education

Dr. Henry Reichman conducted a virtual discussion on academic freedom in connection with the American Association of University Professors on Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2021.

On Tuesday, Oct. 26, Dr. Henry Reichman presented a Zoom discussion on academic freedom, a topic vital to the integrity of any institution of higher education. Dr. Reichman is the former American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Vice President and president of the AAUP Foundation, as well as the chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2012-2015. The event, organized by Dr. Barbara Allen and Dr. Joel Garver, garnered widespread attendance from students, staff and faculty members across all disciplines and from other universities.

In 2019, Dr. Reichman published his book “The Future of Academic Freedom,” which served as the backdrop for this conversation. He explained the terms of academic freedom, making sure to clarify common misconceptions, and offered his perspective on the current biggest threats to academic freedom.

Academic freedom is a concept belonging to the academic profession as a whole that protects the pursuit of inquiry. It guarantees to both faculty members and students the right to engage in debate without fear of censorship. In Dr. Reichman’s words, it “functions ultimately as the collective freedom of the scholarly community to govern itself in the interest of serving the common good in a democratic society.”

It is not, however, a civil liberty akin to freedom of speech; it cannot be classified as simply an employment benefit. Rather, it refers to the collective freedom of the faculty to govern itself as it sees fit, thereby promoting an environment in which academic inquiry is protected. It doesn’t allow a professor to do or say whatever they want without limit or accountability.

It does, however, protect a professor’s comments as a citizen even on topics that have nothing to do with their discipline. Such protection is essential to a healthy institution of higher education. Take, for example, the case of Dr. Arthur Butz, an electrical engineering professor at Northwestern University. In 1975, Dr. Butz published “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry.” Dr. Butz’s Holocaust denial was met with harsh criticism from both his fellow faculty and the public at large.

Many called for his resignation as a professor, decrying his blatantly anti-Semitic beliefs. Academic freedom, however, protects Dr. Butz’s right to publish this Holocaust denial book insofar as it does not affect his fitness to do research in and teach electrical engineering. Had Dr. Butz been a professor of 19th- and 20th-century history, for example, as Dr. Reichman was, then there would certainly be an argument that his beliefs about the Holocaust could affect his ability to do his job, and therefore academic freedom would not protect him. However, given his stature as a professor in engineering, Dr. Butz was allowed to publish such a book and keep his job.

The example of Dr. Butz is extreme, but nonetheless, academic freedom provides for an open environment for discussion within academic institutions. However, one of the most troubling trends in higher education, according to Dr. Reichman, is the tendency to misunderstand the concept of academic freedom; such a misunderstanding could prove to be dangerous to the liberties that such a concept seeks to protect. As with any debate on freedom, the question of responsibility arises: with great freedom comes great responsibility. Dr. Reichman argues that the responsibility refers not to using academic freedom with trepidation out of concern of backlash or censorship. Rather, there is a responsibility to protect this freedom, lest the integrity and functionality of academic institutions be jeopardized — “in academia, we have a collective responsibility to each other, our students, and the diverse common good in a democratic society.”

Toward the end of Dr. Reichman’s explanation of academic freedom, the floor was opened up to questions from audience members. One faculty member asked a question regarding intellectual property with respect to professor-created content: who owns the content we create for teaching? Dr. Reichman replied by saying that it belongs to the professor. The professor may retain their right to sign the rights of that intellectual property over to a publisher, for example, but since the faculty member is the one who created the material, it ultimately belongs to them.

In the age of Zoom University, this question has become more relevant than ever; professors were required to move their entire courses online, demanding them to record lectures and develop virtual manipulatives, among other adjustments. The answer to the question of to whom do these materials belong remains unclear, but the AAUP states that they should belong to the faculty member who created them.

There was another question about the rights of the administration of a university to choose and have access to learning management systems (LMS), such as Canvas or Blackboard. According to Dr. Reichman, faculty members should be consulted in all decisions related to the university, especially those which directly impact teaching and learning. Therefore, the faculty should have a say in which LMS are used as well as the terms of access by the administration. Ultimately, faculty members should have the right to actively debate and vote on decisions made by their university that will affect their abilities to carry out their jobs. After all, “where academic freedom is not protected, shared governance will be a scam,” according to Dr. Reichman.

James LeVan, Staff

When I was growing up, my parents did not keep any alcohol in the house. There was no beer in the fridge for my father to drink while he watched Sunday football, my mother would not sip wine with friends. They never went to beer distributors or liquor stores. In fact, I can only recall maybe one or two times that I ever saw them drink alcohol at a party. There were few things my parents were admittingly strict about as far rules went. Alcohol was one of them and they made it clear that I wasn’t allowed to drink until I turned 21. All of this has led me to have a weird relationship with alcohol. I don’t drink during the semester and only at night with food. I’m sure some reading this will not believe me when it comes to my impressive control of alcohol. Drinking always made me feel ashamed, as though I was doing something amoral and, worried about my mental health during this hellish year, I decided to give up drinking entirely.

My weird relationship with alcohol and my parent’s abstinence from it has always been a curiosity. Why did my parents dislike alcohol so much? My parents gave me and my brother plenty of freedom as we were growing up. So why was alcohol the big issue? I got my answer recently when talking to a distant cousin after the death of my grandfather. She informed me about my great-grandfather and his marriage to my great-grandmother was an unhappy one (from all accounts my great-grandmother was a borderline psychopath and I am not exaggerating that). He hated his wife and used alcohol to numb the pain of being married to her. In one drunken stupor, he decided to run away from his family in Philadelphia and went on a bender all the way to New York. His brother had to track him down up there and bring him back. His brother once again had to rescue him when one night he got drunk and punched a hole in a wall and he had to come over and make sure he didn’t kill my great-grandmother. I never knew my great-grandfather, he died before my father was born. However, his difficult marriage and the drinking created a ripple effect through time — my parents raising me in a dry house and my own awkward feelings toward alcohol today.

Whether we like it or not, we all feel the effects of the past on our lives. Every part of our environment (physical, political, cultural, economic) is the product of the actions of people who made decisions that we still feel even though many of them have passed and their names are not active in our public memory. In that regard, they act as ghosts haunting and whispering to us from beyond the grave. If the past is such a powerful force on us, then does that mean we should study history?

In all my years of studying history, I have come across dozens of reasons for the past. So many, in fact, that if I were to try and list them, I fear that I would lose your attention and push the word limit (which I do often). So, I will make this piece the first in what I hope will be a series of pieces advocating for my fellow explorers to take courses with our wonderful history faculty and even possibly dual major or major in history. My argument here is that events do not just happen in a vacuum. They have consequences and those consequences can transcend the distance of decades and affect us today. In the story above, I mention my great-grandfather and the hardship he endured and how that has led to my parent’s strictness when it came to drinking and to my own decision to abstain from alcohol. Learning my own family’s history showed me that there was a reason for our weirdness towards drinking. Professional historians, of course, do this as well, but on a more societal level — they find ways to show that the worlds they study are speaking to us now.

After the September 11 attacks, historians of ancients Greece and Rome felt their work had become relevant and that the conflicts between the United States and the Middle East were part of a pattern stretching back to the wars between the Persian Empire and the states of Athens and Sparta and how the Greek historian Herodotus framed these conflicts in his work. Or, to use an example from this decade, scholars have been making many connections between modern problems of police brutality and racial injustice and the racist policies and hierarchies that were put in place during the Antebellum and Jim Crow eras of American History to prevent Black Americans from achieving true equality in the United States.

Studying history allows us to better understand how the actions of those from yesterday are still affecting us now, allowing us to perhaps even one day break the chains of conflict and oppression and build something better. Or, at the very least, it will help us steer us into a better direction. Regardless, if you want to better understand this phenomenon, I strongly recommend that you take some history courses here at La Salle during your academic careers. If nothing else, you’ll see that we are just one link in a chain that has been forged long before any of us living now were born.

levanj1@lasalle.edu

The La Salle Collegian

Dr. Henry A. Reichman presents discussion on the future of academic freedom

Reasons to study history: the past is alive