Limits And Ethical Issues Of Academic Freedom
Academic freedom is a very important pillar of most higher education systems seeking to allow freedom of inquiry to students and professors alike. Proponents [1] claim that from it, stems creativity and knowledge, and that it is an interdisciplinary concept that guided our society in the most major scientific developments and breakthroughs in the last decades. It is not just a concept by itself, it is an operational objective protected by law in most countries around the globe.
Together with intellectual autonomy, these are the driving forces that make it possible for universities to bring the common good of society through unhindered research, circulate notions of knowledge, facilitate understanding through fostering independent thinking and expression. But with this kind of liberty, comes a lot of responsibility, individually and institutionally.
The role of this paper is to identify, describe and analyse a such case in which ethics comes prior to those above describe concepts and explore the limits that can be imposed.
According to Britannica [2], Academic freedom, is the freedom of teachers and students to teach, study, and pursue knowledge and research without unreasonable interference or restriction from law, institutional regulations, or public pressure.
Its basic elements include the freedom of teachers to inquire into any subject that evokes their intellectual concern; to present their findings to their students, colleagues, and others; to publish their data and conclusions without control or censorship, and to teach in the manner they consider professionally appropriate. For students, the basic elements include the freedom to study subjects that concern them and to form conclusions for themselves and express their opinions.
Academic freedom has its foundation laid in the medieval European universities, it was in the 18th and 19th centuries the newly emerged nation-states of Europe constituted the chief threat to universities’ autonomy. Professors were subject to governmental authority and were liable to be allowed to teach only what was acceptable to the government in power
The University of Göttingen in Germany became a beacon of academic freedom in the 18th century, and, with the founding of the University of Berlin in 1811, the basic principles of Lehrfreiheit (“freedom to teach”) and Lernfreiheit (“freedom to learn”) were firmly established and became the model that inspired universities elsewhere throughout Europe and the Americas.
As a general definition [3], Intellectual autonomy is a willingness and ability to think for oneself. It is considered a virtue, a personal attribute to and not overly dependent on others when it comes to forming its beliefs. The intellectually autonomous person can form own judgments, initiating reflection and asking probing question.
Both of the concepts defined above, can be contested [4] because sometimes asking questions can be sensitive or can be considered a threat to people who don’t want to have their view altered or dependable on a certain understating of a topic or a certain question. It can be misunderstood because academic freedom it is not free expression, but it connected to that. By nature, academic expression is not political, but it can connect to issues that are political. As society get more complex and connected, these terms can be easily confused.
One of this example of fine limits achieved by one academic member can be Lawrence Henry Summers from Harvard University [5], one of the top ranked University around the world.
Born in November 30, 1954, the son of two economists, both professors at University of Pennsylvania, Summers is an American economist and former president of Harvard University (2001–2006), where he is currently (as of March, 2017) a professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. With an experience in different official roles throughout President Clinton’s administration and President Obama’s administration, Summers resigned as Harvard’s president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty.
Although Summers had prefaced his talk, saying he was adopting an ‘entirely positive, rather than normative approach’, his 2005 January speech the Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce, sparked controversy. His ‘attempt at provocation’ [6] on the topic why women may have been underrepresented ‘in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions’ backfired.
In his lecture, Summers identified three hypotheses for the higher proportion of men in high-end science and engineering positions:
- a. The high-powered job hypothesis
- b. Different availability of aptitude at the high end
- c. Different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search
Summers then concluded his discussion of the three hypotheses by saying:
“So my best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are and working very hard to address them.” [6]
The second hypothesis, the generally greater variability among men (compared to women) in tests of cognitive abilities, leading to proportionally more males than females at both the lower and upper tails of the test score distributions, caused the most controversy.
In his discussion of this hypothesis, Summers said ‘even small differences in the standard deviation [between genders] will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out [from the mean]’. Summers referenced research that implied differences between the standard deviations of males and females in the top 5% of twelfth graders under various tests. He then went on to argue that, if this research were to be accepted, then ‘whatever the set of attributes … that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley … are probably different in their standard deviations as well’.
But this is just a part of the puzzle, as freedom as speech relates to academia freedom on a sense that any academic member can explain [8] his action to a certain degree but cannot prove basic negative character traits like discrimination, favouritism and influencing decisions to their own interest.
Unfortunately, Summers presidency’s at Harvard was also linked with other scandals. The most expensive one: the support of economist Andrei Shleifer, on that the University had to pay paid $26.5 million to settle the five-year-old lawsuit.
Harvard and Andrei Shleifer, a close friend and protégé of Summers, had to settle a lawsuit by the U.S. government over the conflict of interest Shleifer had while advising Russia’s privatisation program. The US government had sued Shleifer under the False Claims Act, as he bought Russian stocks while designing the country’s privatisation.
In 2004, a federal judge ruled that while Harvard had violated the contract, Shleifer and his associate alone were liable for treble damages. One year later, the involved parties, announced that they had reached a tentative settlement. Shleifer was also responsible for paying $2 million worth of damages. Because University paid almost all of the damages and allowed Shleifer to retain his faculty position, the settlement provoked allegations of favoritism on Summers.
Summers’s friendship with Shleifer was known by the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, when it selected him to succeed Rudenstine and Summers recused himself from all proceedings with Shleifer, case that was handled by an independent committee.
Another public case was the donations to Harvard from Jeffrey Epstein during Summers’s tenure as president. The ‘special connection’ between Summers and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is detailed in an article in the Harvard Crimson in 2003 [9].
Epstein pledged to donate at least $25 million to Harvard during Summers’s tenure to endow Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and Epstein was given an office at Harvard for his personal use, otherwise Epstein had no formal connection to Harvard.
The speech at the Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce contributed to his resigning his position as president of Harvard University the following year, it’s clear that this kind of liberty of the professor’s speech it’s a breach of ethical behaviour. The freedom of speech, event pun in scientific form, with argumentative data and documented reference should not be detrimental to other people view and belief and the institutional mission [10].
No one can surpass the Subsidiarity principle [11] and it almost impossible to demonstrate that the professor intention had any negative context in it. The debate in the scientific circles at Harvard was intense after Summers speech, as professors from the artistic and humanist chairs where an active voice in the resignation process, and also there where some voices sympathizing his views.
Faced whit a scholar of this importance, experience and involvement in the academic life, and if these case wats just an isolated misinterpretations of the speech, I believe his reputations was still intact, but in light of the sequence of events that followed this event resignations will be inevitable.
References:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Polanyi
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/academic-freedom
- http://www.ivalongbeach.org/community/blog/posts-on-master-virtues/122-intellectual-autonomy
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGGqS2aVAzg
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers
- https://web.archive.org/web/20080130023006/http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/summers-sexism-costs-him-top-treasury-job-1033373.html
- https://slate.com/technology/2005/01/the-pseudo-feminist-show-trial-of-larry-summers.html
- https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/5/1/mogul-donor-gives-harvard-more-than/?page=single
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
- https://college.harvard.edu/about/mission-vision-history
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
