Rice Historian Examines Academic Freedom During Lecture

Rice Historian Examines Academic Freedom During Lecture

BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY

Rice News Staff

December 2, 1999

In general, the community of scholars today is taking for granted academic freedom, which is largely supported by professional autonomy and self-government, historian Thomas Haskell told his audience at a recent Scientia lecture.

Haskell, Rice’s Samuel G. McCann Professor of History, presented his talk, “Academic Freedom: Who Needs It? Who Deserves It?,” Nov. 16 as part of the 1999-2000 Scientia colloquia called “Rethinking the University.” The lecture was in the Kyle Morrow Room of Fondren Library.

“Historically speaking,” Haskell said, “the heart and soul of academic freedom lies not in free speech but professional autonomy and collegial self-governance.”

Haskell, who writes on American intellectual and cultural history, is the author of “The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the 19th Century Crisis of Authority” (Illinois, 1977) and “Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History” (Johns Hopkins, 1998). He also has written numerous articles and edited several books. He is a fellow of the National Humanities Institute, a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study and a Guggenheim fellow.

The current freedoms that academics enjoy stem in large part from Victorian reformers such as Harvard’s Charles William Eliot, Cornell’s Andrew White and Johns Hopkins’ Daniel Gilman.

The reformers were faced with industrial capitalists intent on pumping cash into universities and state legislators and donors who believed they should exercise authority over higher education, Haskell said.

Despite those mixed blessings of lots of cash and controlling donors, the reformers developed a system that established “the intellectual authority of the university and those who work within it,” Haskell said, adding that today there is a complacency about that intellectual authority.

“Appearances to the contrary not withstanding, the comfortable state of affairs in which we find ourselves today was not foreordained,” Haskell said. “What brought it about was a process of institutional development that proceeded in two overlapping phases, each vital to the success of the other. The first created communities of competent inquirers, the second used them to establish authority in specialized domains of knowledge.”

Haskell said the authority of the university is threatened by two things: the decay of the epistemological assumptions that supported the founding of disciplinary communities and a growing assimilation of academic freedom to First Amendment law.

“My aim is not to put forth a new justification for academic freedom, but to call attention to the limitations of the old one and hold up for critical examination some of the obstacles that stand in our way as we seek a formulation more adequate to our needs,” he said.