Academic Freedom and Its Limits

Here is a short story about academic freedom. Professor X, as I’ll call him, had a target on his back. He was the most popular lecturer at his university. Students thronged to hear him. But for that reason, he had excited considerable jealousy among his colleagues. It did not help that he often seemed to publish more than all of them combined, or that he had been a first-generation university student himself, without the social sophistication of other professors. Faculty in other departments also resented him for opining, as he sometimes did, that his own department and discipline deserved a more prominent place at the university. Most fatefully of all, perhaps, while in a temporary administrative position, Professor X had named one of his own followers to an adjunct professorship, rather than a close relative of his rival and enemy, Professor Y.

Professor X’s enemies saw their chance when, at the end of an academic year, he gave a lecture on a sensitive topic and seemed to express highly unorthodox opinions about it. Although the lecture had been delivered in formal, abstruse, language, the point was immediately obvious to those in the know (it had also included a snarky remark about Professor Y). Within a day, colleagues were openly denouncing X, and members of the community were calling on him to be fired. The controversy exploded into the media and showed no sign of abating when the new academic year started. Professor Y sent some of his own students to spy on Professor X’s lectures, and, having moved into an administrative position himself, threatened to take away scholarships from students who continued to study with X. Several colleagues formally petitioned the university administration to place strict limits on what Professor X could teach, but Professor X successfully argued that under the university’s bylaws, faculty members did not have the right to make such demands.

The controversy might have eventually died away, but, unfortunately, political officials got involved. Horrified at what they saw as Professor X’s dangerous opinions, some of them asked the highest-ranking official in the state to take action. That person was not particularly bright or well educated, and didn’t really understand the issues at hand, but it didn’t matter. The story ends with Professor X getting fired, without possibility of appeal.

This story could have taken place in many countries around the world today. It could easily have taken place in the United States within living memory—perhaps during the McCarthy era. And it is hardly out of the question to think that things like this might take place in the United States again.

In fact, it took place in Germany more than 300 years ago, in 1721. Professor X was Christian Wolff, a philosopher at the University of Halle, in the Kingdom of Prussia. Professor Y was his rival in the Theology Department, Johann Joachim Lange. Wolff’s lecture was entitled Oratio de Sinarum Philosophia Pratica, or “Oration on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese.” It was delivered in Latin. The controversial argument, based on Wolff’s reading of Confucius and Chinese history, was that it is possible to have a virtuous society without knowledge of God. I should add that the story did not end so badly for Wolff. Although Prussia’s brutish King Frederick William I not only fired Wolff from Halle, but ordered him to leave the kingdom within forty-eight hours on pain of death, Wolff was quickly snapped up by the University of Marburg, across the border in Hesse. And after Frederick William’s death, his successor, Frederick the Great, brought Wolff back to Halle where he taught until his death, grew wealthy from his royalties and lecture fees, and, among many other honors, became a Baron of Holy Roman Empire. He is today considered the most important German philosopher of the eighteenth century before Immanuel Kant.

In addition to being a classic example of plus ça change, the story illustrates an important point that is too often overlooked in quarrels about academia today, in twenty-first century America: academic freedom is not the same thing as freedom of speech.

In 1721, in Prussia, there was no such thing as freedom of speech: no Prussian First Amendment, no Prussian Declaration of Rights, no Prussian Civil Liberties Union. Unorthodox speech was potentially criminal, and the final judge of its criminality was the King. Of course, Prussia did not exactly have academic freedom either, in the way we understand the concept today. There was no Prussian Association of University Professors working hard to defend the rights of scholars like Christian Wolff. When King Frederick William fired Wolff from Halle, no one doubted his absolute right to do so. The American Association of University Professors dates only from 1915, and, as my old friend Daniel Gordon discusses in his terrific book What is Academic Freedom? (available in open access), concepts of academic freedom in the United States have been hotly debated, and undergone considerable change, ever since.

But before Frederick William stomped into the controversy, Christian Wolff had, in fact, quite effectively defended his right to study and teach in the way he wanted. Whether or not such a right is explicitly acknowledged, in order to function as places in which scholars can pursue ideas to their logical conclusion, and to challenge ideas they disagree with, universities need to give them latitude to think, to write, and to teach as they please. This was true well before the eighteenth century. It was true of the University of Halle, despite the fact that Prussia’s Hohenzollern rulers had founded it with a strong political purpose in mind, namely, to take the instruction of pastors and state officials out of the hands of the Lutheran Church, which dominated other institutions of higher learning in northern Germany (the Hohenzollerns were Calvinist).

Wolff himself would have recognized limits on his rights. Had a colleague of his tried openly and explicitly to promote atheism in his role as a professor, Wolff would not have defended him. Atheism is what some of Wolff’s critics accused him of, but he heatedly denied the charge and always insisted that he remained a good Protestant. To the end of his life, he maintained that his lecture on Chinese philosophy did not contradict a firm belief in the truth of divine revelation.

But then, there has never been such a thing as absolute academic freedom. This fall, the University of California, Berkeley, placed in its catalogue the following description for an upcoming introductory course in English Composition (yes, English Composition) that began as follows: “With the US-backed and -funded genocide being carried out against Indigenous Palestinians by the Israeli Occupying Force, many have found it difficult to envision a reality beyond the one we are living in today.” The description also mentioned “the Hamas revolutionary resistance forces combating settler-colonialism” and a “continuous anti-imperialist politic by Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, China, DPRK [North Korea], and various Indigenous and First-Nation peoples…” That course description has subsequently been removed from the catalogue, and I, for one, do not think that any violation of academic freedom has taken place.

That episode underlines one large difference between academic freedom in Christian Wolff’s day and in our own in the US. In Prussia in 1721, the scope of academic freedom (limited but real) was greater than the scope of freedom of speech (nonexistent). Today, in the US, the scope of academic freedom is considerably less than that of free speech. If the authors of the Berkeley course description had wanted to publish an article celebrating Hamas and denouncing “the US-backed and -funded genocide,” as opposed to teaching a course on this basis, no one would have stopped them.

Academic freedom, as it is usually defined, applies to academic work specifically, and not to speech in general. This definition in turn implies that “academic work” can be separated from “politics,” and in practice that distinction is anything but easy to draw. Michel Foucault is only the most prominent philosopher to emphasize the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of drawing a clear line between systems of knowledge and systems of power. Many academic disciplines today, most prominently anthropology and literary criticism, engage in elaborate, often performative rituals of self-flagellation for their own alleged prior complicity with the forces of European imperialism and white supremacy. And as Daniel Gordon emphasizes in his book, newer disciplines such as African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies were born out of political struggles and are often presented by their most eminent practitioners as furthering those same struggles.

But difficult and confusing as the subject is, the distinctions do need to be drawn. And interestingly, most American academics today, even those most committed to undermining the distinctions in theory, still draw them in practice. They respect differences of opinion in the classroom and, despite what the right-wing media incessantly repeats, do not try to impose their own political views on students, still less “brainwash” them. There are, yes, exceptions, but they remain in the minority.

In the Age of Trump, the distinctions desperately need to be maintained. In practice, the idea that academic freedom is a shield protecting virtually any sort of conduct in the classroom becomes a pretext for academic freedom’s complete destruction. We already saw this dynamic at work last spring, when Congresswomen Virginia Foxx and Elise Stefanik, and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, carried out their Inquisition of university presidents, with enormous destructive effect (as I wrote here). Those of us in the academy need to fight for academic freedom, but also to recognize its distinction from freedom of speech, or we become all the more vulnerable to what happened to my Professor X, Christian Wolff, at the hands of Prussia’s King.