Academic Freedom

The other day, I watched a debate between David Horowitz and a radical professor at Reed named Steinberger on the issue of academic freedom--something which, for obvious reasons, is important to university professors, but for stranger reasons is thought to be something students should care about. The two debators went back and forth, arguing about what kind of material teachers ought to be teaching in order to make students think critically. Horowitz said the students should hear more conservative views to counterbalance liberal views; Seinberger said Liberals are smarter, so the students will be better off hearing mostly Liberal views.

The problem with the debate was that neither of them examined the assumption underlying both of their positions: that students need the institution of the school and its agents of authority, the teachers, in order to learn. The issue of the individual freedom of the student, his right to develop free from intellectual control by the school, never came up. As Max Stirner wrote, any time that the word "freedom" is brought up without explicit reference to people, the word "control" should be substituted for freedom. Political freedom is freedom of the state (over individuals); religious freedom is the freedom of religious institutions (over their subjects), freedom of conscience is the freedom of moral systems over people's intelects. Likewise, academic freedom is nothing more than the freedom of the academic institutions to discretion in determining the way in which citizens learn.

In order to be meaningful, any discussion about freedom in education should focus on the freedom of the people pursuing knowledge, and not on the freedom of institutions. Institutions, in particular the school, should be viewed as obstacles, or, more optimistically, as tools to be used for student benefit. "Academic freedom" is something I, as a student, have no reason to care about.