A few years back, University of Colorado professor of ethnic studies Ward Churchill created a national controversy for calling the victims of the 9/11 attacks “little Eichmanns”, referencing the Nazi SS officer who organized the logistics of evacuating the ghettos and setting up the extermination camps of World War II. Now, his research methods have come under scrutiny and he may have his tenure revoked and lose his position as department chair.
The author of the aforementioned article, Anne D. Neal, is a member of the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni, whose mission is as follows:

“…ACTA is the only national organization that is dedicated to working with alumni, donors, trustees and education leaders across the country to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically-balanced, open-minded, high-quality education at an affordable price.”

This seems fairly reasonable, and the fact that ACTA was founded by Lynne Cheney seems fairly irrelevant in their views. In fact, their definition of academic freedom:

It is the belief that intellectual inquiry must be protected against those who, for whatever reason, may try to deny it, shape it, silence it, or punish it; and that the unfettered pursuit of truth is central to the purpose of the college or university and fundamental for human progress.

is very much so in line with the liberal UNESCO’s definition:

Higher-education teaching personnel, like all other groups and individuals, should enjoy those internationally recognized civil, political, social and cultural rights applicable to all citizens. Therefore, all higher-education teaching personnel should enjoy freedom of thought, conscience, religion, expression, assembly and association as well as the right to liberty and security of the person and liberty of movement. They should not be hindered or impeded in exercising their civil rights as citizens, including the right to contribute to social change through freely expressing their opinion of state policies and of policies affecting higher education. They should not suffer any penalties simply because of the exercise of such rights. Higher-education teaching personnel should not be subject to arbitrary arrest or detention, nor to torture, nor to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In cases of gross violation of their rights, higher-education teaching personnel should have the right to appeal to the relevant national, regional or international bodies such as the agencies of the United Nations, and organizations representing higher-education teaching personnel should extend full support in such cases.

as well as the definition of the American Association of University Professors:

1. Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.
2. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.
3. College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.

Of course, the AAUP and the ACTA are representing two different viewpoints: the AAUP is going to leap to the defense of faculty, while ACTA is going to argue from the perspective of administrators.

What I find interesting here is that the third part of the AAUP definition discusses academic responsibility, as does the UNESCO declaration regarding academic freedom. How people could defend Churchill as a victim of politics when it appears that he has committed grievous transgressions of the standard rules of research and publishing is beyond me.

The way I see things, there are essentially two camps of thought with regards to the definition of academic freedom: those who feel that academics should be able to say or do whatever they deem necessary in the course of their inquiries (AAUP), and those that feel that academics are, at the end of the day, accountable to the general public (ACTA). However, they cloak their arguments in the same language, so perhaps a better working definition of academic freedom is in order. I therefore propose the following definition of academic freedom:

Academic freedom is the right of a member of the public academic community to pursue avenues of research which will lead to supportable conclusions, regardless of how such research meshes with existing social or political beliefs in the academic’s community.

I think this is a reasonable definition of academic freedom. I’m simply stating that an academic can research however they choose, so long as at the end of the day their work can be supported with facts pieced together in a logical manner. This means simply that if someone raises an objection to conclusions drawn in research, the result can be supported with a series of objective, factual statements, rather than appeals to emotion or ad hominem attacks.

The trouble here is that this is not what is being done in universities today. I read many stories in which someone makes a research statement, presented with factual information, that is discarded or railed against for presenting ideas that are not politically correct.

John Ogbu comes to mind: in the late ’90s, he did research in an affluent, mixed-race community to determine why black students were under-performing. Due to the economic situation there, saying that the teachers are sub-par or that the schools are underfunded was not possible. The popular notion is that the black students continued to be the victims of a racist institution. Ogbu, who lived amongst the black community there, observed that many of the students felt that performing well in school somehow made them “more white” or “less black”. The black students were found to be just as capable as the white students, but they refused to “play the game” required in public schools In essence, he found that the issue was not racism, but a cultural distrust of education. Ogbu was accused of “blaming the victim”, his research techniques were called into question, and he was accused of not studying the white community. In Ogbu’s defense, he stated that he had not been asked to study the white community, but if he had more time and money he would have done so.

Ogbu is just one example where his academic freedom was violated because others did not like his results. Robert Park, a member of the APS, once declared that “Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough to be persecuted by an unfriendly establishment, you must also be right.” Sadly, there are many professors that are victims of an unfriendly establishment, but at no point does anyone ask if they are right.

Larry Summers is another great example of someone whose academic freedom was tread upon in the name of political correctness. At a conference to discuss why there were so few women in science, he stated as one of many possible reasons that women may not be “wired” for science as well as men are. It is a biological fact that male and female brains are wired differently, so why could this not be a mitigating factor. Rather than doing a scientific study of the proposal and concluding that it was incorrect, the local feminists went crazy over his remarks, and on June 30, 2006 he resigned his position. Of interest to me in that article was that some of the women interviewed expressed that they were “offended” by his statements.

Two hundred years ago it would have offended European sensibilities to suggest that the white race was not genetically superior to other ethnicities. It is offensive today to suggest that perhaps a student’s failings in the classroom are brought about in large part due to the student and his parents. That does not make them incorrect. We now know that ethnicity does not make someone a “worthier” human being, and I for one believe that the lion’s share of underperformances in school are due to student and parent factors.

Being offended by a statement does not make it wrong, and if it is wrong it should not be terribly difficult to piece together a coherent, logical, fact-based argument to refute. If women were not genetically disinclined to do science, then it should not be too difficult to do a study and conclude as such. If it was not a cultural issue that led to the failings of the black students of Shaker Heights, then Ogbu’s detractors should have easily been able to discredit this with their own studies.

Academic freedom means following an idea and finding facts to support it. It does not mean producing work that supports what the community believes it should find. If academics as a community spent all their time “discovering” that everything in the status quo was correct, then there would never be any more progress to be made. Sadly, what is not understood by society or academics is that the academic is a slave to reality, not the other way around. It is the notion of academic freedom that allows the academic to pursue reality, not reinforce what we believe reality to be. It is a fine balancing act between AAUP and ACTA camps to insure that what comes out is not only what the academic wants to say or what the public wants to hear, but is the actual truth of the situation.