BY ALEX SMALL

I recently read Tom Ginsburg’s article “How to Truly Protect Academic Freedom” with sympathetic disagreement. I share his concern over the many high-profile incidents that he cites, and I have lamented many of them with friends. I am an avid consumer (even tester?) of academic freedom, lodging dissents in my university’s academic senate and publishing pieces with heterodox opinions on diversity and inclusion, expansive notions of harm, teaching methods, and administrivia. Yet despite my concurrence that academic freedom is under threat, the last thing I want is to empower yet another administrator.

Good intentions, the paving stones of a well-known road, rarely offer long-term protection against negative consequences. I have no doubt that a founding generation of chief academic freedom officers would consist mainly of principled and even gadfly-esque professors hoping to make a difference. However, pioneering generations inevitably give way to institutional types loyal to the systems that groomed them. We cannot assume that a future chief academic freedom officer would defend a future Nikole Hannah-Jones or Steven Salaita from powerful officials or donors challenging their tenure bids.

Also, protecting an institution that’s in the public eye often elicits simplistic responses to complex challenges. Consider how colleges and universities train employees on topics like laboratory safety and sexual harassment. They do so with blunt instruments rather than nuanced approaches that address specific situations. Laboratory researchers watch generic videos reminding them to wear gloves and eye protection rather than learning hazards specific to each chemical in their cabinets. Employees take multiple-choice tests about examples of obvious sexual harassment, rather than discussing ambiguous situations that may lead to plausibly deniable (and hence perpetuated) abuse.

I dread the inevitable academic freedom training videos that would come out of the office suggested by Ginsburg. I can imagine cartoons of people reviewing job applications while a character says, “This applicant was the faculty adviser for the College Republicans at a previous job. I don’t think students would feel safe in his classroom.” We all know that is an absurd academic freedom violation that would never really happen—at least not so explicitly. I would prefer a campus culture in which self-organized faculty reading clubs delve into Mill, Voltaire, Hofstadter, and other significant writers on academic freedom. (I would also enjoy seeing the lack of diversity in that author list improved via reading recommendations—the more texts the better!) Shared values have more power than any administrator.

Lacking the power to substantially affect culture, an administrator would have to “celebrate” academic freedom through ironically safe gestures. I predict we would see events focused on once-censored but now-celebrated works like Catcher in the Rye, rather than books that remain subjects of current controversy. After all, a chief academic freedom officer would have to sit in meetings alongside a chief diversity officer. It would be awkward if one of them celebrates Huckleberry Finn and J. K. Rowling while the other offers support to students who feel unsafe at their mention.

Ginsburg also envisions these academic freedom administrators handling complaints. However, that task requires clear standards to identify frivolous complaints. If one person criticizes another scholar’s statistical analysis regarding a controversial social issue (as I have done on multiple occasions), the question will arise: is that an exercise of academic freedom or an attempt to infringe another scholar’s freedom?

I want to think that the answer is obviously the former, but a determined and unreasonable person can distort criticism into harm, especially if taught to embrace therapeutic responses to heterodox arguments. An administrator primarily concerned with institutional interests, and educated to similarly embrace claims of harm, may feel that ending the controversy is more important than defending the critic. The likely result would be memos explaining that an obvious violation of academic freedom is not in fact such, and that the university remains committed to its ”core values,” mission statement, vision statement, strategic plan, or other statements of principle.

For all the shortcomings of faculty guilds, we are a squabbling, prickly collection of experts who prize the right to bloviate. The surest defense of academic freedom is a culture that embraces the positive aspects of our complicated nature. There is no easy way to get there, and I have no sure roadmap, but working at ground level to develop such a culture will prevent infringements of academic freedom more reliably than yet another administrator. I really do not want to take yet another multiple-choice test on cartoon scenarios.

Alex Small is a professor of physics at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and a writing fellow at Heterodox Academy.