5 - Academic Freedom

Summary

While the cliché of “academic freedom” has unfortunately led to a freedom that is often merely “academic,” I would argue that institutions of higher learning are greater expressions of our freedom than any other institution, including that of the government itself. What does “academic freedom” tell us about freedom in general, and what does freedom, in general, tell us about academic freedom in particular? Having distinguished the common, “negative” notion of freedom identified with individualism or, as it is more commonly understood, doing what one wants without outside constraint, from the more positive view of freedom discussed in the first part of this book that identifies the notion with our creativity and potential originality in acting in accord with our highest—divine or absolute—aspirations, we are now in a better position to apply this positive notion to other institutions and “zones,” beginning with academia and then proceeding to politics, free speech, artistic freedom (the music of Beethoven) and, finally, friendship.

As we learned in the previous chapters, positive freedom requires work. We have seen this in the case of Sisyphus, whom Camus declared happy not despite the fact of his incessant, “proletariat” toil but because he knew it was the “price to be paid” for challenging the absolute authority of the gods. We have also seen this in the case of Nietzsche, for whom artistic freedom is not achieved by simply ignoring the “tyranny of arbitrary laws” and traditions but by working with and struggling against them. And, finally, we have seen this in the case of Kant, for whom moral goodness is only achieved by ignoring precisely those contingent forms of self-interest that define our so-called personal, individual freedom. As noted in the Introduction to this work, positive freedom has nothing to do with the freedom of the individual with which it is often confused, as in Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom.

One thing that is clear in approaching the question of academic freedom is that it, too, is largely defined in opposition to personal, individual freedom and in accord with the work that is necessary to make such freedom possible.