BY ILANA GERSHON
Academic freedom sounds so academic—especially for employees frustrated at work because they are answering workplace surveys all the time, and yet somehow their insights about how to make an office or a task function better are never taken seriously. Faculty members are not the only experts in their workplaces, so, if we would like the freedom to express our expertise without being disciplined or censored, then maybe the best way to persuade a public weary of elites of all stripes is to call for freedom for all, and to be as expansive as possible. We should fight for the rights of workers in all workplaces to have their expertise valued.
The idea of intellectual freedom for all is not new. For well over a century, some have argued that workers in all lines of work have valuable insights and their right to present these views should be institutionally protected. One can find traces of this perspective in early twentieth-century management-consultant and organizational literature and even recently in popular reality-TV shows. A common theme of this unlikely coupling is that workers have expertise because of their structural positions, not despite them. What an employee can know about how an organization functions or a set of tasks depends on how that worker figures out how to navigate the daily challenges of a particular job role. What one knows about a company from the sales floor is very different than what one knows as the director of marketing—and should be understood to be equally valuable.
Recognizing the dignity of situated expertise is hardly new. Decades ago, in the 1920s and 1930s, public intellectuals were already arguing for workers’ expertise and intellectual freedom, although perhaps not in those words. Mary Parker Follett was an early New Deal management theorist and a participant in the settlement house movement who was sharply critical of Taylorism because of how it turned workers into extensions of machines. Advocating for greater democracy in the workplace, Follett was deeply opposed to the contemporary worker’s all too common experience of being consulted and ignored. She believed that the problem with clashes between management and labor was that they obscured how much workers could—and would—be invested in helping factories run as well as possible if only they were encouraged to do so. It also made good business sense to see the workplace as a shared community in which everyone might want to support a common good if only workers were treated with respect. Follett was writing at a time of strong unions and many strikes, and she was trying to imagine more effective strategies for negotiation between management and workers. In her vision, everyone could contribute to the strength of a company if their perspective was taken as not only valid but insightful.
More recently, this notion that intellectual freedom at work might be beneficial has surfaced in the UK version of Undercover Boss—whose very appeal signals that maybe there is indeed an audience eager for this proposition. Undercover Boss’s basic plot is exactly what the title implies: the CEO or someone in upper management pretends to be a newly hired entry-level worker for five days at their own company. The structure has familiar antecedents in folktales, popular films such as Freaky Friday or Trading Places, and well-known novels such as The Prince and the Pauper. In folktales, a prince travels as a peasant in disguise and gains valuable humility and insights into how the kingdom functions. Or a husband is forced to change roles with his wife for a day, and, in the struggle to manage all her tasks, discovers how hard she works and comes to see how much he has been undervaluing her. Changing structural position in these narratives is revelatory, and the superior gains valuable insight into how a company, kingdom, or household functions by listening to another’s practical expertise.
In one striking example from Undercover Boss, the CEO of Quicksilver, a chain of stores filled with gambling machines, shadows Ian, a technician responsible for servicing machines in nine stores that day. Ian explains early on that he likes his job because he sets his own schedule and doesn’t have to work too hard. He makes other comments about his commitment to inefficiency, explaining as he drives, “I like to go in circles—I don’t like driving back on the same road.” As the day wears on, the undercover boss discovers that this worker had made suggestions for how to improve the repair work a year or two earlier, only to have his suggestions completely ignored. This is a revelation that the technician doesn’t have a bad attitude, but he has been actively demoralized by a middle-level manager’s inability to recognize a good idea. The CEO’s response during his final scene of revelation with this worker is to reward him, explaining that his idea to have a workshop was “a bloody good idea” that the company will institute. The lesson repeated over and over is that bosses can learn new and productive ideas by listening to what workers in a different structural position know—a very satisfying story for many frustrated by workplace politics. We need to persuade nonacademics to support academic freedom—people who value what businesses have to offer, who are reformists, not revolutionaries; from this perspective too, intellectual freedom for all workplaces can seem reasonable and even beneficial.
If faculty want to advocate for academic freedom, why limit this advocacy to the university? Make it about respect for expertise at work in general—for knowledge evaluated and valued by a community of practice according to shared and hard-won standards. We should fight for the idea that all of us have valuable insights into what we know about the world and how we can get things done.
Ilana Gerson is Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Anthropology at Rice University.
The “wall to wall and coast-to-coast” motto of Higher EducationLabor United (higheredlaborunited.org) commits us to organizing around this very principle: intellectual freedom for all. You can call it “respect for situated expertise” if you want, or if you’re talking about faculty, call it “academic freedom,”‘ or make up a new term that covers both comfortably — given the way things are going in higher ed, it’s all a moving target but the right one to aim at.
I think this approach is right. Some people think academic freedom is an elitist concept because it calls for a right that other workers don’t have. But other workers should have these rights to speak out without retaliation. However, this ideal for all workers shouldn’t make us hesitate to embrace academic freedom for professors. After all, workers should unionize even though other workers don’t have those job protection. It’s not elitism to fight for your rights in your profession or your institution, even though others are denied those rights.
I believe Dr Gerson is right but she is confusing the two principal goals of the AAUP. I believe she is talking about “shared government”, one of the pillars of faculty participation in educational decisions. Academic freedom is not an elitist position, is the ability to teach, evaluate and grade the students in your classroom and to be able to explore, without administration interference, what the faculty believes are valid concepts. Of course this freedom is bounded by the universal principle of “due no harm”.
Two of the basic concepts of a democratic society are, to be truthful and seek enlightenment plus “do no harm”. These basic concepts includes both, shared governance and academic freedom. Obviously, in a democratic society it should be extended to all citizens, not just faculty.
This freedom ought to go without saying but it doesn’t. As long as people are involved, it’ll be a bunfight in a swamp. Before I quit academe in disgust in the mid 1980s, watching academic integrity being vandalised by going commercial and dumbed down, I made copious notes as to why I was leaving. Where the truth is involved, humans–in the main–don’t give a damn. They don’t care. Least of all in the hallowed halls of academe. Three thinkers were a great influence on me. “‘No normal human being wants to hear the truth. It is the passion of a small and aberrant minority of men, most of them pathological. They are hated for telling it while they live, and when they die, they are swiftly forgotten. What remains to the world, in the field of wisdom, is a series of long-tested and solidly agreeable lies.’ (H. L. Mencken). The second, Jose Ortega y Gasset, had this to add: “The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that, the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself where it can.” The third was Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame: “We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.” To prove him right, America elected MAGA twice. Free of the nonsense and absurdity, I wrote a book on why Einstein called our reality pure illusion by which we all get suckered into insanity. Academic freedom? Pull the other one. It’s a great myth to natter and waffle about but that’s all it’ll ever amount to in an idiot culture.
I think what Gershon is talking about also comes up in discussions of workplace democracy. I guess one could see academic freedom as a workplace democracy issue that’s unique to teachers and researchers, but, like Cerro, I think the better academic analogue to workplace democracy might be shared governance. But I agree that drawing on parallels, where possible, between the concerns of academics and those of other workers is a prudent strategy. It’s still true (I think) that less than a majority of adults have four year college degrees. Many of them may not know or care enough about what happens in colleges to be very concerned about academic freedom. Or, given that so many of us (college graduates or not) are at least somewhat politically siloed, some of these folks might be primed to believe messages from people they trust misrepresenting or denigrating academic freedom. Gershon’s strategy may be just what we need to combat this sort of thing.
Anthropology, eh? Organizational or occupational anthro? You are correct, intellectual freedom is not new, it is innate to every human being. But something called work place intellectual freedom might be (relatively) new and subject to constraints in its exercise. As usual, much depends on how you define the concept. If you define it too broadly, it loses the situational expertise you mention, along with how in the 1920s and 30s, “public intellectuals were already arguing for workers’ expertise and intellectual freedom.” Are you including Dewey and the Gang at the AAUP (https://bit.ly/IronyAbsurdAAUP1)? It also depends on how you facilitate the exercise of freedom (in the work-slash-earning space), with the obvious goal of maximizing realization.
Tell me, IIana, why do you think that public intellectuals then and now fail to consider a professional service and stewardship model for the social good of higher education? How is the (exercise of) the intellectual freedom of attorneys or physicians or engineers or…, worse or better off than faculty employees? Professionals worked out this (particular) intellectual freedom thing in the couple of centuries running up to the 20th. So, why do you suppose Dewey and the Gang (after careful consideration of existing or alternatives generated using intellectual freedom?) decided to keep the exclusive employment of academics by universities and colleges – our institutional inheritance – rather than opt for the relatively new, but tested, professional model of self-representation and earning used elsewhere in other equally valued social contracts? What do you think the response from these professionals would be if tomorrow attorneys and physicians in America were told that the only way they can (legally or sustainably) earn a living in their fields of expertise is by (hopefully) becoming an employee of some firm or hospital (public or private)? And, please, I am not talking about further privatization of the public good (https://bit.ly/PSAnotNeoLib).
The exclusive employment by state instruments of academics who aim to serve and steward higher education, the facilitation model that Dewey et. al. assume without challenge to this day, is neither necessary nor recommended, while a viable, desirable professional alternative has been staring faculty employees and theirs champions in the face for centuries. If this is what academics as (casual) faculty employees wring out of their intellectual freedom, as exercised in the exclusive earning and learning in higher education, then we have a breach of social contract. It is a failure in the intellectual and fiduciary duty of academics to: identify and evaluate assumptions (https://bit.ly/InheritedAssumption ). Try what Dewey and the Gang did not, some research: https://bit.ly/AofResPSA.