But what if Prof. Smith at Low Budget U. is teaching statistics and believes that the faculty-selected, bulk-purchased text for the intro course misrepresents the meaning of p-values. He assigns the class J. Cohen’s “The earth is flat (p (less than) .05).” Is his academic freedom violated if the dept. sanctions him or tries to permit him from doing so? I think yes.

Apparently, ‘less than’ signs become code easily.

I think most academic freedom debates are best illustrated via casuistry. Elaine Scarry is an English professor who has written in non-academic journals—not in peer-reviewed journals about electronics or aeronautics —about “electromagnetic interference” and plane crashes. If she turned “The 19th Century Novel” course into a course on EMI and planes, then Harvard would have legitimate grounds for sanctioning her, and it would not be a violation of academic freedom. That’s what I take Harry to be saying.

But what if Prof. Smith at Low Budget U. is teaching statistics and believes that the faculty-selected, bulk-purchased text for the intro course misrepresents the meaning of p-values. He assigns the class J. Cohen’s “The earth is flat (p

(btw, is it more awkward to refer to “Harry” but “Dewey” and Burke”? no disrespect meant)

Anyway, maybe it’s because I’ve been reading On Liberty today, but the Millian line seems an appealing one to me here:

Why not say academics – like all others – are only answerable to society for what concerns society. Of course, all teaching and tax-funded research may have indirect effects on others, but here bring in that ‘direct and assignable duty’ bit – academics should not be free to neglect duties to their students and colleagues but, otherwise, should be left to do what they want. I think a lot of Mill’s arguments about the value of free thought and experimentation apply in academia, and it’s often those that ‘think outside the box’ who ‘change the subject’.

As for who polices the police (in academia, as opposed to law enforcement), since non-academics won’t really be capable of doing so directly I guess they can only judge the merits of any particular academic, project or institution by the proxy of how it’s received in the academic community. If I see Prof X refused tenure and Prof Y offered a chair at Harvard, then I assume Prof Y is doing stuff his fellow academic community deem somehow ‘more worthy’. I think something like a competitive marketplace effectively ‘polices’ itself in most cases. (Though, of course, one would have to be wary about, say, professors indoctrinating undergrads who hadn’t got much real choice or exit option, etc).

I could see that. If you assume that no rights are natural, then the only way to preserve them over some period of time is to agree not to argue about them, or at least to have the presumption that it’s going to take a very strong argument to change them.

Which is not to say that there aren’t reasons for rights and freedoms. It’s that reasons are not, finally, very important when considering how they get changed. The reasons why it’s not a good idea to torture people are just as convincing as they ever were. But those reasons have been predicteably ignored when people decided, in a hysterical reaction to events compounded by propaganda, that torture would be a good idea after all. In those cases, you have to support freedoms as rules.

As for the genesis of positive freedoms (e.g. the right to health care), I don’t think that the people who argued for a freedom-right to the use of their labors ever had a case, historically. There never was an era in which taxation for the purpose of provision of some kind of public good did not exist, if only the public good of protection against invasion. The people arguing against public health care on those ideological grounds were doing the same thing that I’ve criticized in this thread; proposing a new framework in which current arrangements are ignored and in which “rational” consideration from first principles should control political realities.

But, just to say, the level of income tax is often taken, quite wrongly in both our views, to be non-negotiable because people have a freedom-right to the fruits of their labours. It takes intellectual work to show why this is false, and that is the kind of work I think needs to be done in specifying the proper parameters of any freedom.

I also disagree about the (radically strong) presumption in favour of freedom, at the level that I’m interested in, which is the level of thinking carefully about what people should and should not be able to do. Sure freedom is important, but it is important for reasons, and those reasons have to be weighed against reasons for doing things that impinge on freedom. As for a presumption in favour of freedom at the political level, I’m more sympathetic. I am so glad, though, that it was not in place in the UK when we set up the National Health Service, and in the Scandinavian social democracies when they were establishing those.

I should also say that I don’t have some kind of idea of “natural rights”, “originalism” etc. I accept that all rights and freedoms are constructs created through some mixture of negotiation and power politics, and that none have time-invarying meanings. But most of liberal politics can be seen as an attempt to make some of them more difficult to change than others.

Where is the proposal for the radical restructuring of society? I would argue, in the case of press freedom, for a mild change in the law concerning whom the press can name during the lead up to and period of a trial. In the case of schooling I would argue for a changes (in some districts) in the working conditions of teachers such that they can expect to collaborate with their colleagues in a way that exposes some of what they do to the scrutiny of others. Nothing radical there—its standard in elementary schooling, and in pretty much all good schools. Your standard seems unwilling to consider reform, and on what grounds? We don’t know because you have defined academic freedom as whatever deal has already been made.

All right, then let’s be clear that you are in fact proposing a radical restructuring of society, in which every freedom must be rationalized, as in your example around freedom of the press. Perhaps now you can see why I referred to Burke.

I’m not a conservative, but the history of this kind of attempt should make it clear why it’s a bad idea absent a) clear problems with the current system, b) a clear goal that you are trying to approach. You have neither. What you seem to have is technocratic language—“some of the essential levers of school improvement would be impossible to introduce”—which is very predictably going to be bowled over by organized political interests as soon as the mechanism for enforcing change is put in place. Without a mechanism for enforcing change, really all you are saying is “don’t be a jerk”, but because you seemingly don’t want to put it that way, it comes out as a useful attack on academic freedom.