Academic Freedom On A Model Diet - Part 1

Hank Reichman is a prominent figure among university professors, though perhaps not among academics. At least that’s what the title of his organization suggests, the American Association of University Professors. These people are, steadfast. That’s the term to use.

Hank is on the right and his interviewer is James Vernon.

This series of posts speaks with contempt because I have tried to get this champion of academic freedom, wrapped in a AAUP cloak, to fulfill academic duties for some time now. In fact, for over thirty years I have asked all academics to execute just one basic necessary function of the job: stop assuming.

Hank has remained steadfast in his silence and probable ignorance. But he has no power over me. Does he have power over you? Do his AAUP union masters have power over you? Or is it just your institutional employer and the bargaining unit is a liberator?

If the latter, then read on and I’ll again try to rob you of that fatal fantasy by critiquing a recent interview Hank gives on academic freedom. Using a common formula on the PSA blog, there is direct quote from the interview followed by analysis, evaluation and prescription. Another related example can be found here where I treat a promotion video from the California Faculty Association.

So, let’s dance to the disaster de jour in higher education: academic freedom.

But before the music begins, I feel an oft-repeated bridge coming on: The ills of higher education are not to be fixed by upmarket band-aids like academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure that are applied to an inheritance of university and college professors, or more precisely, them and their institutional employers that together form an unchallenged heritage of universitas. The Professional Society of Academics (PSA) adopts and adapts a recognized alternative universitas in the professions and applies it to higher education as a formal, viable, desirable challenge to the continued assumption of our inheritance.

Cue music to an old familiar faculty chorus…

Response One from Hank

Hank: And for many people, the response to the McCarthy era is not dissimilar [to what is happening on campuses today], I think, to the response of some administrators and probably more than a few faculty members today, which is maybe we should sacrifice the broader ability of faculty and students to speak out as citizens in order to retain and protect the most important elements of academic freedom, the freedom and research and in the classroom and in teaching.

Me: Much of what Hank says is hard for me to understand. This is an example. I want to assume he does know there is a hierarchy at play when one addresses the topic of freedom. In this context, it goes something like this: Job to job. But his response comes across as an earnest report of sincere thinking by more than a few of his peers, who are essential employees of the institutions. That is, he takes the following thinking seriously: “…maybe we should sacrifice the broader ability…to speak as citizens…to retain and protect the most important elements of academic freedom [on the job]…”

I worry that Hank is a leading voice in higher education.

A hierarchy of freedoms seats academic freedom (AF) as a derivative sculpted by social, occupational and personal circumstances that include legislation-backed exclusive employment in the institutions of higher education, which have exclusive legal right to call themselves a university or college and issue credentials, while individual people work very hard to one day knock on the door in the hopes of earning a living or seeking an education within the inherited halls.

In these conditions of the social pillar, Hank mentions colleagues who think to butcher from the freedom corpus, as a mere element, what he calls, citizen freedom, which is itself a derivative, along with AF, of what I will call, Job freedom. That is, the freedom we all have, because we are.

But is it possible to chop off Job freedom from citizen or academic freedom and still function as a faculty employee or as an academic in service and stewardship to higher education? Put another way using a more precise term by PSA lights, would there be job freedom if there were no Job freedom?

Well, yes and no.

It is possible so long as you adopt something like a Communist China HE system, where the tyrant tells, the employee tenders, and the truth, if managed at all, is managed by the state. Yes, we can refrain from exercise of the freedom with which we are born, which is given to us by God, or however you might like to phrase it. We can also treat a distilled citizen freedom as an apéritif, if you like. But one thing is for sure, the freedom of Job that comes with existence is not forfeited, might be impossible to forfeit, and certainly is not challenged by taking a job, getting an education, or bowing to a tyrant.

But Hank talks as though this ain’t so. Not a few of his peers believe one can separate the freedoms of job and Job. So that when you become a student by enrolling in the only place you can receive formal higher education, a university or a college, you forfeit natural (Job) freedom and need academic (job) freedom, because, well, a school uniform and moto are special. Or so Hank and the Hornets tell me.

You can see why I have a hard time understanding this guy.

I want to believe that his response is a rhetorical device and in truth almost no academics are thinking what he attributes to them. Unfortunately, his response indicates he does believe there is no interdependent taxonomy of freedom. Or at least he lets his colleagues think so? Or maybe he’s just taking a sarcastic piss on (some) academics, and I missed it? I hope so, because what he says is that not a few academics think that an natural, essential freedom that humans poses, that makes me the person I am, or more conventionally, the citizen I am, though a foundational element of AF, it is something that is distinct enough to be jettisoned from the higher education lifeboat. This is absurd.

 

No Students in the Faculty Lounge

I broaden AF to include students because Hank and the AF Hornets do this, as he notes when discussing the history of the AAUP in his interview. Of course, like much of the AAUP play list, I don’t recommend it. For instance, it invites confusion surrounding another central concept, academic. It seems the capture of students in the AF net means that the use of ‘academic’ in ‘academic freedom’ now refers to (1) a culturally relative necessary condition of a job description that includes (2) the sort of philosophy and pedagogy that depends upon old-school AF for the faculty employees to do their job properly and now also (3) the course of study or the academics of a student who has paid institution X to provide them education service (and stewardship) that includes (4) the required or optional (instructed) exercise of the freedom to “speak out” (presumably within certain limitations), so that now, AF includes these four all based in (5) Job freedom. If so, then academic freedom has morphed into academic-student freedom (ASF) – because “academic-academics,” “academic-studies,” and “academic-student speaking out freedom” were all way too awkward.

PSA is down with a metamorphosis that places greater emphasis on one of the only two essential relationships in higher education, the academic-student and the academic-academic.

As we shall see, Hank thinks a lot of the inclusion of S freedoms and their exercise. That is, the introduction of (3) and (4) to academic freedom, capturing the philosophical and pedagogical elements from the point of view of, as experienced by, valued by, paid for by the learner, the student. As he acknowledges, this was not the original meaning of AF for many decades after the AAUP formally codified this band-aid for painful, slow, marginal introduction to the inheritance - though he claims the founding fathers would be “sympathetic.” Hindsight is unforgiving in its hilarity!

It's simple, Hank and the ASF Hornets. The job freedom is a derivative of the Job freedom. You can eject exercise of the Job freedom but then you might find it quite difficult to exercise the job freedom needed to provide proper service and stewardship in higher education. But hold on, there’s more. What does “proper” mean? In his response, Hank intimates what Communist China means by proper higher education and faculty employees, wherein people-citizen-academics give up exercise of the Job freedom for some job (and some no disappearing and dying) freedom – which is why we should be walking away from Communist China higher education.

“Right, that’s exactly my point!” trills, Hank. “We mustn’t give it up! We can’t give up our freedoms!”

He might hold this view, but that is not what he exhibits when he matter-of-fact announces that not a few of his colleagues think our Job freedom can be surrendered (at all) while we retain and protect the most important elements of AF and the now expanded, ASF - or as I still prefer, "job freedom," because it better captures the elements that Hank identifies as a set of job functions (i.e., teaching and researching, but presumably also community servicing), each principally conceived from the point of view of the academic as a faculty employee and not as a truly independent professional.

If this is so, then all could use a class on Kant. Not from me though, if only because I don’t have a job in an institution from which person-citizen-academics and person-citizen-students need protection in the form of ASF. And I want to remain emancipated from the exclusive, exploitive employ of these institutions, but I also want to contribute to higher education. And I bet I’m not alone.

If the job freedom is the most important and Job freedom can be surrendered to the fight, then this implies that Job freedom is not essential, not necessary, an incidental (to me? life? service? work?). But none of us think that. Intellectually, if not practically, only a fool would take that position. Hank and the ASF Hornets are not fools. Though, by his own admission, some of the band members do entertain the idea of surrendering to the fight our citizen freedom, so…

As I have said repeatedly, such disordered and dangerous thinking is pervasive, being used in an interview by a top thinker on the subject without his UC, Berkeley, Professor of History interviewer raising an eyebrow, marking casual display of an egregious lapse in basic (professional) academic standards of service and stewardship. The interviewer continues with, “Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, we’re both historians that this being the 60th year [of the Freedom of Speech Movement], it reminds us in some ways how short the history of free speech on university campuses has been.”

On university campuses, he says. We are fucking doomed!

Hank and the Hornets fail to challenge the institutional model of university and college employers that forms our higher education inheritance. But to challenge is their fundamental function, to not assume and make an ass out of your and me. Specifically, but not solely, there is mass failure by academics (employed as faculty or not) to examine their assumptions regarding the nature of (institutional) higher education and the (institutional) means of its provision and protection.

This is bad enough, but I further diagnose that this failure is substantially a consequence of preoccupation with occupation, with escalating concern over how a person can earn a living in higher education as a frontline employee of institutions that are used by society and overseen by governments in execution of a social contract to service and steward from the pillar to the person.

Sounds ominous and it is. But worse still, there is no alternative, no choice, only one course of action, only one way to earn and learn. That is to make yourself an institutional employee or enrollee who needs stability in (the exercise of) freedom in order to effectively and properly do the joint-job of academic and student, the both of whom repeatedly find themselves fighting the ebb and flow of ASF in its inherent institutional waters.

I mean, he claims many faculty – principal stewards – suggest triage on the dying higher education patient should/could involve excision of a fundamental freedom of human beings, of people, to save some freedom as an employee of some institutional employer.

Talk about an obvious place to look for erroneous assumptions!

Can this even be done? Could Hank’s colleagues argue that because, under the current circumstances, which are in fact centuries old, I want to earn a living contributing to higher education and if I can only exercise one or the other of my freedoms – i.e., my right to earn or my right to express – I must choose to give up my expression, my Job freedom? Even in the Communist China example we find only the forfeiture of the exercise of freedom, not freedom itself. Can forfeiture be done constitutionally where we stipulate by law that people who elect to earn a living as an academic or, more precisely, as an institutional faculty employee, must forfeit their Job freedom, or citizen freedom, their freedom of expression? Oh, and the same for students who want to learn. All this, when both personal pursuits – earing and learning – build societies and persons, while needless institutional employers interfere and impede. And if you think the public-private distinction matters here, try harder.

Considering this analysis, what is it that the professor employees who are members of the professional organization and trade union, the AAUP, are trying to protect for academics and students today, decades or more after our birth and maturation? Some more important element of freedom, of me, or of me and another person studying together, for credit in higher education? What the hell could that be? Or is this all just what the object of union protection seems, a clause in a two-year or one-semester employment contract meant to capture something that can’t even be hunted?

Zeroing in on the disaster de jour, what does any of this ASF nonsense have to do with where and when I exercise my Job freedom, as surely students, faculty and staff do when they publicly protest under the protection of the constitution, itself a product of protection from Job? You recall Jobian freedom, the thing that some of Hank’s colleagues think can and perhaps should be swept under the rug, while muttering, “But only in these times you understand,” to the click of stylish boots.

If you want to retain and protect a western ethos higher education system, then Job freedom is the prize you need to keep in your eyes. The rest is derivative, citizenry freedom included. This is indisputable.

 

Nothing Is Indisputable, But What’s Next?

Certainly not what Hank and the re-branded, ASF Hornets, sing about over the air waves.

In this more nuanced compositional space, we have to design a higher education model that better protects the exercise of Job freedom when one is on the job, where “on the job” means working as a (union represented) faculty employee (or student enrollee) in an institution-government employer and not retired or unemployed in that job; and working, retired, or not practicing as a professionally licensed academic of the Professional Society of Academics in the state of New York (for instance), with both models public and set as either complementary or competitive.

If PSA was in place, person-citizen-academic-student freedom – my fucking freedom! – would need protection from what or whom? No, seriously, PSA will need protection, of course.[LINK – Day] So, please, help me answer this question.

But when you ask this basic, responsible question of the inheritance you assume, what is your answer, Hank? Is it an institutional employer, some university or college? Is it some administrator employee, a Vice Chancellor or Dean? Is it some trustee from the tech industry or a former colleague gone alt-academic on you? Is it a fellow faculty employee, a chair or hire you did not favor? Is it some union boss for whom you didn’t vote? Is it a student who has a sound grip on football but spaghetti when it comes to the Hard Problem, or the Harder Hard Problem? Is it a platinum donor, or a secret one? Is it government overseers? Is it government overseas? Is it pandemics, Ponzis, or publishers? Is it yourself?

Isn’t philosophy a broadening experience? Might be nice if we could keep more of it in higher education, don’t you think? I offer it here for free, because I don’t and don’t want to work for some institutional tool of inheritance and government.

All of this is emollient for my chakra release:

Who the fuck do you and your inheritance think you are!? Hmm, Hank?

No person-academic has ever needed anyone or anything on this list of potential and actual assailants that are with and without agency. I might overstate a tad when it comes to subsistence, but just ask the adjunct majority who can be found in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia,… Personally, I’ve been a part of that job class and there is not much agency or ahi to be had. Nor am I reassured by AAUP shop stewards and strike pay, when a long time ago the AAUP dropped the ball without excuse and now Japanese espresso and education comes from machines.

It is outrageous and reckless to think and act on a trade union as a liberator of academic labour, one that bargains for what is principally an individual-cum-collective academic charge that is subordinate to no model, government, employer, policeman or union. Unions for academics are quicksand for higher education. To escape, we need to turn the institutional employment of faculty into the professional society of academics, into the independent earning of academics and learning of students. This turns the institutional model inside out.

But maybe Hank and the ASF Hornets only want to slip down the slope as far as citizen freedom in the hierarchy, in the bargain for higher education. And so, what I’ve done is create a strawman of their centenarian push for AF/ASF. These professors don’t want to surrender Job freedom, only citizen freedom.

My point is made. I’ll leave you to judge if it hits the mark or if I can’t reason my way out of a corridor maze. If I have committed a fallacy, then I’m glad. Somebody needs to throw a fallacy or two at this Lot of the Steadfast. Reason isn’t working, so maybe rhetoric will. I’m desperate, as we all are.

This ends the first post of the series. I hope it does not end your engagement with the PSA model, because I welcome it.