What Does Academic Freedom Look Like (When It’s Working)?

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once noted that a tool often goes unnoticed until it breaks. Most of the time, the hammer exists as part of a seamless assemblage of nails, wood, a tool belt, a work site, and a collection of other tools, animated by the routine movements of construction workers and craftspeople going about their daily activity. Only when the hammer breaks does anyone take notice. One can think of academic freedom in a similar way. When functioning, academic freedom appears common and ordinary—the daily life of higher education, the unseen fabric and everyday practices that constitute academic work.

Today, however, academic freedom seems constantly and profoundly broken. It can be hard to remember what academic freedom even looks like in practice.

At its core, academic freedom is predicated on the notion that colleges and universities cannot serve the common good if those with political, economic, or institutional power determine what is taught and researched. When working right, therefore, academic freedom entails replacing rule-by-dictate (for example, how a CEO runs a corporation) with the daily practices of peer review. In other words, academic freedom exists when a community of teachers and scholars engages in the constant work of evaluating and assessing ideas, arguments, evidence, and pedagogies according to our training and expertise.

In publishing, this looks like the peer review process. While by no means a perfect institution, peer review ensures that what counts as quality research is determined by a community of scholars, not by those who might have strong non-scholarly preferences about what research does (and does not) get published.

Peer review also forms the heart of the hiring process, where a faculty committee sifts through the pile of applications—often hundreds of files deep—while wrestling with hard decisions about which candidate meets something like a collective understanding of what constitutes compelling teaching or quality research or best fits departmental need.

This tedious process of poring over files, debating, and arguing over who to invite to campus stands in sharp contrast to the now numerous examples of university presidents simply appointing faculty, as happened when Ben Sass placed a political ally at the head of the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida. Or when Ben Sass himself was appointed to a faculty position at the Hamilton Center, after resigning the presidency in scandal. Or when the faculty of the UNC-Chapel Hill journalism school went through a lengthy review process to select Nikole Hannah-Jones for a tenured faculty position, only to have the trustees block the position because they objected to Hannah-Jones’ work on political grounds.

When working right, decisions about tenure and promotion are also assessed through peer evaluation. First through departmental deliberation, next by an elected faculty committee, and only then by the dean, president, and governing boards, who often simply ratify the deliberative work done by the faculty. Sure, this process of collecting and reading files, evaluating the work, writing letters, and meeting to discuss the materials is time-consuming. But it is still far superior to a situation when politically appointed presidents or deans are simply given free hand to decide which faculty they think should receive promotion.

The dreaded faculty Senate and other faculty committees offer another example of academic freedom in practice. The AAUP’s 1966 “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities” holds that academic freedom cannot exist when faculty lack a meaningful say in the governance of their institutions. During the mid-twentieth century, there was a concerted push by academic workers for greater voice in decision-making regarding long-term planning, budgeting, the physical plant, and the hiring of presidents and administrators. In some institutions, like my own, there remain active faculty committees, some of which exert real power. For example, when a former dean tried to impose a curricular reform from above, the faculty rebelled, pointing out the proposal’s numerous flaws and incoherencies. The Curriculum Committee then worked with the faculty to develop a new curriculum through deliberation and considerable input. The revised curriculum was then unanimously adopted by the faculty. It was a time-consuming process of meetings, debate, and endless email threads, but the outcome was far superior to the one cooked up by the dean. And the things I don’t like about it? Well, I was part of the process that came up with it, so I only have myself to blame.

At institutions with collective bargaining agreements, unions often serve as important venues for the daily practice of shared governance and for creating the daily conditions for academic freedom.

For higher education as a sector, the federal or state government does not determine which colleges or universities meet criteria of quality. One could see why this would be dangerous in a state (looking at you, Florida) where the Governor is openly hostile to academic institutions. Rather, accreditation is done through peer assessment. Again, by no means are accrediting bodies without fault. However, the practice of non-partisan accreditation agencies built around peer review looks far superior to handing that power over to vindictive governors. Not to mention Trump or Musk.

To be sure, the daily practices of academic freedom have been steadily eroded at many institutions by corporatization, austerity, adjunctification, and the centralization of decision-making power in fewer and fewer hands. And, in recent years, our increasingly hollowed-out institutions have faced a new onslaught of partisan political attacks. However, most academic institutions still retain many daily practices of peer assessment and shared governance. Identifying, protecting, and expanding these spaces is an essential part of building a higher education infrastructure that protects academic freedom in practice.

In doing so, academic freedom looks less like a hammer and more like the hard daily labor of workplace democracy.

The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.