BY RUBÉN MARTINEZ
Crises in intellectual and religious thought have been opportunities for the reformulation of the basic principles and ideas of existing bodies of knowledge for decades. In the 1920s and 1930s, legal realism raised the specter of the destructive character of accepted theories of law. In the 1960s, Vatican II, the twenty-first Roman Catholic Ecumenical Council, accepted the Church as part of the modern world. Around the same time, the view that scientific knowledge advanced through paradigmatic revolutions brought the philosophy of science closer to the history of science. Soon after, critical legal theories exposed the unexpressed values and biases of a legal culture that claimed neutrality and objectivity. The important lesson from these crises is the understanding that our institutions are not stable but dynamic and reflect aspects of the contexts in which they exist.
Today higher education once again finds itself in a crisis of its own. I want to focus on academic freedom, which has a long history of scholarly and political debate. Historically, academic freedom has been associated with the pursuit of truth, whether in research or in teaching, as well as the critical examination of aspects of the world. According to the principles of academic freedom, these activities are to proceed without political, religious, government, or university administrative interference.
Academic freedom tends to be imbued with a sense of universality that all who engage in research and teaching are granted the freedom to pursue truths about the world and to teach them to students. This is usually understood as the personal autonomy of the researcher and teacher. There is also the freedom and autonomy of institutions to set their decision-making processes and policies. From this view, universities are to be protected from government overreach, but their autonomy has limits, as has been evident in admissions cases involving affirmative action. Personal and institutional academic freedom are related in terms of what is examined and by whom.
The issue has to do with the relationship between presence and academic freedom. By “presence,” I refer to the membership of colleges and universities engaged in research and teaching about the world. It is generally assumed that these colleges and universities are capable of discovering truths without subjective biases. However, if colleges and universities, like the Catholic Church and our legal systems, generally reflect the social hierarchies in society, can we really assert that the research that is conducted is objective and unbiased?
Further, since social hierarchies in society are structural, what are the structural effects on academic freedom? Returning to debates around affirmative action as a prime example, consider that admissions units are gateways to a higher education and that the cumulative effects of the different dimensions of social hierarchy greatly influence who gets to matriculate into the nation’s colleges and universities. If there is differential access at the group level in accordance with social hierarchies, then the culture and practices of colleges and universities reflect the values and perspectives of the dominant groups. This tendency ensures that the values, views, and priorities of the excluded are not part of the critical examination of today’s world. In short, they are not engaged in the affirmation of academic freedom in society. This raises questions regarding how academic freedom is nested in social hierarchies and how these structural features of society limit academic freedom in our colleges and universities. It is with these issues in mind that Adalberto Aguirre and I wrote “Chicana/os in the Academic Culture: Still Struggling for Inclusion and Voice?” for the latest issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom.
Rubén Martinez is professor emeritus at Michigan State University and former director of the Julian Samora Research Institute.
