Is academic freedom a made-up concept?

In Satyajit Ray’s 1980 satirical fantasy film Hirak Rajar Deshe, literally “in the kingdom of the Diamond King”, the education minister of the king dictates what should be taught in school. Finally, the minister closes the school. Is the story a true reflection of the contemporary world, to some extent?

The nature of education and how it shapes society can be examined in a variety of contexts, from the fictional kingdom of the Diamond King to real-life Donald Trump’s America. Given that Columbia, an Ivy League university, surrendered its academic freedom, and Harvard, the oldest and richest American university, has chosen to legally defend it, one would wonder what academic freedom is and what its scopes and limitations are.

When then President Pranab Mukherjee spoke at the “International Buddhist Conference” in Nalanda in 2017, he invoked Nalanda and Taxila, the ancient universities, to pitch for an atmosphere free from prejudice, anger, violence, and doctrines. “It must be conducive to free flow intellectual persuasions,” he stated.

A difficult path

However, it’s not so easy, always. Scholars who disagreed with church theology or behaved in ways the church deemed unacceptable risked persecution in medieval Europe. Then, philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt created a new university in Berlin in the early 19th century. The fundamental principles of academic freedom – freedom of scientific inquiry and the unification of research and teaching – were institutionalised in and diffused to other countries by the Humboldtian model of higher education.
Today’s seemingly made-up concept of academic freedom can be summed up as follows: students have the right to learn in an academic environment free from outside interference, and teachers have the right to instruct. The right of teachers to engage in social and political critique is another definition, though. In a 2022 paper published in the Houston Law Review, Yale Law School professor Keith E. Whittington stated that universities committed to truth-seeking and the advancement and dissemination of human knowledge essentially require “robust protections for academic freedom for scholars and instructors.”

Definition of freedoms

At the UNESCO-organised International Conference in Nice in 1950, the Universities of the World pledged for “the right to pursue knowledge for its own sake and to follow wherever the search for truth may lead.” Academic freedom was then defined as “the freedom to conduct research, teach, speak, and publish, subject to the norms and standards of scholarly inquiry, without interference or penalty, wherever the search for truth and understanding may lead” at the first annual Global Colloquium of University Presidents held at Columbia University in 2005. But is defining and accomplishing academic freedom really that straightforward?

Tenure, promotions, pay hikes, research funding, and academic honours are all intimately correlated with research publications in the current academic environment. Thus, today’s scholars are driven by the peer pressure of publishing. And the interest of funding agencies has a significant impact on academicians’ research. Nowadays, universities are also concerned with their international rankings, which are largely based on research papers.

‘Publish or perish’ culture

How serious is today’s “publish or perish” culture? Quite a bit, indeed. One significant exception was 2013 Nobel laureate British physicist Peter Higgs, well known for the Higgs Boson. Higgs never published aggressively. He stated that he became “an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises” and that he would have most likely been fired from his job at the University of Edinburgh if he had not been nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1980. However, he thought that because he would not be deemed “productive” enough in today’s academic system, no university would hire him. Thus, today’s academic system doesn’t even permit a future Nobel winner to peacefully conduct his own research without regularly generating research papers.

Nowadays, there’s little scope for leeway in a pre-scheduled framework of university curriculum. Furthermore, as American biologist Jerry Coyne put it, a geology teacher who casually informs his students that the earth is flat is not exercising academic freedom but rather is failing in his duties. Compared to general freedom of speech, academic freedom of speech is more limited. For instance, a non-academic can criticise the effectiveness of vaccines, but they can only do it with academic freedom if they have the necessary academic credentials. Academic perspectives are frequently subject to peer review, in contrast to public speeches.

And, importantly, academic freedom may be as much as a country’s politics and society at the time would have desired to offer academic institutions. For instance, several fields of research, including sociology and genetics, were outlawed as “bourgeois pseudoscience” in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Checks and balances

What’s the freedom of a flying kite, indeed? When a kite is flying high, it means that the person holding the spool has just let it soar. Without the monarchs’ generous financing and allowing foreign scholars and students, would ancient Nalanda or Taxila have been able to exercise their academic freedom? What happens if that person believes the kite is behaving strangely? Of course, a democracy has checks and balances, such as the judiciary and periodic elections. Therefore, academic freedom and political interference in it are continually being redefined by changing sociopolitical dynamics.

Academic freedom certainly sets up a protective umbrella over scholars’ activities; however, this protection is neither absolute nor guaranteed. As some powerful politicians still view universities as “the enemy,” Hirak Rajar Deshe becomes a timeless doctrine that holds that education is more than just imparting knowledge; it’s also about moulding souls, developing minds, and enabling people to think critically and behave morally. A university serves as a prism of enlightenment to the community it caters to.

However, efforts to define a framework for acceptable academic freedom and to ensure it continue.

(Atanu Biswas is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata)