Achieving Our University

By Michael Meranze

In his last post, Chris made a call for increased faculty governance on budgetary matters and a proposal for how we might do it.  I want to follow up by taking up the problem of governance in a different realm: the very definition of universities.  It is here that faculty face not only an internal but an external challenge and also need to build upon recent efforts to challenge the managerial class's monopoly on definition and meaning.

If the Trumpist attack on higher education has taught us anything it is that university governance is broken.  Faculty, students, and staff can no more count on legally instituted university governors than on state legislators to protect the academic freedom or institutional autonomy of colleges and universities.  Of course, as we have been arguing on the blog, this inability of managers and boards to speak clearly and effectively against those who wish to reduce higher education to either job training or the mouthpiece of the state has been clear for years.  

But the last year has clarified in a national setting what was clear in states like North Carolina and Florida, as well as under blue state governors like Jerry Brown: Boards and managers will collaborate and comply when under pressure from politicians, donors, or the forces of anti-intellectualism.  I do understand that managers face complex situations and have to address multiple demands within a legal framework.  Their failure to fight does not necessarily stem from personal preference.  But whatever the cause, we have to recognize that we cannot count on them to defend colleges and universities from those who seek to control or reduce academic freedom, destroy whatever is left of faculty governance and autonomy, and strike at the very heart of academic research and teaching.

Indeed, if you look at the last year it is clear that it has been faculty, through organizations like the AAUP, that have led the charge to defend the independence of higher education far more than have universities.  Faculty organizations have the initiators of the vast majority of the lawsuits that have been filed to protect individuals, institutions, and the research enterprise.  It has been the faculty who have, at least since the Columbia administration chose to turn their campus into a surveillance state, who have acted to defend the rights of dissent and scholarly inquiry.  To be fair, there have been some presidents who have spoken out.  But they are so few as to confirm the point that administrative and board leadership has failed as a class.

I offer this summary as a backdrop to my real point:  it is now up to faculty as faculty to openly defend and define the mission of colleges and universities.  I am not naive about this: to do so runs against the structure of legal power in higher education (that allows boards and presidents to "speak" for the institution); it defies the conventional arguments for institutional neutrality; and it would take place at a moment when politicians are attacking not only professors but the very notion of professional autonomy.  But it is for all of these reasons even more necessary.

In taking up this project, we do have conceptual resources.  As the AAUP's 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure  put it regarding the relationship of Board to faculty: "The latter are the appointees, but not in any proper sense the employees, of the former. For, once appointed, the scholar has professional functions to perform in which the appointing authorities have neither competency nor moral right to intervene."  

As the Declaration continued, "So far as the university teacher’s independence of thought and utterance is concerned— though not in other regards—the relationship of professor to trustees may be compared to that between judges of the federal courts and the executive who appoints them."  Crucially, the Declaration insisted that this independence had to reside in the scholarly community as a collective if the university was to be a university: "It is, in short, not the absolute freedom of utterance of the individual scholar, but the absolute freedom of thought, of inquiry, of discussion and of teaching, of the academic profession, that is asserted by this declaration of principles.”  The implication was clear, colleges and universities exist to enable the scholarly community to fulfill its purpose and function and fulfilling that function required self-governance whatever the legal form of a college or university is (although we need to change those as well).

This position was never universally accepted of course.  It was challenged almost from its first articulation by Boards, Presidents, and organs of conservative public opinion; and the very basis of its assumption of a unified scholarly community has been undermined by decades of expanded precarious labor, the degradation of job conditions, the spread of managerialism, and the intrusions of donors and legislators.  The Trumpist assault on professional knowledge itself is only the latest, if most intense, version of this attack.

But conceding all of this history doesn't mean conceding the point or claims made in 1915.  There is a fundamental difference between legal and scholarly or moral authority.  The scholarly community may not have the legal authority to represent a college or university as a constituted institution.  But the community of scholars can, and must, speak for the purpose, mission, and function of a college or university and more especially for colleges and universities.  After all, although colleges and universities may have many "uses" as Clark Kerr insisted, they have one overriding mission: to enable the activity of the community of scholars.  And the scholarly community must seize the right--under academic freedom--to speak out when their managers are not upholding that mission.  We cannot  concede to the idea that speaking out on the nature and mission of the university is outside the scope of the faculty's "independence of thought and utterance."  Especially when boards and managers have failed to protect the scholarly community on so many fronts.

To be sure, this community of scholars is broader than what the founders of the AAUP may have intended.  They spoke largely for what we would call tenured and tenure track faculty.  That definition is too narrow--any full consideration of the scholarly community must include all university teachers and researchers as well as students engaged in scholarly activity.  But we will need to recognize that most of the managerial class--whether they bear academic titles or not--no longer speak for the scholarly community.  And we also have to recognize that in defending and reconstituting the university faculty will need to take a leading role--however much we may be demonized now by large sectors of the public. 

Moreover, they need to do it as faculty.  As Timothy Kaufman-Osborn recently pointed out, such a statement was made with great power by the faculty at Columbia when then President Shafik called in the NYPD faculty protested.  But they did so in a very particular way:

What rendered this protest unconventional was the appearance of faculty participants in full academic regalia. Consisting of a robe, a hood, and a cap, this garb is a relic of the earliest European universities that was transplanted to the American colonies and, until the Civil War, worn daily by faculty. By the late nineteenth century, this costume was mostly reserved for official rituals, like commencement, that celebrate the academy’s unique purpose, commend those who contribute to its accomplishment, and congratulate the newly degreed. At Low Plaza, however, this garb was worn at an improvised demonstration called by faculty whose purpose was to affirm their solidarity with students by dissociating themselves from the presidents who hold authority over both. What work does this regalia do, we might wonder, when incorporated within a protest called to castigate those who are entitled to speak on behalf of the university but, according to those assembled on April 22, have betrayed its true end?

Formally, when worn by faculty, academic regalia signifies its wearer’s completion of the requirements for an advanced academic degree, that achievement’s certification by those who were once one’s teachers but are now colleagues, and, finally, admission into a community of scholars that transcends the boundaries of any specific college or university. Cap and gown thus affirm a silent but very real claim to authority that is grounded in a faculty member’s esoteric knowledge; and it is this authority that the faculty of Columbia and Barnard asserted when they declared that these universities must now be “reclaimed” from those whose actions have demonstrated that they understand neither education nor the conditions of its possibility.

Their actions may only have been symbolic, and clearly Shafik and the Columbia Board were not listening.  But such actions—combined with continual work by academic senates, faculty groups and organizations, individuals writing about the purpose of higher education—will be a necessary outreach to the students and the publics.  It will not happen overnight.  

If we want to gain authority within our institutions we have to reach outside of them as well.  In this effort, academic freedom--its description, its range and limitations, its justifications, and its defense--will need to be at the center.  Universities exist to enable the scholarly community, their product is academic freedom: properly understood as the scholarly and disciplinary pursuit of knowledge, the self regulation of the scholarly community, and the provision of the material basis of knowledge production and transmission.  There is no genuine separation between academic freedom as a negative liberty and academic freedom as a positive freedom.  We separate them out because of our individualism and willingness to accept the terms of managerial austerity.    

Again, this will not be easy, there is no guarantee of success, and it will not happen overnight.  But as the last year has shown us, if the faculty and its organizations don't take the lead in opposing the federal and state efforts to restrict academic freedom, to destroy the system of academic research, and to turn higher education into a tool of the current regime, no one will.  And we must do it as defenders of our scholarly mission.  It is the only way to achieve our university.