Chapter 1: Academic freedom and institutional autonomy – the concepts
3. Conceptual grid
3.3 The guild version of the concept of academic freedom – Quadrant Three
3.3 The guild version of the concept of academic freedom – Quadrant
unimpeded by external constraints. In this view, academic freedom is not considered a special kind of freedom of speech and, indeed, individual academics are subject to the norms, standards and practices of the discipline in the first instance, and the institution in the second. Related to this aspect is the belief in the necessity for academic self- governance in order to pursue truth effectively. As Haskell writes, “The cardinal principle of professional autonomy is collegial self-governance; its inescapable corollary is that only one‟s peers are competent to judge one‟s performance.”63 Peer regulation of the discipline is all-important and peers have the right to curtail the academic activities of individuals should they not adhere to the norms and standards of the discipline community. Academic freedom is about the autonomy and authority of scholarly communities of the competent and not about individual rights of scholars to teach, say and publish whatever they please.
Roots
While this version is undeniably also “liberal” in orientation, as in Quadrant One, it has somewhat different roots, although based in the same general trajectory of historical development of the university. The roots of this version can be traced back to the medieval world in the rise of independence for academics as a specific guild privilege, a collective protection for the community of the scholarly competent to determine the rules of their own game. Academic freedom and institutional autonomy are in this sense thus very closely aligned.
Neave, for instance, argues that the “origins of university autonomy go back to the foundation of that institution in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries”.64 He posits that there were two major models of universities embodying academic freedom, those of the Universities of Paris and of Bologna. In the Bologna model, autonomy applied chiefly to
63 Thomas L. Haskell, “Justifying the rights of academic freedom in the era of power/knowledge”, in Menand, L. (ed), The Future of Academic Freedom, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.46.
64 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.34.
the student constituency and consisted in the freedom of the individual to learn. In the Paris model, autonomy applied to the academics in that it was understood as the freedom to teach. He proposes that the medieval concept of autonomy was part of a rather broader underpinning of contemporary social organisation, grouped around guilds or corporations, each of which enjoyed various privileges or exemptions in the practice of their activities.65
Similarly, Heer writes that:
In the Middle Ages the word universitas meant primarily an association, a corporation of the kind already frequently found in urban life; the name is applicable to any kind of guild of merchants or craftsmen, or indeed to any organised group.
The university in its narrower sense originated as an association of teachers or scholars for their mutual benefit during their sojourn in foreign parts … At Bologna the universitas originated as an association of German, French and English students. At Paris it was the teachers who came together in this way… Paris and Bologna, both of which had their beginnings in the late twelfth century, are the two archetypes of the European university; student-universities were modelled on Bologna, universities of masters on Paris.66
Heer describes further the fierce independence of the early Italian universities from the towns in which they were located. Referring to the students of Bologna, he writes,
“these students of civil law would tolerate no sermonizing, whether from Rome or from their university professors; the university belonged to them”67, and they “could exert powerful pressure on the city and on the professors, who at first were only loosely organised into a „college‟.”68 If the conditions in the town with respect to lodgings and accommodation were unfavourable, or if the town interfered with intellectual life, then there was always the threat of secession. Heer alleges that “the majority of the Italian law schools and universities originated in secessions of students and/or teachers no longer able to tolerate the conditions in their own towns.”69 With respect to the medieval
65 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.34.
66 Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe 1100 – 1350, London, Weidenfeld, 1993, p.196.
67 Ibid. p.197.
68 Ibid. p.198.
69 Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe 1100 – 1350, London, Weidenfeld, 1993, p.198. For example, a secession from Bologna in 1222 laid the foundation of Padua – Jean Dunbabin, “Universities
University of Paris, Heer describes an ongoing saga of intellectual conflicts and battles against authority, and finds that “in this place [Latin Quarter, early 13th Century] the intellectual life of medieval Europe found its greatest freedom, here the love of controversy was extended to the limit.”70
Hoye argues, in contrast, that “both the idea of the university and the idea of academic freedom can be called gifts of medieval Christianity to the modern world, albeit in secularized form.”71 He sees the birthplace of academic freedom lying in medieval Christianity, noting that the first mention of academic freedom comes in an official document of a pope. He writes:
In 1220 the young University of Bologna turned to the pope for support in a conflict it was waging with local civic government. Pope Honorius III responded by repeatedly encouraging the university to defend its „scholastic freedom‟ and to take extreme measures to resist the attempts of the city government to undermine the independence of academic life by requiring students to pledge an oath of allegiance to the city.72
The medieval universities were characterised by a cosmopolitan culture, with scholars coming from all over Europe to study in a particular city. Latin was the unifying factor. At base was the universal order of Christendom, rather than ties to a particular nation state, with Europe still being organised around powerful towns before the rise of the nation state. As knowledge was circumscribed to the available written texts, it was possible for
c.1150 – c.1350”, in Smith, D. and Langslow, A.K. (eds), The Idea of a University, London, Jessica Kingsley, 1999, p.35. Another famous secession is, of course, the secession in 1209 of some masters from Oxford to establish a university at Cambridge. Dunbabin argues that because it was the threat of secession that most guaranteed scholastic freedom, paradoxically, the institutional forms of the early universities initially necessarily remained malleable.
70 Ibid. p.201.
71 While there is considerable agreement that the roots of academic freedom lie in the early medieval universities, not everybody shares Hoye‟s view that this is a phenomenon specifically associated with Christianity. Friedrich Heer writes, for instance, that “the intellectual life developed in medieval Europe was a positive response to the broad stream of classical, Arab, Islamic and Jewish influences to which it was exposed…” and that “the medieval university owed much to the educational system of the Arabs”.
Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World : Europe 1100-1350, London, Weidenfeld, 1993, p.190. However, the more widespread view sees academic freedom as part of a medieval ecclesiastical tradition – see for instance Conrad Russell, Academic Freedom, London, Routledge, 1993, p.3.
72 William J. Hoye, “The religious roots of academic freedom”, Theological Studies, 58 (3) 1997, p.411.
scholars to gain an understanding of all spheres of knowledge. The curriculum was based on the Aristotelian organisation into the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). The primary function of the medieval universities was instruction (rather than teaching, as little reflection on the received texts was required). Without print, communication was slow and the links with the broader society tenuous, mostly being mediated through the church.73
The tenuous link with the broader society of the medieval universities is a characteristic of the understanding of the role of the university underlying the version of the concept of academic freedom in Quadrant Three. In this version, perhaps the caricatured “ivory tower” understanding of the university prevails, stemming right back to these medieval roots, although, as Heer remarks, “far more than the modern university the medieval university was a self-contained intellectual community: not only did the daring and the novelties it produced come from within, but the pressure for intellectual conformity also chiefly came from within.”74 But in these beginnings the importance placed on the value not only of independence, but also institutional, and especially disciplinary, self-regulation is evident.
According to Hofstadter and Metzger, “in internal matters the (medieval) universities had the prerogative of self-government. They were autonomous corporations, conceived in the spirit of the guilds; their members elected their own officials and set the rules for the teaching craft.”75 Certainly in much of the Anglo world today, the resistance to any external body attempting to regulate the affairs of a university is widespread. For instance, Russell writing in the context of late 1980s Britain, asserts that “for any academic, there is a tendency to assume that their rights to free speech are inextricably intertwined with their right to run their own affairs.”76 In this statement he runs together two different conceptions of academic freedom, what I have here termed the “liberal
73 Gerard Delanty, Challenging Knowledge: the University in the Knowledge Society, Ballmoor, Buckingham, SRHE and Open University Press, 2001, pp.27-29.
74 Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe 1100 – 1350, London, Weidenfeld, 1993, p.201.
75 Richard Hofstadter & Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, New York, Columbia University Press, 1955, p.6.
76 Conrad Russell, Academic Freedom, London, Routledge, 1993, p.2.
individualist” version and the “guild” version, but he explicates the “guild” version further in a passionate plea for the right of universities to govern themselves in an increasingly legislative and bureaucratic higher education policy context. He writes:
It has become necessary to reassert the medieval ideal of liberties, to argue that Universities have their own independent sphere of judgement, in which the State should not meddle. The argument runs that it is only by this sort of autonomy to govern their own affairs that academics may protect a world in which they are free to exercise their basic rights of freedom of speech and of thought. It is not enough to defend these by the law of the State alone, when the State may, perhaps entirely unwittingly, take away conditions in which these rights can be exercised … The standards of the University degree, and many other things also, can only ever be defended effectively if they are recognized as purely academic matters, in which the State can have no legitimate say. It is only by defending a medieval liberty, a sphere of academic freedom in which the State does not enter, that academic freedom in a Millite sense can ever be effectively defended.77
Relationship of institution to state and society
Clearly, from the quotes above, the relationship of institution to the state is seen, in good times, as one characterised by separate spheres of influence underlined by a mutual relationship of trust, and in bad times, as an actively hostile one, with the state posing a threat to the continued self-governance of universities. The relationship, of course, also depends on the theory of the state that is employed. Neave would argue that in the British context, until the First World War, British political life had no concept of the state as a distributive or regulative entity. He writes:
… the British model of academic autonomy derived not from the action of the state defining a „reserve area‟ of non-intervention but rather from an absence of a concept of the role of the state which itself could serve to legitimate such a definition. Hence there could be no concept corresponding to the Humboldtian arrangement by which the state itself served as a buffer to ensure commitment to scholarship and learning.
Such commitment was self-regulated by the non-written practices of academia. Nor, for the same reason, could there be an acceptable theory, within the confines of Liberal constitutionalism, of the state setting down the „external limits‟ to academic autonomy, for the simple reason that such an act would have involved some measure of intervention.78
77 Ibid. p.3.
78 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.37.
Main metaphors
As in Quadrant One, the main metaphor is of a boundary drawn between state and institution. However, a metaphor that could be used to describe the relationship of institution to state in this quadrant is of two independent gentlemen [used advisedly]
agreeing to conduct their affairs separately on the basis of a handshake. However, there is some mutuality in the agreement with one providing the financial means, and the other getting on with the job of educating the future generations of leaders on the basis of their unquestioned expertise. Where that relationship of trust is broken, and one gentleman tries to interfere in the affairs of the other (academics were also expected to display political neutrality), then the relationship would sour into open hostility. It is at such a moment in the history of the British university that Russell was writing, and in fact, as is explored further in Chapter Two, that moment has changed that relationship utterly, with the introduction of what many academics consider to be an increasingly draconian set of legislative measures designed to regulate and re-engineer British higher education.