chronicle | It is not surprising for a boss to think that employees should avoid saying things in public that might damage the organization for which they both work. It is not even surprising for the boss to understand “damage” to include making the boss’s own life more difficult.
But
college faculty members have fought very hard, for a very long time, to
be protected from such attitudes. They have established that, unlike
employees at most organizations, they have the right to publicly
criticize their employer and their administration. So it is notable when
an especially prominent administrator publicly announces that faculty
speech rights should be rolled back a century or so. That is what Lawrence D. Bobo,
dean of social science and a professor of social sciences at Harvard
University, did last week in an opinion essay published in The Harvard Crimson with the ominous title, “Faculty Speech Must Have Limits.”
Members
of the faculty, Bobo argued, have the right to debate “key policy
matters” in “internal discussion,” but they should be careful that their
dissent not reach outside ears:
A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs. Along with freedom of expression and the protection of tenure comes a responsibility to exercise good professional judgment and to refrain from conscious action that would seriously harm the university and its independence.
Such
public criticisms, Bobo says, “cross a line into sanctionable
violations of professional conduct.” If a group of faculty members, for
example, decides that a dean’s policies are inimical to their
institution’s core mission, and if they take their criticism to the
press, then — according to Bobo — they should be properly disciplined.
Bobo’s
views were conventional wisdom among university officials and trustees
in 1900. They are shocking in 2024. Shocking, but unfortunately no
longer surprising. The Harvard dean’s arguments resonate with a growing
movement of those who wish to muzzle the faculty. Professors are to be
free to speak, so long as they do not say anything that might disturb
the powers that be. Those in power may not want the faculty to march to
the same tune, but they do all like giving the faculty their marching
orders and expecting them not to step out of line.
The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,
issued jointly by the American Association of University Professors and
what was then called the Association of American Colleges, established
the now widely adopted rules regarding faculty speech. It specifies that
when professors “speak or write as citizens, they should be free from
institutional censorship or discipline.” The statement does suggest that
professors have some “special obligations” when speaking in public,
though the AAUP has long urged that those be treated as suggestive
rather than obligatory. Even so, the statement merely urged professors
to “be accurate” and “exercise appropriate restraint.” They “should
remember that the public may judge their profession and their
institution by their utterances,” and thus they should avoid
embarrassing themselves in public by being rude or ignorant. But there
was no suggestion that they should avoid airing the university’s dirty
laundry.
Harvard’s own free-expression policy,
first adopted in the Vietnam era, is if anything even more emphatic
about the need for officials to tolerate dissent and critique. It notes
that “reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part” in the
university’s existence and that all members of the university community
have the right to “advocate and publicize opinion by print, sign, and
voice.” Dissenters are not to obstruct “the essential processes of the
university” or interfere “with the ability of members of the university
to perform their normal activities,” but they are free to “press for
action” and “constructive change” by organizing, advocating, and
persuading. Bobo’s ideas about where the limits of faculty speech are to
be found are plainly at odds with both AAUP principles and common
university policies, not to mention First Amendment principles that
would bind officials at state universities.
The AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles
provided the rationale for such protections of faculty dissent. “With
respect to certain external conditions of his vocation,” a professor
“accepts a responsibility to the authorities of the institution in which
he serves,” but “in the essentials of his professional activity his
duty is to the wider public to which the institution itself is morally
amenable.” The “university is a great and indispensable organ of the
higher life of a civilized community,” and the members of the faculty
“hold an independent place, with quite equal responsibilities” for
caring for and preserving those institutions. For those purposes, the
“professorial office” was not that of an employee doing the bidding of a
boss but that of a scholar answering to a public trust. The faculty’s
ultimate duty is not to the college as such but to the larger public
that even private universities, as charitable institutions, serve.
