Academic Freedom For Sale
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by Nancy Fioritto Patete
I AM, AMONG OTHER things, an adjunct instructor at a community college. Recently, the politics of my job
got to me. This happened quite innocently while browsing through my e-mail messages at the beginning of last Spring semester. It included an attachment of an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The sender, a full-time faculty member, commented on the urgency of the article, but I, as a part-time faculty member, found it disturbing for different reasons.
The article recounts the experience of a university professor who said the wrong thing to his class at the wrong time. Gerald Wilson cracked what he thought to be a joke to a class where not everyone appreciated the humor. The “joke” came as a retort to a question having to do with how the class was going to be run. The question was an awkward one: “Do you have any prejudices?” a student asked. The answer was flip: “Yeah, Republicans.” Oops, I thought before reading any farther. The remark was ill received, at least by the inquiring student. The joke seemed harmless enough. Let’s face it: It can be a chore to break the ice at the onset of classes, and gaffes happen to even the greatest wits among us.
But this wasn’t an article about teaching for dummies. This anecdote was actually a lead-in to the more serious issue of academic freedom. It was intended to serve as an illustration of the threat that looms above us, a kind of cultural gag order on information exchange in higher education. The threat, according to the article’s author, Sara Hebel, comes from the religious far right, in this case, principles espoused through the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. We are told that its supporters are presumably ultra-conservative students tired of feeling marginalized at their campuses.
An audacious proposition. These students are presenting their grievances at the very institutions designed to ready them for mainstream America, schools which the students and their families pay dearly to attend.
The “Academic Bill of Rights” seeks to make “welcome a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions.” No argument here on this account—unless one argues the use of the word “diversity” in such a conservative context. Thus, Hebel reports, conservative activists are fed up with the pervasive liberal climate found at most college campuses across the country. These students are applying their clout (money) at schools that possess their own brand of clout (stature). Conversely, college educators are feeling a squeeze to be careful in their delivery of a range of ideas in the classroom, i.e., left of center ideas. Otherwise privileged professors are feeling constrained.
The e-mail message I received from my colleague voiced fear over the erosion of academic freedom that this movement presages. “All right, so what?” I told myself, opening the next e-mail. All this same, I thought about this e-mail for days. Why was it sent to me, an adjunct? Exactly in what way should I be concerned? Doesn’t the permanent faculty know or realize that I, one within an army of workers, am a mere observer? I have no academic freedom.
To the defenders of academic freedom, the sentence probably most disturbing in the Academic Bill of Rights is this: “Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.“ Faculty shouldn’t anyway. Academic freedom is not an entitlement. It shouldn’t have to vest, like a retirement plan. It is one of the principled cornerstones of education. Unfortunately, it is linked to academic tenure, historically and operationally. I’d love to be a defender of academic freedom, but I simple cannot.
In 1940, the American Association of University Professors, and the group now known as the Association of American Colleges and Universities, jointly set forth standards for academic freedom. This doctrine, first espoused in 1925, appeared in a document entitled “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.” Apparently this doctrine has been worth revisiting several times, once in 1940 and most recently in 1970: “Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institute as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.” Truth thrives in an environment where there is full freedom to research, publish, and discuss a subject. The environment begets living wages and permanent appointments. Thus, intellectual pursuit partners with job security.
Who, today, can afford to “advance the truth?” I can’t and neither can the 64 percent of community college faculty who hold temporary appointments. According to a 1993 survey compiled by the U.S. Department of Education, 64 percent of community college faculty are part-time. (In the same DOE survey, the figure for four-year institutions is a conditional 29 percent, the condition being that the approximately 200,000 graduate assistants at work in these institutions are not factored in.) It shouldn’t surprise any of us that ten years later these percentages have grown.
In 1997, nearly eight decades and many generations of college students later, a white paper compiled by a collection of 10 mostly academic associations appeared. Entitled, “Statement from the Conference on the Growing Use of Part-Time and Adjunct Faculty,” it includes this passage:
This system of disparate personnel policies and contractual arrangements for instructional staff has created a multitier faculty that all but inevitably divides along caste lines. . . . A Shrinking Brahmin class of professional-rank faculty enjoys academic careers and compensation commensurate with advanced training, while a growing cast of “untouchable” education service workers can obtain only poorly remunerated semester-to-semester jobs that offer no career prospects. By establishing the root conditions for the emergence of this multitier faculty and caste system, cost-driven reliance on part-time and adjunct, non-tenure-track faculty degrades the environment in which both full-and part-time faculty work, diminishes faculty professional development, and denies many students adequate access to quality instruction.
We may not like to admit it or to view ourselves this way, but academic freedom has evolved into a privilege for the elite. In our prosperous nation, roughly two-thirds of faculty in higher education—the majority of us walking the halls of the classroom buildings—is not afforded job protection.
This means that truth-seeking, when it occurs in two-thirds of the classrooms, is merely anecdotal. As a result, the stratification inherent in the caste system of higher education extinguishes academic freedom.
Several days later I responded to the e-mail in an angry, discrediting tone. I found the Duke professor’s reply to the student “cavalier” and his reaction afterwards “childish.” I wrote that it’s not our place to be cute in the classroom, and that the student was right to object, no matter what anyone might feel about the convictions of the religious right.
My outrage was a direct result of working as an untouchable among the Brahmins of the academic community. How can I, given my status, presume to be “frightened” by threats to academic freedom?
I understand that not every adjunct wants a full-time post, and that colleges can’t staff instructional programs with a 100 percent full-time labor force. However, the academic community can begin the reversal of this terrible and frightening caste system in other ways. It should begin, first, by offering fair compensation and access to benefits. Adjuncts should be included in academic program decision-making.
Taking the long view, the quality of higher education is diminished by this caste system. In the same way that education is no longer the great equalizer, the community of educators has been splintered. This is no longer a trend, but a condition that blunts the pursuit of truth, the very basis upon which academic freedom rests. Truth demands the right to endure in every forum, whether in a freshman composition class, or a graduate-level course in rhetoric. The institutions of higher learning will change when the culture recognizes academic freedom as essential.
In actuality, the e-mail that got me fuming, and started me thinking, was one of those global messages sent out with good intentions. At its worst, it constituted an insensitive act. Yet, it is clear from Gerald Wilson’s experience, and The Chronicle of Higher Education’s reporting, as well as my colleague’s well-intentioned global e-mail, that full-time faculty are frightened by the erosion of their own academic freedom. At the same time, the Brahmins remain conveniently oblivious to the fact that part-time faculty have no academic freedom at all.
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