BY JOAN W. SCOTT
At the 2019 AAUP annual conference Joan W. Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and longtime member and former chair of AAUP’s Committee A, delivered a luncheon address on the theme of “Knowledge for the Common Good.” The full text of that talk has now been posted as a feature on the Academe website here. The following are excerpts from that feature.
Joan W. Scott
[For the progressive era founders of the AAUP] Academic freedom rested on the assumption that knowledge and power were separable; the pursuit of truth ought to have nothing to do with public conflicts of interest, even if new knowledge might weigh in on one side or another of one of those conflicts. The AAUP’s founders, in the 1915 report of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, defined the university as “an inviolable refuge from [the] tyranny [of public opinion] . . . an intellectual experiment station, where new ideas may germinate and where their fruit, though distasteful to the community as a whole, may be allowed to ripen.” And they defined professors as “contagious center[s] of intellectual enthusiasm”: “It is better for students to think about heresies than not to think at all; better for them to climb new trails and stumble over error if need be, than to ride forever in upholstered ease on the over-crowded highway.” . . . .
Knowledge is, then, the accumulated product of disciplined thought, verified by communities of scholars. It is, of course, what we take to be scientific fact (that vaccines prevent certain diseases, for example, or that the earth revolves around the sun), but it also refers to those areas that John Dewey said were bound up with “the problems of life”—these are the humanities and the social sciences, which offer interpretive, evidence-based readings of social structures, patterns of discrimination, art, and literature, as they exist and change over time. In the academy, it is scholars who are trained to produce knowledge, teachers who are trained to transmit it, and students who are expected to acquire the discipline to read critically and thereby to learn to distinguish between true and false. This kind of learning is the opposite of indoctrination, which leaves no room for questioning what is being taught. Indeed, to the extent that students may be thought to have academic freedom, it is precisely their ability to question things that is at stake. But that doesn’t mean substituting opinion for knowledge. Rather, it involves learning to think within the limits that knowledge production requires. Those limits do not mean that what counts as knowledge is forever fixed. The processes by which change occurs (often in the form of difficult contests between orthodoxy and innovation) are always subjected to demanding communal standards, themselves open to challenge and change. The pursuit of truth, after all, is an endless and ever-evolving process. . . .
. . . Freedom of speech is an individual right to express one’s views without regard for their truth or falsehood. The standard of truth does not constrain the unfettered expression of individual opinion. This right is defined as private property, belonging to an individual. In contrast, academic freedom is a corporate right that covers those who produce and transmit knowledge. The one is about individual self-expression, the other is about collective contributions to the common good—they are not the same.
Yet, recently the distinction between academic freedom and free speech has become blurred. Administrators looking to promote civility on campus have offered the metaphor of the “marketplace of ideas” to encourage tolerance of diverse points of view both inside and outside the classroom. Although there are many different ways of pursuing truth, the marketplace is not one of them. Leaving the test of the validity of knowledge to the market abdicates academic responsibility and, indeed, subsumes what counts as knowledge to other tests of its acceptability—these days those are especially political tests. . . .
. . . there is a wholesale attack under way on the academy that has now taken the form of the defense of free speech. The attack antedates the Trump administration by many years, but it has intensified since his election. . . . The conflation of free speech and academic freedom is symptomatic of a more general process of privatization in which individual rights substitute for a notion of the common good. . . .
. . . I am suggesting that the conflation of free speech and academic freedom, with its emphasis on individual rights, is about the individualizing of education, and the denial of its importance as a collective enterprise for producing and transmitting the knowledge that sustains the common good. . . .
All the noise about free speech on campus works to silence critics of these large structural developments; it is one more weapon in the campaign to erode public faith in the mission of higher education. There are other weapons as well: those that have tied increased tuition and student debt to mismanagement and fraud, to the notion that universities are responsible for social inequality, and to the representation of faculty as elitists, sheltered from public accountability by the dubious claim of academic freedom. Another, even more insidious eroding of the image of higher education, indeed of education in general, is Trump’s celebration of mediocrity—if not of know-nothingness—as a national virtue, embodied in the appointment of cabinet secretaries, judges, and heads of agencies who know nothing of the work for which they are presumed to be responsible. The degradation of the very notion of expertise and the knowledge upon which it based has everything to do with the abandonment of the idea of the common good. . . .
To defend academic freedom is to defend the production and transmission of knowledge—the pursuit of truth—as a necessarily critical, open, unending process conducted with a certain discipline and rigor. John Dewey maintained that academic freedom must protect scholars whose work challenged “habits and modes of life to which people have accustomed themselves and with which the worth of life is bound up.” Critique is implicit in that comment. . . . But it’s not enough anymore to praise critical thinking as the teaching mission of the university and to call for academic freedom to protect it. We need to be defending the covenant upon which academic freedom rests: the importance of knowledge for the common good. Academic freedom is, after all, the privilege and protection afforded to scholars whose critical research and teaching lead to better and more just policies and laws, and to the training of a democratic citizenry able to know the difference between charlatans and serious leaders. The fight for academic freedom, therefore, cannot take place on the grounds of that freedom alone; without a concept of the common good, as Dewey and his fellow Progressives articulated it, academic freedom will not survive.
. . . The common good will not survive—and for that matter neither will individuals survive—without medical knowledge, knowledge of climate change, knowledge of history, knowledge of how structures of discrimination work at the economic, social, political, and psychic levels to perpetuate inequalities of race, gender, sex, and religion. It is academic freedom that protects the production and dissemination of that knowledge. It is that knowledge that nourishes and advances the common good. The future of the common good and of academic freedom are bound up together; the one cannot survive without the other. It is up to us to ensure their joint survival.
To read the entire talk go to https://www.aaup.org/article/knowledge-common-good#.XRON6P57lAg
