I have a long-standing pet peeve about the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech, especially in the context of (purported) campus debate. In order to illustrate why one should not conflate academic freedom and freedom of speech, I introduce two uncontroversial theses about each.
Thesis [I]: lying and deception are protected features of political speech under most contemporary ‘free speech’/‘freedom of expression’ doctrines/legal standards; they are seen as occasionally necessary in politics, and sometimes (even if rarely) lauded by public opinion. By contrast, thesis [II]: lying and deception in scholarship and education are wholly incompatible with academic freedom.
I’ll take [I] as common ground. And before you are worried that I am setting a trap for you, even if you accept [I], you are not required to sign up for Platonic skepticism (here) — which holds that democratic political speech is usually in the realm of opinion, not truth — about political discourse.*
You may have doubts about [II]. You may, for example, think that lying and deception are permitted when used instrumentally to discover truth, say, in a social psychology or a behavioral economics experiment. Since the replication crisis, I won’t concede such examples because the nay-sayers (mostly my friends from experimental economics) turned out to be prescient: those scholars used to lying to their subjects also got in the habit of less than forthright truth-telling to each other and the wider public. And while I grant that lying to subjects probably didn’t cause the replication crisis in social science, it was, in fact, manifestly part of a more general corrosion of academic norms.
Either way, ‘academic freedom’ is one of the great misnomers; for it always involves disciplined and accountable speech. This is one of the great implied, original lessons from Thomas Kuhn’s account of science back in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. All science is disciplined by general norms of intellectual life (including the norm against deception and lying) and by ones particular to a given scientific field (involving accepted standards of rigor, of citation practices, of how to present graphics and data, of authorship protocols, of ethics approval, etc.)
As an aside, of course, these norms of disciplined academic speech are never quite stable. For example, at the moment, thanks to the widespread availability of cheap and computationally powerful AI, we’re clearly in a period of norm transition. The AI apparatus fails to give proper credit to the sources in the training data, and it is also used by academics in ways that would have been censured not so long ago.
I don’t mean to deny that there is a form of liberty in academic freedom—the freedom to pick a topic of one’s own; the freedom to come to one’s own conclusions; the freedom to tell a Dean they are wrong about the curriculum for one’s field, and so on. Although in practice, these freedoms are often less than it seems since there are hard constraints (of funding, of time, of academic consensus, etc.).
Be that as it may, and this is a crucial further illustration of the significance of theses [I] and [II]: one can be expelled from the academic community for being caught plagiarizing and committing academic fraud and so on. Academic norms treat academic deception and fraud as being far worse in character than many felonies, putting life-time banishments from the academy on perpetrators without a possibility of forgiveness or redemption.
By contrast, one cannot be evicted from one’s political community for lying and deception.** Even the implied exception proves the rule. In many political jurisdictions classes of non-citizens can lose their residency permit if the permit was acquired through lying or deception. (This is not a Trump-era rule.) Natural-born citizens face no risk in losing their citizenship even when committing massively costly fraud. And politicians generally face negligible consequence(s) for lying on the job altogether.
That politicians, lawyers, and journalists are not especially familiar with or prefer to ignore the difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech is regrettable, but not surprising given their incentives and the many other obstacles to tracking important distinctions in complex societies. Somewhat oddly during the past decade (or so) universities are incredibly recalcitrant to inform outsiders and members of their own communities about the difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech. In many places it should, thus, not surprise that the law barely recognizes a difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech. Even most of the great recent declarations on institutional neutrality by elite universities find it difficult to articulate a principled distinction between academic freedom and freedom of speech.
Instead, universities willingly participate in the fiction that they are important sites for facilitating and generating public debate. When the fiction is not simply taken for granted (or overshadowed by consumption of social media), it is embraced as true and defended as educative to the student-body (and the wider community). We are often reminded of this fiction when during a campus controversy a visiting speaker is (say) heckled and some group of students, we are told, prevents another group of students to ‘educate themselves.’ Even allowing that heckling or preventing visiting speakers from speaking is against the campus rules for such occasions and a lack of hospitality (and decorum, etc.), a necessary distinction between the nature of education and being (say) informed or entertained is also being effaced in such attitudes.
I don’t deny that there is an educative function to bringing visiting speakers to campus; but in so far as there is education for the students involved it is usually more in the planning and organizing of the event than in what was said or debated at the event itself.+ (Invited visiting speakers to a class or a department can be genuinely educative.) In fact, as Olúf??mi O. Táíwò recently emphasized in a different context, a lot of what passes for campus ‘debate’ is very far removed from the minimal norms of rational inquiry and basic standards common to a true education. Even leaving aside culture war issues, usually the campus wide visiting speaker program reflects honoring academic achievement of the past not advancing knowledge or transferring skills or knowledge. While this may not fit the norms of the attention economy educators know that campus visitors and campus ‘debate’ are not a proper part of education; they are at best focal points for starting or acknowledging topics worth attending to. Having such shared focal points may be useful in education and politics, but campus debate is little more valuable than that. It is, of course, profitable to small group of minor intellectual celebrities and professional provocateurs.
Let me close with a final thought. I suspect that part of the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech is encouraged by how during the last sixty to seventy years the influential and expansive American free-speech doctrines associated with a robust interpretation of the first Amendment came to be very closely associated with a mythical, misreading of On Liberty. (I have railed against it so many times that I won’t repeat the evidence here [but for a quick update see here; here; here with further links.]) This misreading of On Liberty claims (see Gordon 1997) that in a free marketplace of ideas truth will or might emerge over time. (Lurking in the misreading is also a kind of ascription of providentialism wholly foreign to Mill & Taylor.) The popular myth widely accepted among the chattering classes ascribes to political speech a function more fruitfully and less controversially associated with academic freedom, and in doing so effaces the boundaries between them.
- A revised version of this post was first published at Digressionsnimpressions (here).
*Not all lying is, of course, permitted under freedom of speech, but the exceptions usually do not involve political speech or (as in political defamation) have to pass a very high bar.
**In some Germanic countries one’s political ambitions may be hurt; but these are the exceptions that prove the rule.
+This is not the whole of my position. As regular readers know (recall) I argue that some kinds of student protesting with ‘teach-ins’ can be a form of social experimentation and collective learning that may educate a campus or a wider society.
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