Academic Freedom as an Indicator of a Liberal Democracy

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Disclosure Statement

The author is a member of the Board of Scholars at Risk (SAR).

Notes

1. This is not intended as a tautological statement. I would like to see evidence of greatness at an institution of higher learning that does not abide by these values.

2. While I am suggesting that the state of academic freedom and free inquiry will provide us with strong clues as to whether the nation in which these universities exist are liberal states, respecting individual rights, I am not making a causal statement. If there is causal direction here it probably is that the degree of suppression of individual liberty leads to the repression of academic freedom and the closing down of creativity and discovery at that nation’s research universities.

3. See Özkırımlı’s essay in this issue for more details.

4. Thus, scientists belonging to the American Geophysical Union have recently created a new publication, ‘Handling Political Harassment and Legal Intimidation: A Pocket Guide for Scientists’.

5. To put this in a slightly different framework, ‘illiberal democracy’, as John Shattuck has discussed it, attempts to foster ethnic, racial, and linguistic homogeneity, portrays the nation as a victim of external forces (which leads to a nationalistic rhetoric, argue for the virtues of a centralized authority that will, supposedly, foster efficiency, and perhaps most importantly, espouses government control—even ownership—of print and television media – of sources of a citizen’s information. I want to thank John Shattuck for sharing these ideas with me in private conversation.

6. And if we enter the emotional realm of discussing the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government or the behavior of American groups and the US Congress toward academics who question, not the existence of Israel, but its policies and American policies related to Israel, we face the open question of whether the treatment of Palestinians and their opportunities for full citizenship and equal rights by the Israeli government, represents such a gross violation of freedom that it suggests the existence of an illiberal state and one that violates, as well, basic tenets of academic freedom and free inquiry? Are Arab citizens living in Israel, who have extraordinary talent, being denied equal access to the best Israeli universities by virtue of their Palestinian origins? Is that an indicator of the nature of Israeli society today? We might also consider just how ‘liberal’ our democracy has been, given that the US codified a form of the Orwellian term ‘illiberal democracy’. The US Constitution codified, of course, the absence of full rights for American women and its slave population of African-American people who were considered chattel, that did not produce equal opportunities for all, and despite the rhetoric of equal protection and due process, these ideal values were not extended to all Americans. On a relative scale we may represent a society that protects individual freedoms, but even today many of our citizens, including minorities, immigrants, women, and members of the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) community are not treated equally despite our rhetoric.

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Jonathan R. Cole

Jonathan R. Cole is John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University at Columbia University. From 1987 to 1989, he was Vice President of Arts and Sciences, and from 1989 to 2003, he was Provost and Dean of Faculties at Columbia. For many years, his scholarly work and publications focused on development of the sociology of science as a research specialty. In recent years, he addressed issues in higher education, particularly problems facing American research universities. His most recent book, Toward a more perfect university (PublicAffairs, 2016) follows his earlier publication The great American university: Its rise to preeminence, its indispensable national role, Why it must be protected (PublicAffairs, 2011), which has been translated into Chinese and Arabic. He recently co-edited the book, Who’s afraid of academic freedom? (Columbia University Press, 2015). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Philosophical Society; the Council on Foreign Relations; and a Commendatore in the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy. He lectures throughout the world on topics related to higher education and continues to teach a variety of courses in several schools of Columbia University.