colleges, from state encroachment and assertions of professorial academic freedom against the general aims and philosophy of the institution. The reason for this preference is simple. According to Rabban, all things “academic” must be judged so by the faculty. Within this theory, universities possess “institutional academic freedom” only insofar as it facilitates and protects faculty academic freedom. There are no theoretical grounds for the university administration, board, or the state legislature to challenge the faculty’s “academic” judgments.
This chapter focuses on recent controversies over offensive speech on college campuses. May universities create and enforce speech codes censuring hate speech and other forms of offensive expression? Generally, the courts have not upheld university speech codes unless they track with general First Amendment free speech jurisprudence, that is, they limit only speech that fails the “imminent lawless action” test: threats of violence, “fighting words,” etc. And yet, the context of a university as an educational institution places additional restraints on speech. Some speech that would be lawful to utter in the public square would not be appropriate in the classroom. According to Rabban, however, even “offensive” speech should be allowed if it serves a bona fides educational purpose. As an example, a classroom reading from The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn might include the word “nigger.” Rabban argues that teachers should not be compelled to substitute “N-word” for nigger. Institutional academic freedom allows universities more regulation of speech than the government can impose in the public sphere, but it must serve an academic and educational purpose. As one can imagine, there is much danger of subjectivity in defining what speech serves an educational purpose and what speech serves no educational purpose.
The academic freedom claims of individual professors may conflict with academic freedom (or institutional autonomy) claims of universities. These cases often turn on the academic merit of a professor’s research or teaching. The institution’s educational policies outweigh a professor’s academic freedom claims. Abusive, disruptive or “vitriolic attacks” of professors against the administration, for example, are not covered by academic freedom (See Johnson v. Lincoln University 1985). Rabban continues,
Several [cases] concluded that a university cannot balance the loss of funding or other support from a state legislature, alumni, or the public against a professor’s controversial expression on matters of public concern (p. 253; for a list of cases, see fn. 16, p. 353).
Most judges are rightly hesitant to weigh in on the academic or educational merit of an academic freedom claim. But they are free to examine whether or not the parties adhered to the proper procedures or acted in good faith. Judges should rely on peer review for judging academic merit.
With reference to the justification of student academic freedom, Rabban argues,
The societal value of the student interest in learning provides a plausible justification for a distinctive theory of student academic freedom. The student interest in learning, while different from the general rights of free speech, promotes the broadly recognized First Amendment values of disseminating knowledge and promoting democratic citizenship (p. 282).
Student academic freedom differs from professorial academic freedom:
Whereas the protection of expert speech that justified academic freedom for faculty does not extend to political expression beyond this expertise, the exercise of political speech by students in extracurricular activities contributes to the learning process that justifies their academic freedom (p. 283).
Student academic freedom covers “student interests in access to knowledge, in disagreeing with the views of their professors, and in fair evaluation” (p. 297).
Response
What is the distinction between a theory of academic freedom as a First Amendment right and academic freedom as a professional norm? As a professional norm, the academic freedom of professors, colleges, and students is justified the same way other professional norms are justified, that is, the norm inheres in the definition and practice of the profession. The essence of the profession of professor is to think, research, teach, and disseminate knowledge. Subservience to alien authorities within or without the university would redefine the nature of the professorate as a mere mouthpiece of these other parties.
But why define the professorate in a way that includes this type of academic freedom within its definition? According to Rabban, in reliance on the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration, the professorate performs an important service to democratic and progressive society. It serves to advance scientific knowledge and create an informed and critical citizenry. That is to say, its function is to challenge the status quo with a view to progress in all areas of life. To do this effectively, the professorate and the university must be protected from reactionary and conservative forces invested in maintaining the status quo.
However, as a professional norm, an assertion of academic freedom possesses no legal force. It depends on persuasion and soft coercion for its enforcement. It persuades by appealing to the nature of the profession and its service to society. It coerces through mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and rewards and punishments that operate under the control of the profession as represented by the most prestigious universities and the most celebrated professors. This professional elite institutionalizes itself in learned societies, journals, publishers, accrediting bodies, and such advocacy groups as the AAUP and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Still, academic freedom as a professional norm possesses no legal force, and as we saw in Rabban, most court cases involving censorship or punishment of professorial expression were adjudicated on other grounds, the “impairment of contracts” clause, the “equal protection” clause, or general First Amendment rights.
Rabban, the AAUP, and other legal scholars want the Supreme Court to recognize and clarify a special First Amendment right of academic freedom. This change would add constitutional force to the profession’s methods of enforcement, which at present are limited to persuasion and soft-coercion. It would give the professorate and individual professors the constitutional right to speak freely in the course of performing their professional duties, without censorship, threats or punishments on all academic matters within their expertise. Clearly, making academic freedom a constitutional right would provide more protection for the professorate than other legal doctrines. Within the narrow sphere of their role as professor and within their expertise, it would allow the courts to treat the activities of professors not merely as those of citizens or employees but as those of professors. Within this sphere, the work of professors would be constitutionally protected from censorship, punishment, or threats of the same from within or without the university.
As the above analysis demonstrates treating academic freedom as a special First Amendment right would give professors more protection than would other legal doctrines. But unlike other legal doctrines that have been applied to disputes about academic freedom, this doctrine focuses only on actions that qualify as “academic” and fall within the expertise of the professor. Who decides what speech qualifies as “academic” and falls within the expertise of a professor? Judges cannot make this determination. According to Rabban, this question must be decided by the professor’s peers. In effect, “academic” means whatever a group of peer professors say it means. That is to say, Rabban provides no substantive definition of “academic” speech. To complicate matters even more, we must also ask who qualifies as a peer and who selects this group of peers?
One has to ask why our society would tolerate a profession that demands freedom to exercise its “academic” expertise as it pleases and to be recognized as the sole arbiter of what counts as academic? Isn’t that rather circular? Must society simply trust that the profession as a whole will disregard its narrow self-interests and do the right thing? Moreover, the profession now wishes to have its demands declared special constitutional rights designed just for it. Why would citizens, state legislators, alumni, and donors continue to support such a profession and the institutions within which they work? Will they not demand some say about what counts as worthy of the designation “academic”? Who, then, will guard the guardians?
The demand that academic freedom be treated as a First Amendment right becomes exponentially troubling from the perspective of the Christian college. In fact, it spells the end of Christian colleges. For, if professors who teach in Christian colleges possess the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to teach and write whatever their disciplinary peers judge to be “academic” and within the expertise of the professors in question, the college’s freedom to carry out its Christian educational mission will be trumped by the consensus of the profession and the courts. Professors in Christian colleges would be free to deny and refute cardinal Christian doctrines and basic Christian moral teaching. Indeed, no one could hinder them from teaching atheism, agnosticism, moral relativism or any other view that peers in their discipline considered of “academic” merit. The Christian college’s legitimacy is denied not only by imposition of elite professional norms but also as a matter of constitutional law!
Hence, I reject Rabban’s conclusion on both social/political and Christian grounds.
The plausibility of the theory of academic freedom articulated in the AAUP Declaration, defended and expanded by Rabban depends on accepting its interpretation of three foundational concepts. And these interpretations, I shall argue, are tendentious and disputable.
1. The Profession. The definition of the profession of professor in the AAUP Declaration omits the socially important task of explaining and defending the wisdom of the past in favor of criticism and discovery of new knowledge. The “professional” college teacher must teach students to be critical of the status quo and become more progressive in their thinking. Apparently, there is no place in the profession for conservatives and traditionalists. This is a narrow and elitest view of the profession borrowed in the late nineteenth century from German universities, which focused almost totally on graduate education and research. But there is no rational ground to exclude from the profession college teachers whose main goal is explaining and defending the wisdom of the past to undergraduates. The job of traditioning its young is a necessary educational task of any society, certainly equal in importance and prior in developmental order to developing researchers and critical thinkers. Critical thinking by those who have no foundations and accepted verities and values leads to nihilism in philosophy and radicalism in politics. No society can long exist without shared values, stories, and traditions.
2. The Academic. As we saw above, Rabban argues that “academic” means whatever the profession says it means. And yet, a profession defined as the AAUP Declaration defines it will always view itself as the only authority that understands the true art and science of the profession. If what you say is not progressive and critical of conservative culture and if you don’t adhere to the dominant methods and conclusions of the “academic” disciplines, your work will not be judged as academic. We need a substantive definition of what counts as academic. I propose that teaching and research that occurs in a school, begins with clear axioms, intuitions, or facts and argues logically for its conclusions should count as academic. In this way, what counts as academic does not depend on inbred group thinking.
3. Peer Review. Peer review is central to the modern theory of academic freedom. If the nature of the profession and the concept of the academic are defined as Rabban defines them, then peer review is essential to proper adjudication of any academic freedom claim. However, if in the review process only members of the profession as it is defined by the AAUP Declaration and Rabban qualify as peers, then the outcome is predetermined: the academic nature of a professor’s work will be judged by the elite standards or prejudices or ideologies that constitute the ethos of the peer group. Professors are not saints or thinking machines! They are just as self-interested and tribal as any other group with common interests. In my view, review committees in academic freedom disputes should include members from outside the profession as a check on inbred group thinking and a surround-the-wagons mentality. No group unchecked by a balance of power and interest can be trusted to be fair to everyone concerned. Nimo iudex in causa sua (No one is judge in their own case!).
If the concepts of “the profession,” “the academic” and “peer review” must be broadened beyond the confines of research institutions and scholars engaged in discovery of new knowledge and mentoring the next generation of critical scholars, it follows that the concept of academic freedom must be broadened as well. An undergraduate college that emphasizes the great books or traditional or religious wisdom must embrace a view of academic freedom with a different scope and limits than an elite research university. Professors who desire to transmit, explain and defend traditional wisdom need the academic freedom to do that, and they need institutions that employ such teachers and rewards this kind of teaching. And why shouldn’t students have the academic freedom to study at such a college and to learn from such professors? It would be institutional suicide for a college that exists to provide this kind of education to grant professors academic freedom to criticize, reject, and replace traditional wisdom or religious faith with progressive or radical thought. Nor does it make sense for them to recruit and employ or retain professors with these aspirations. Academic freedom must be broadly conceived so as to be applicable to a wide variety of colleges and universities and a variety of professors. Academic freedom, then, is the freedom to carry out your academic vocation within the scope and limits of the educational philosophy and mission of the college where you teach, be that a research/critical university or a traditional, religious, or classical college. What counts as academic freedom depends on your location within the higher education spectrum. In education as in foot ware, one size does not fit all.
Next time: “Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom: The Cases of Dartmouth, AAUP Declaration, and Rabban, Academic Freedom”
Two recent experiences provoked me to reflect on the disparity between what I want to know and how much I actually know. To live at peace with this disparity, I’ve had to develop strategies for dealing with my ignorance without falling into skepticism or dogmatism. I share three of those lessons below.
First. My newspaper never arrives before I finish breakfast! For this reason, I keep my Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church on the dining table. This amazing resource contains 1798 double-column pages and many thousands of entries of relevance to church history. It begins with “Aaron” the brother of Moses and ends with “Zwingli” the Swiss reformer. I learn something new, interesting, and useful every morning. But I am also stung with something I’d rather not think about. Almost every time I read from that huge book I am reminded of my ignorance and my insignificance: the millions of lives lived, experiences had, institutions founded, and systems created.
Second. Recently, a long-time friend with whom I have not spoken in years called to catch up. During the course of our conversation, he asked what I thought of the state of the church in the United States. Perhaps he thought that because I’ve taught theology for 35 years to thousands of students from two generations I would have a grasp on what things had been, how they have changed, and where they stand. After a few lame attempts to say something intelligent, I think I said, “I really don’t know.”
You must understand that I’ve always had a passion to know, to understand my world, the flow of human history and my place in it. As a young person I had questions to which I needed answers. How can you act intelligently in a world you do not understand? So, I read and read. I read the Bible, theology, the history of nations, church history, and philosophy. Hundreds of books and tens of thousands of pages! I found satisfactory answers to some of my questions. But many more remain, and new ones arise almost every day.
The first lesson: know your ignorance. Perhaps I should say “feel” your ignorance, because you cannot know the extent of what you do not know. Speak and act with humility and caution.
Of course, there is no shortage of big picture theories. Theories of society and politics, metaphysical theories, theories of human nature, climate futurology, economic theories, and theological visions. Comprehensive theories give us an illusory feeling of omniscience, of knowing the essential truth of all things. Perhaps that is why we like them. But there is no consensus about which theories are true. For abstract theories paint only the vaguest general outlines of their subject matter. They cannot be verified, for they do not create transparent understanding of why things in all their intricate interrelations are exactly as they are.
Our minds long for simplicity and clarity. Simplicity allows us to see the whole thing at one instant, and clarity gives us confidence that we see things as they truly are. Mathematical knowledge is the paradigm case of simplicity and clarity. Physics is the most mathematical of the natural sciences. But what you gain in certainty and clarity of knowledge you lose in descriptive power. For there is more to nature than quantity, much more! Knowing the basic physical/mathematical laws of matter does not give you the power to describe the actual state of the vast array of different kinds of things we experience in the universe. Such non-mathematical theories as we find in psychology, sociology, economics, and politics must be abstract, simple, and general for us to understand them. Like theories in physics, theories that deal with human behavior, insofar as they are abstract, simple, general, offer little help in understanding why things are the way they are in all their actuality.
The Second lesson: The wise person will avoid mistaking theory for actuality or the model for the thing. Theory never exhaustively explains actuality. Let the model direct your attention to the thing.
We all know the limits of first-hand experience. No individual human being’s experience extends to every place and time. The very purpose of education is to make available to each individual the experiences and insights of countless other individuals from other places and times. It is the distinctive glory of humanity that we are not limited in knowledge and wisdom to our natural instincts or to what we can learn from our own experiences. Still, each individual must integrate information received from diverse sources into a unified whole centered in themselves. We are limited to the information we receive and to our powers of integration; we cannot leap outside of ourselves to get a God’s-eye point of view. Nor can we know how well our limited vision of things corresponds to a universal consciousness.
Though we must acknowledge the limits of our knowledge, few of us can believe that one individual’s vision of the world bears no resemblance to those of other individuals or to that of a universal consciousness. For this belief would render futile all attempts to learn from each other, to understand each other, or to achieve consensus. And why strive for a common vision apart from the conviction that this common vision bears some resemblance to reality? For then we would be limited to exploring the internal powers and possible objects of the human mind without reference to the way things truly are.
Now let’s revisit my two humbling experiences mentioned above. Admittedly, I cannot come to know and understand the experiences, thoughts and deeds of every human being who has ever lived. However, if I assume that all human beings possess the same powers, possibilities and weaknesses, I can learn more and more about my own humanity by studying the history of the human spirit in the lives of past individuals. (Reading entries from the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church makes sense after all!) Making the same assumption—that all human beings possess the same powers, possibilities and weaknesses—and thinking in the reverse direction, I can learn better to understand the experiences of other people by examining carefully my own first-hand experiences.
As I stumbled to answer my friend’s question about the state of the church in the United States, I ended up saying something like this: “I can’t speak from extensive, detailed knowledge of the big picture, but I can tell you how it looks from where I stand.” This humble and cautious approach seemed to satisfy my friend. He could compare his limited perspective with my limited perspective in a process that promised to clarify and supplement his understanding. Combined together many limited perspectives may move us all closer to the goal of comprehensive understanding.
The Third Lesson: Avoid both arrogance and despair (or dogmatism and skepticism) in your quest for true understanding. Listen carefully and dialogue respectfully to all voices and allow them to clarify and purify your first-hand understanding of the matter at issue.
In the previous six essays I summarized Christopher Rufo’s account of how the New Left came to dominate American education, government agencies, and corporations. I will devote this essay to higher education.
Before I discuss higher education, I want to assert briefly and bluntly that neo-Marxist philosophy is incompatible with Christianity. You cannot be a disciple of Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse and be a Christian in any sense close to orthodoxy. Marcuse was an atheist as are most other New Left leaders. As we saw in our previous essays, neo-Marxists are willing to destroy a relatively just, admittedly imperfect, social order in a despairing hope that a perfect one will take its place. The New Left divides human beings into oppressors and oppressed; it further divides the oppressed into a hierarchy of ever more marginalized identities. It explains all human relationships by this narrow category. Moreover, it justifies violence as a means of bringing about its vision of justice. CRT, DEI, and Critical Pedagogy make no sense apart from neo-Marxist critical theory. They cannot be adapted to serve a Christian purpose.
In contrast to the New Left philosophy, Christianity proclaims that God exists and is known truly in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. God is the creator and lord of the world. Human beings are God’s creatures made in his image and subject to sin, corruption and death. There is no hope for salvation except in God. People find their true identity in faith and union with Christ. Jesus calls on his disciples to live in peace and joy, to be peacemakers and extend mercy, to love their neighbors and enemies. There is one church, inclusion into which depends on faith and baptism. Class envy and racial animus are forbidden. Violence in service of supposed just causes is prohibited. In both spirit and letter, Christianity and neo-Marxism could hardly be more antithetical. You cannot serve two masters.
Why were American universities so easily and so thoroughly conquered by the New Left? Why could they not resist such an anti-Christian, anti-democratic, anti-American, and divisive philosophy?
The short answer is that in the late 19th century the old American colleges began their transformation into modern universities by adopting the research model of the University of Berlin (1810). They cease assuming the truth of Christianity and argued for professorial and student freedom to teach and learn unencumbered by confessional restrictions. They viewed academic freedom and professional competence as essential because the new idea of the university centered on critique of old ideas and the production of new knowledge. Hence any force that resisted those new goals was considered anti-progressive. And progressive academic leaders thought that orthodox Christianity and conservative politics were the most counter-revolutionary forces they had to fear. To guard against these reactionary forces, modern academic leaders institutionalized such strong protections as near inviolable academic freedom and career-long tenure. The enemies of critical scholarship, value neutral research, and the progress of science, they thought, were all on the right, that is, among those wanting to turn back the clock. Hence all modern academia’s defenses were directed to its right. The values academic leaders asserted were critical, skeptical, purely methodological, liberal, and supposedly metaphysically and religiously neutral; all were designed to defend against traditional religious and political dogmas. Modern academia could not assert positive beliefs, truths, and values without sounding dogmatic and hypocritical. Its only commitment was to make no commitments. It never imagined that it would be attacked and conquered from the dogmatic left.
As we learned from Rufo, the New Left turned modern academia’s progressive rhetoric, critical methods, and institutions of academic freedom and tenure against it. Because the New Left was neither conservative nor Christian, it caught the liberal establishment off guard. The New Left painted the liberal order of the modern university as sold out to the white capitalist establishment. The liberal university establishment, in the leftist critique, was not critical enough, not neutral, and not progressive. Liberal academics and university administrators were face with a dilemma. They could admit that they have positive commitments after all and assert those beliefs, values, and truths in its defense against the leftist critique. Or, they could give in to the New Left as the logical outcome of their critical stance toward traditional Christianity and conservative politics. Not wanting to give ground to their old enemies, they chose the latter. To escape Christian dogma and reactionary politics, the nightmares of the liberal establishment, the university mortgaged itself to tyrannical, dogmatic leftists.
According to Rufo, the only possibility of overturning the neo-Marxist hold on the American university—if there is a possibility at all—lies in the democratic process. The public must reassert its control and reimpose its values on the education system. It will have to insist that primary, secondary and college education should stop working to create activists for the left’s utopian vision of social justice and take up again its traditional task of preparing productive and informed citizens for the constitutional republic of the United States of America. The value of tenure for securing the quality of education and as protection from arbitrary dismissal should be obvious, but it must be granted and maintained only under specific and clearly stated contractual obligations consistent with the stated mission of the university. The protection of academic freedom should not be extended to efforts that subvert the academic mission of the university by redirecting the educational process toward non-academic purposes. Moreover, universities should make it clear that freedom of speech applies not to the classroom but to public spaces. In staff, administrative, and bureaucratic positions, where academic tenure and academic freedom do not apply, legislatures, Boards of Regents, and administrators have much more freedom to reorganize and reform the educational bureaucracy. Shutting down all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices would be a good start.
But I am skeptical that the public, elected officials, and Boards of Regents will carry out these measures. I could list many reasons for my pessimism, and so could you. But from an insider perspective, this one stands out: there is a deeply rooted assumption in higher education that there should be a single academic culture that sets the standards for the whole nation. Each university, it is assumed, should embody those standards. As long as this assumption holds sway, it is impossible for any one university to assert positive beliefs, values, and truths against the New Left. In a diverse society like ours, it is unlikely that a set of beliefs, values, and truths strong enough to resist the New Left can emerge as a national consensus. The only way forward is to reject the assumption of the necessity of one uniform definition of sound education. Individual universities must assert their right to define their own standards.
Next Time: The New Left and The Christian College
This essay continues my review of Part III of Christopher F. Rufo: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023). My previous essay introduced the problem with which Rufo deals in this section. We will now consider the career and influence of the Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire (1921-1997).*
In 1969 the Brazilian political exile Paulo Freire spend six months at Harvard University, during which time he translated his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed from Portuguese into English. According to Rufo, the book has sold over a million copies and is the third most cited book in social science literature. Pedagogy of the Oppressed presupposes the Marxist analysis of society, which divides the world into the masses of oppressed and the minority of oppressors. A truly just and free society cannot be realized within the capitalist system. The oppressors’ success relies on a series of myths (private property, individual rights, hard work and merit-based rewards) that justifies their superior status and enables them to maintain their dominance. Freire’s innovation, however, lies not in the area of Marxist theory but in developing a way to use the educational system to further the revolution. Freirean educational philosophy has come to be called “critical pedagogy.”
In contrast to what most people think is the purpose of education, that is, to teach young people the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the dominant culture, Critical Pedagogy aims to debunk the myths that justify capitalist society and awaken the oppressed to their oppressed status and oppressors to their oppressor status. Instead of the basic skills of reading, writing, and mathematics, the emphasis falls on social criticism and activism in service of “liberation.” Like many Marxist theorists, Freire justifies using violence in service of the socialist revolution. He explains:
Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized…Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed…can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the [violent] response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human (Pedagogy, Chapter 7; quoted in Rufo, p. 150).
In this chapter, Rufo describes how Freire’s American disciples led by Henry Giroux disseminated Freire’s ideas. First, Giroux initiated a series of publications that introduced Freire’s ideas to American educational theorists. Giroux did not attempt to hide his Marxist leanings: “The neo-Marxist position, it seems to us, provides the most insightful and comprehensive model for a more progressive approach for understanding the nature of schooling and developing an emancipatory program for social education” (Teachers as Intellectuals, 1988; quoted by Rufo, p. 162). The next step, according to Giroux, was to secure tenured positions for 100 likeminded professors in American universities. Over the next 40 years, these educational theorists published thousands of articles and books exploring ways to use critical pedagogy in schools and colleges to further the cause of the socialist revolution. As an example of the influence of critical pedagogy, Rufo details ways in which the State of California has incorporated it into its public educational program. In its Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, California declares that school children shall learn to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs…[and critique] white supremacy, racism, and other forms of power and oppression.” Schools need to teach students to join in “social movements that struggle for social justice…build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society” (Quoted in Rufo, p. 164).
In this chapter, Rufo documents the now familiar transition from social analysis focusing on economic class to that focused on race. In America, Freire’s American disciples recognized, the Marxist oppressor/oppressed paradigm could be more effectively applied to the White/Black or People of Color distinction than to the owner/worker distinction. Speaking of the second generation of Freire’s disciples, Rufo says, “Their primary pedagogical strategy was to pathologize white identity, which was deemed inherently oppressive, and radicalize black identity, which was deemed inherently oppressed” (p. 173). According to Barbara Applebaum and other critical pedagogists, whites must become conscious, confess and repent of their white supremacy and white privilege. Whiteness is a disease that masks itself in appeals to rationality, the rule of law, capitalism, liberalism, secularism, merit, hard work and other myths. Whites need therapy and a program of reeducation. They need to commit “race suicide” and abolish the “white race.” Black children, on the other hand, need to be taught how to see through the myths and systems of whiteness.
In this chapter, Rufo pursues the irony that Portland, Oregon one of the whitest cities in America, is also the “headquarters of race radicalism in the United States” (p. 189). “The city’s loose network of Marxist, anarchist, and anti-fascist groups have turned the street riot into an art form” (p. 196). According to Rufo, the young rioters educated in the Portland school system are simply putting into practice the vision of society they were taught.
*See also my January 15, 2023 review of James Linsey’s book The Marxification of Education, which focuses on Freire.
Next Time: We will look at work and influence of Derrick Bell and the origins of Critical Race Theory.
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