Chapter 1: Academic freedom and institutional autonomy – the concepts
3. Conceptual grid
3.2 The civic version of the concept – Quadrant Two
2. Civic
Characteristics: knowledge as pursuit of truth progress
freedom as positive liberty Roots: German Idealists
Bildung
Relationship to state: state as facilitator Metaphor: two sides of same coin
Quadrant Two (Q2)
Individual
Positive liberty
Characteristics
In what I have termed the “civic”53 version of academic freedom, the fundamental difference from the “liberal” version lies in its roo t conception of freedom. In terms of Isaiah Berlin‟s two concepts of liberty in political thought, that is freedom from interference in one‟s pursuits (negative liberty) and freedom to carry out a pursuit or freedom for a particular end (positive liberty), this version posits autonomy positively.54 Instead of seeing freedom exercised in being left alone in an autonomous space to pursue truth, this version sees freedom consisting in being part of a facilitatory context, in order to pursue a truth that will result in the positive advancement of the whole. This concept of freedom still pertains to individuals but sees individuals as part of society, contributing to the overall well-being of that society. Individuals are not seen as autonomous moral agents pursuing their own chosen ends but as agents who are enabled to further some conception of the good life. This is the Enlightenment grand narrative of progress writ large; knowledge and hence truth are not pursued for their own sake but serve towards the overall end of human progress.
The second characteristic of this version lies in its underlying concept of the state, and the relationship of the university to the state. Rather than being seen as a „big brother‟ regulator interfering in academic affairs, the state is regarded as an enabler or a facilitator of the conditions within which free enquiry can take place. More than that, the state is a guarantor of the cultural life of the nation, of which the pursuit of knowledge is an expression.
53 Originally I termed this quadrant the “republican” version. However, in very recent debates in South Africa the term “republican”, emanating from the work of André du Toit, which he posits in opposition to the
“liberal” conception, has gained prominence in the South African debates. Instead of a simple dichotomy, however, I have distilled the concept further into four different quadrants. As du Toit‟s use of “republican”
would probably cover two of them, I have chosen the term “civic” to refer to one of these in a bid to avoid confusion.
54 Isaiah Berlin, “Two concepts of liberty”, in Four Essays on Liberty, New York, Oxford University Press, 1969, pp.118-172.
Roots
This conception derives from what is arguably the beginning of the modern university located in the debate around the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810, particularly in the writings of von Humboldt. The German idealist philosophers,55 while regarding the Kantian idea of the university and of academic freedom as essential,
“reacted against the bourgeois utilitarian conception of knowledge that was emerging with the Enlightenment and saw the university as a kind of social utopia, a „republic of letters‟, or „republic of science‟ that would imitate the republic of the polis that modernity was seen as promising.”56 The understanding of knowledge was not very different from that in the version in Quadrant One, that is that knowledge, in order to be emancipatory, must be protected from the rest of society but, as Delanty points out, freedom and knowledge were one side of the coin, nation and culture the other. In von Humboldt‟s view the university was not just “the cradle of autonomous knowledge but also the custodian of the cognitive structure of the nation.”57 The university‟s role was seen as that of transmitting cultural and national heritage.
This view, elaborated above by Delanty, appears largely to be based on Readings‟
thesis that the modern university has had three referents, the second one being culture.
For Readings, the contribution of the German idealists to the development of the modern university was “to propose that the way to reintegrate the multiplicity of known facts into a unified cultural science is through Bildung, the ennoblement of character. Through Bildung, the nation-state can achieve scientifically the cultural unity that the Greeks once possessed naturally.”58 There are two important aspects to the understanding of academic freedom based on these roots. First, that knowledge is understood not as pure
55 Fichte, Schleiermacher, von Humboldt, Schiller, Hegel – see Delanty p.33 and Readings pp.62-69. Also see the discussion in Chapter three based on Lyotard‟s outlining the different positions in the debate surrounding the founding of the University of Berlin – Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987, p.32.
56 Gerard Delanty, Challenging Knowledge: the University in the Knowledge Society, Ballmoor, Buckingham, SRHE and Open University Press, 2001, p.33.
57 Ibid. p.34.
58 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1997, p.65.
reason but also as a process of aesthetic and moral education (Bildung) or the cultivation of character, thus applying to individuals. Second, that Bildung can, however, only be developed within a framework of tradition embodied and enabled by the state.
Readings writes that “the nation-state will come to re-embody the unity that the multiplication and disciplinary separation of knowledges have imposed in the intellectual sphere, that the division of labor has imposed in the social sphere.”59 The implication for this understanding of academic freedom is that it applies to individuals, in building their moral capacity, but that development of character can only flourish within and serve the end of furthering the cultural unity of the state. Readings sums his thesis up in the following way:
The University of Culture, instituted by Humboldt, draws its legitimacy from culture, which names the synthesis of teaching and research, process and product, history and reason, philology and criticism, historical scholarship and aesthetic experience, the institution and the individual. Thus the revelation of the idea of culture and the development of the individual are one. Object and process unite organically, and the place they unite is the University, which thus gives the people and idea of the nation- state to live up to and the nation-state a people capable of living up to that idea.60
There is an important caveat to Humboldt‟s version of academic freedom that makes it very clearly an idea of its time (and certainly pre-1968). While academic freedom applies to individuals within the appropriate external conditions for the maintenance of the freedom to pursue academic endeavours, it does not apply to them equally. In Humboldt‟s model, the university is not a community of equals but a descending academic and administrative hierarchy, with various degrees of institutional autonomy vested in different grades. The chairs of disciplines would have the greatest degree of autonomy, then fellow academics and then students.61 Students did indeed have academic freedom, that is, the freedom to learn (Lehrfreiheit), just as academics had the freedom to teach (Lernfreiheit) in the community of scholarship, but not as equals.
Lehrfreiheit is not to be understood as a critical engagement and active participation of
59 Ibid. p.65.
60 Ibid. p. 65. The main contribution of Humboldt to the development of the modern university is most often considered to be his emphasis on the main function of the University as carrying out research as well as transmitting knowledge through teaching.
61 See the discussion in Guy Neave, “On being economical with university autonomy: being an account of the retrospective joys of a written constitution”, in Tight, M. (ed), Academic Freedom and Responsibility, Milton Keynes, SRHE and Open University Press, 1988, p.35.
students in their learning in a relationship of equality with their teachers, but simply as the right to study, albeit within a master-pupil relationship.
The relationship of the institution to the state/society
The relationship to the state and society in this view is not an antithetical or hostile one, as could be construed of the classical liberal version of academic freedom discussed under Quadrant One, although some of the Idealist thinkers, including Humboldt, are more circumspect about the extent of the role of the state vis-à-vis the university than others. But the roles are interlinked. As Readings explains:
The University‟s social mission is not to be understood in terms of either thought or action. The University is not just a site for contemplation that is then to be transformed into action [as could very well be the case in the understanding of the role of the university in Quadrant One]. The University, that is, is not simply an instrument of state policy; rather, the University must embody thought as action, as striving for an ideal. This is its bond with the state, for state and University are the two sides of a single coin. The University seeks to embody thought as action toward an ideal; the state must seek to realize action as thought, the idea of the nation. The state protects the action of the University; the University safeguards the thought of the state. And each strives to realize the idea of national culture.62
Main metaphors
While Delanty and Readings both use the metaphor of two sides of a coin to describe the relationship of the university to the state, words such as “protect”, “embody”,
“facilitate” and “enable” suggest a softer metaphor, rather more the enlightened guardian and mentor, the great facilitator, a buffer body. The boundary metaphor of Quadrant One is not applicable here. Indeed, the university is immersed in society which is embodied by the state, but at the same time, the university does occupy a protected space within that context in which knowledge (understood not as pure reason, but as Bildung) can be pursued to further the moral and cultural progress of the whole.
62 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1997, p.69.
3.3 The guild version of the concept of academic freedom – Quadrant