Academic freedom under fire
Campus forums explore challenges to faculty control

Do faculty members have the right to discuss any topic they please in their classrooms? What expectations do students have about what and how their professors teach? Do adjunct faculty have academic freedom? What's in our contract and college policy?

Questions about faculty control over their classrooms have become a political hot potato in recent years.

A new report from the AFT, "Academic Freedom in the 21st-Century College and University," cites five major causes underlying AFT members' general unease with the state of academic freedom on their campuses:

• the increasingly vocational focus of higher education;
• loss of financial support for colleges and universities;
• corporate-style management practices;
• political attacks on faculty and instructional staff; and
• the erosion of academic staffing through the loss of full-time tenured positions and the financial and professional mistreatment of contingent faculty.

The subtitle to the AFT report, "Academic Freedom for All Faculty and Staff," reflects the importance of that last factor. Driven by member feedback, getting institutions and policymakers to address the inequities presented by the academic staffing crisis has become a number-one priority of the union.

During Campus Equity Week 2007, Oct. 27-Nov. 2, AFT locals sponsored Academic Freedom Forums on their campuses to explore questions such as those above, which were raised at the forum at Suffolk Community College that was sponsored by the college and the AFT local, the Faculty Association at SCC.

Suffolk professor of English Jeff Kluewer noted the external influences that shape public perceptions of educators: "There's this charge that we're too liberal ... that we change people." Yet, "our mission statement actually says that we hope to transform lives."

Wayne Horsley, a Suffolk County legislator, observed that nationally, in the last few years, government has intruded on academic freedom, particularly in the realm of corporate support for research and teaching. "That's where university unionism becomes so critical, in fighting back that push from the people with the money," says Horsley.

ADJUNCTS ARE VULNERABLE
Workshop participants also spoke of the vulnerability of those who lack tenure—part-time/adjunct teachers and junior faculty. Kathie Rogers, professor of accounting, invoked the plight of "younger adjuncts who don't have a pension, a state retirement to fall back on, especially those who are trying to get their foot in the door to become full-time faculty, who I'm sure don't feel that same sense of freedom [as tenured faculty do] and who don't want to offend their colleagues or their department head."

Student Katelynn DeLuca said that students realize how it affects them when a teacher indicates that he or she has no office and no department phone number as a point of contact. Further, "when you sit in a tenured professor's class, you can feel that sense of freedom" they have to teach, whereas adjuncts "at times may not want to discuss issues of race, religion or sexual orientation," because of possible repercussions.

At Temple University on Nov. 2, a regular weekly teach-in series called Dissent in America became the venue for a forum on "Academic Freedom for All: Fact or Fiction." Featuring Temple Association of University Professors president Art Hochner (who wrote the AFT's Academic Freedom report), the panel included academics and a student. Joan Wallach Scott from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton is an outspoken writer and defender of academic freedom. "We have to protect the classic definition of academic freedom," she said.

"It pertains to teachers," not students, who have "the right to free speech, as we all do."
Scott focused on the ideological attacks visited upon Middle East scholars and other academics defined as "so-called enemies" in a time of national emergency. The attacks come from people like conservative commentator David Horowitz, who is cavalier about factual accuracy. "They substitute moralistic arguments for evidence."

Temple adjunct professor of history Ralph Young shared his unfortunate experience of being bashed by Horowitz, president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, in a lengthy online diatribe, "Intellectual Indoctrination and Academic Fraud at Temple University." Young teaches a course, "Dissent in America," that relies on primary sources going back to the founding fathers. When classes routinely started running over because of students' unwillingness to end their discussion, the idea of the regular Friday afternoon teach-ins took hold. "As a nontenure-track senior lecturer, I worry all the time about whether my contract will be renewed," he says.

Associate professor of journalism Linn Washington, a first amendment expert, also found himself attacked on Horowitz's Web site. A student complained because the student thought the reporter's role was to be a stenographer, while Washington's emphasis to budding journalists is to "think for yourself; read, reflect, react."

"We can disagree without being disagreeable," he adds. "I wish that phrase would filter far and wide across America."

At an Academic Freedom Forum sponsored by the Portland Community College Faculty Federation on Nov. 1, the guest speaker was Douglas Giles, an adjunct professor who was fired by Roosevelt University in Chicago because he allowed open discussion of controversial subjects in a world religions class in 2005. Out of the blue, he received a call from the department chair, who ordered him to avoid discussions about Judaism, Zionism and Islamic beliefs. Within a week, he was fired. Through his union, he is fighting the termination on academic freedom grounds.

Most academic freedom infringements are not so blatant, noted Michael Dembrow, PCCFF president. Adjuncts fail to get their course assignment, without explanation. Students are none the wiser.

Suffolk student DeLuca takes umbrage at the thought. "I'm here to learn, to become educated. I have to be taught in a way that challenges me to learn and to grow," she says. "It's our right to be treated as adults in college because that's what we are."

Cynthia Eaton of Suffolk Community College contributed to this report.