BY JENNIFER RUTH

In “Academic Freedom: A Pilot Study of Faculty Views,” published in the collection Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom? (2015), Jonathan R. Cole, Stephen Cole, and Christopher C. Weiss suggest that “an erosion of the norms of academic freedom and free inquiry has taken place at American universities and colleges.” They posit two causes for this erosion: the inferred lack of thought devoted to academic freedom found among early-career faculty and the devaluation of the concept due to the rise of speech codes and bureaucratic bodies like IRBs. They worry that:

The hundreds of cases of abridgments of free speech on campus that have been chronicled by scholars like David Bromwich, Cass Sunstein, Kent Greenawalt, and Greg Lukianoff, may have led the faculty to devalue academic freedom compared with other core values of the university. In fact, the unwillingness to accept the idea that speakers have a right to hurt others, feelings and offend their sensibilities may lead faculty members to think of academic freedom and free inquiry as just another value of the university without any special place among this hierarchy of values.

This assessment, they say, is tentatively borne out by a survey of full-time Columbia faculty members they conducted. The survey asked faculty in the Arts and Sciences, the professional schools, and the medical school to respond to fourteen vignettes that were based on actual cases. Faculty were asked about “actions involving congressional interference with research on HIV/AIDS street workers, to treatment of students in class, to appropriate subjects to discuss in class, to the role of institutional review boards (IRBs) in limiting research, to action outside the university taken by faculty members, and to the appropriate treatment of faculty members whose research does not conform to the existing paradigm of the field.” They found that faculty in earlier stages of their careers tended to approve more of disciplinary actions and/or interference in the complete autonomy of researchers and instructors than did faculty in the later stages of their careers. This tendency appeared to be unrelated to tenure status, as senior faculty without tenure responded similarly to senior faculty with tenure.

Though Cole, Cole and Weiss explicitly state that they never named “academic freedom” as a concern of the study in the survey itself, so as not to bias results, they interpret the patterns they find as registering an erosion in the norms of academic freedom. The particular case they highlight as most revealing of this erosion is interesting. “It also seems to be true that relatively few faculty members, even at a place like Columbia, have given much time to thinking about the limits and consequences of restraints on academic freedom, despite the consequences that it may have for free inquiry at the university,” they write. “In our survey, this becomes most apparent in the situation involving the IRB’s actions regarding a long-standing and highly successful research program carried out in Venezuela.” This is the situation survey respondents were asked to respond to:

A team of anthropologists and geneticists who hold faculty positions at a major research university are conducting a study of a rare but deadly hereditary disease in Venezuela. There is a high level of the disease in the fishing town and a great deal of family formation within the community. It is a deeply Catholic community. The researchers offer birth control information for those who ask for it, but otherwise do not. The efforts of the team have led to the discovery of the gene responsible for the hereditary disease. They receive a grant from the NIH to continue their work, but the local IRB says that they cannot carry out the research unless they have mandatory sessions explaining the heritability of the disease and how birth control methods could reduce its incidence in the community. The researchers refuse and claim that the IRB is being insensitive to the religious beliefs of the community and in refusing to allow them to conduct the research is violating their rights of free inquiry.

Respondents were asked whether they “agree with the researchers that the IRB is interfering with the researchers’ rights as faculty members,” “disagree with the researchers and support the position of the IRB,” or if neither of these two choices captured their opinion, to “briefly tell us in the box below what you believe the university should do in this situation”  (375).

Cole, Cole and Weiss find the results worrisome because “roughly 40 percent of the Columbia faculty support the IRB position in response to situation.” They write:

Philip Hamburger . . .  argues that the IRBs are actually unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment and that in the name of protecting human subjects, they do far more harm than good—and they are more intrusive than restrictions on speech in seventeenth-century England. Whether or not one agrees with Hamburger, this subject has not been the subject of proper debate within the framework of academic freedom— despite the considerable subterranean complaints one hears all of the time on campus about the intrusiveness and power of the IRBs to control both the protocols of research and its publication. When roughly 40 percent of the Columbia faculty support the IRB position in response to situation 5 and simply accept the IRB structure because it is a requirement for receiving government grants and do not weigh the effects of the IRBs on academic freedom and free inquiry, then it suggests far more discussion needs to take place about the effects of various forms of government intrusion into the operation of free inquiry on university campuses.

Notice what Cole, Cole, and Weiss infer from their results. They do not recreate what might be the IRB’s argument (such as the unethical nature of conducting research without offering subjects already-existing and readily available knowledge about the nature of the deadly disease with which they are afflicted) and then imagine that their subjects might have agreed with that argument. Rather, they attribute the acceptance of the IRB’s position to a kind of unthinking careerism. In their mind, the respondents essentially shrug and say, well, an aspiring scholar has to work with the IRB if you expect to receive grants so what are you going to do? What if, instead, the respondents actually agreed with the IRB that withholding information is unethical? What if these respondents are fully informed about IRBs and why they were perceived to be necessary in the first place? Maybe these respondents are familiar with Tuskegee and other shameful moments when researchers placed the pursuit of knowledge over respect for the lives of the people standing in front of them? Maybe these respondents believe that an academic freedom worth championing is one that views the equality and dignity of persons as the foundation of the “common good,” which academic freedom is supposed to serve, not as its unfortunate outer limits. If these speculations are true, then the 40 percent of respondents are not operating with an impoverished conception of academic freedom but rather with a conception all of us should endorse.

Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. She is the author of three books, the most recent being It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), coauthored with Michael Bérubé. An essay adapted from the book was recently featured in The New Republic.