BY JOHN K. WILSON

Tom Ginsburg, a professor at the University of Chicago, proposes institutionalizing academic freedom in an opinion essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education this past week: “Colleges must institutionalize the protection of academic freedom by devoting resources to training, establishing standards, and hearing complaints when norms are threatened.”

According to Ginsburg, “Institutionalization of academic freedom could look something like diversity initiatives, and would have the same goal: to advance core values in the culture of colleges. Staff members would serve as a resource for the faculty, develop basic explanations of core concepts for students, collect data, and advise leaders behind the scenes on how to handle controversies when they arise.”

I strongly agree that we need to better institutionalize academic freedom on campus, but I don’t think administrative units are the answer. Administrators are unlikely to have a strong devotion to academic freedom. The model of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) units is not exactly a paradigm of success. DEI units are expensive, ineffective, administrative-controlled, and rarely supportive of faculty interests. Diversity is treated as something to be celebrated and imposed, not analyzed and understood. DEI too often is a PR tool, and certainly not a place for voices critical of administrative policies and their failures to promote equity.

What colleges need are multiple institutional strategies for entrenching academic freedom. The most important form of institutionalization is what the AAUP has historically focused on: policies that establish clear rules and procedures for protecting academic freedom and tenure, and ensuring that faculty have the authority to make academic decisions.

While specific AAUP-approved procedures are essential, one thing colleges ought to do is to establish broader policies protecting academic freedom on campus for everyone, enforced by a faculty committee rather than by administrators. For example, in addition to a broad statement of support for academic freedom, colleges ought to have an explicit policy protecting academic freedom and a faculty committee to examine cases (and, ideally, an academic freedom ombudsperson who can help promote free expression on campus and assist people who have complaints). In fact, you could create a Free Expression Response Team like the Bias Response Teams for diversity, which are often unfairly maligned (or in the case of the University of Michigan, banned by judicial fiat for baffling reasons).

Another area of academic freedom needs considerable improvement: the campus culture supporting academic freedom. To do that, we need to turn not to administrative units enforcing rules, but to traditional faculty approaches for educational purposes such as the academic center.

Ginsburg argues, “Institutionalizing academic freedom would help to ensure a common understanding of the issues.” No, it wouldn’t, because there is no common understanding of the issues. Even the AAUP’s Statement of Principles is not really a common understanding so much as a common statement of rules that still requires interpretation and understanding and enforcement. Nothing is more boring than some administrative unit piously reciting some “common understanding” we must all agree to. Instead, what institutions can do is provide a mechanism for the discussion, education, and debate about these issues, and that in turn creates a greater (not common) understanding of the issues. That should be the goal.

One good model of an academic center is the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement (where I was a fellow in 2019-20), which was created by the central administration in the wake of the 2017 Milo riots at Berkeley, and criticism by faculty about their lack of involvement in its creation led to some reforms and the development of a faculty advisory council. The National Center is not an enforcement unit for the administration, but instead a way to promote intellectual work, research, and discussions about free speech on campus.

However, centers for civic engagement established by top administrators to appease legislative critics and reverse bad PR can be questionable. At Boise State, where legislators cut $1.5 million to punish the university for a false rumor about a social justice course, administrators attempted damage control in the form of a new Institute for Advancing American Values. But it’s an open question whether the American values of academic freedom that Idaho conservatives oppose will encourage controversial ideas attacked by the right.

That’s why faculty and students should not leave discussion of free expression solely in the hands of administrators trying to use this as a shield against right-wing attacks. Instead, faculty should take the lead in creating these free speech centers, and make them genuinely independent institutions that can research, teach, and discuss issues of free expression in truly academic ways.

Ginsburg argues that the AAUP is “too far removed from the front lines to touch the culture of students and faculty members.” That may be partly true of the national AAUP. But there are hundreds of AAUP chapters around the country, a number that has increased substantially in response to the pandemic, with faculty who have a direct impact on their campus cultures.

I believe AAUP chapters should be taking the lead to create their own campus centers on free expression, shared governance, and civic engagement, shaping these institutions with academic priorities rather than administrative ones, and maintaining control over these centers even when administrators want to avoid controversy. AAUP chapters (or even faculty senates) can create their own independent centers if administrators refuse to offer any support. It’s time for the faculty to take back free expression on campus and start institutionalizing academic freedom themselves.