Liner Note 58. Academic Freedom and Democratization

 Golden Gate on October 7, 2026

This is the text of a short talk I gave in a UC Berkeley Mellon Sawyer seminar last Friday. The seminar's overall title is “Neutrality: The Problems and Challenges of the Public University.” Friday’s topic was “institutional neutrality,” and the reading included the Kalven Report (1967), discussed below, the Woodward Report (pre-demolished by legal scholar Robert C. Post), and UC Berkeley’s Senate report on academic freedom (2026), mercifully left to one side. The other guest was Joy Connolly, president of ACLS, who said inspiring things about universities as generative sites of intellectual freedom that I hope she publishes at some point. The discussion was truly interesting and also heartening, as participants were less wary of the potential public popularity of academic freedom and of democratized governance than has been my past experience.  It was also really fun, and reminded me that a far more open university, where governance includes batting things around in an atmosphere of Tomkins-like mutual interest, would also be very fun to have.  Education is really very fun. Happy thank yous to the participants and the organizers and the staff still doing the paperwork.

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There are 3 dimensions of an expansive definition of academic freedom that may not get enough attention.

    1.        It depends on research conditions, on the materiality of funding for research and teaching

    2.        It justifies but also depends on institutional authority that is embedded in professional expertise. Academic freedom depends on direct faculty governance.

    3.        Academic freedom also assumes an interactive relation between universities and the general public about the creation and use of knowledge, including the meaning and the intellectual effects for society of academic freedom itself.

These aspects of academic freedom get little attention because 2 and 3 exist only in shadow form (as in “shadow education minister” in the British or Canadian system). Researchers also don’t control the first.

I’ll elaborate these in order.

1. Research.  Academic freedom isn’t just speech—professional publications, teaching—but also action. The action starts with conducting research and creating knowledge. Research actions are very expensive.  The simple rule of thumb is that resource restraint is restraint on academic freedom—usually invisibly, always upstream.

Foundations like mine make grants on the assumption of a prior and continuing university  investment in research infrastructure.  We no longer take this for granted. Some universities, including the University of California, are asking foundations (and not just the government) to fund university infrastructure through the grant or gift: UC Berkeley chancellor Rich Lyons advocated a version of this practice called “fungible philanthropy” to the UC Board of Regents last month (Liner Note 57).  This will discourage outside funders, who for both good and bad reasons want to leverage existing university resources; if they can’t get these “multipliers” or “efficiencies” they will look elsewhere or, for corporate STEM research, do it in-house. If officials continue to reduce the university’s commitment to research infrastructure, it should inspire faculty members to take more direct control of funding policies that in fact are restricting their academic freedom of research.

 

2. Faculty governance: the versions that fully support academic freedom require faculty to acquire more advanced financial knowledge. Academia has its own version of the automotive “Treaty of Detroit,” which stabilized tenure, salaries, and limited non-interference in ground-level academic practices in exchange for faculty ceding authority over institutional finance and management.  Faculty outsourced financial decisions, and offloaded financia knowledge along with it.  This era of widespread tenure-with-non-interference is for the majority of faculty a thing of the past, but it never allowed faculty control over the funding that directly affects their teaching and research: for example, staff support varies wildly by discipline on any given campus, to an extent and for reasons that are generally opaque. If faculty continue to outsource financial analysis and authority and also the definition of extramural speech to a separate cadre of senior officials, they will continue to face today’s restrictions on research, funding, syllabi content, course methods, and so on. I’m sorry we don’t have time to discuss the valuable paper, “In Search of University Democracy,” (Daniel J. Hemel and David Pozen 2026). I can only say that at some point, the financial governance of the university will need to be democratized. 

 

3. The public life of academic freedom and academic knowledge. 

We know that a forty-year campaign has successfully convinced much of the US public that professors are the enemy of the people. And also, that academic knowledge is both dangerous and wasteful. The counter-campaign from university officials would argue incessantly that academic freedom is a power for society: academic knowledge empowers the people, including non-college people.  This countercampaign from governing boards and senior officials has never existed.

One reason is Kalven—not so much the actual statement as the Kalven ethos or zeitgeist, the hundred-plus Kalven elaborations, the Kalven expansionism, leading to a Kalven Inhibition.  Kalven inhibits everyone in thinking about the scope of “the very mission of the university.” Jennifer Ruth, Robert Post, Brian Soucek, and others are certainly right that Kalven and its heirs can’t draw a principled distinction between non-mission and mission issues. They’re right that this distinction is an empirical, variable, and, I would add, an affective matter. 

What’s also true is that universities have inhibited themselves from commenting on the preconditions of valid knowledge as such in society.  What methods create sociocultural knowledge? How is it validated? How is it continuously self-critiqued, rejected or refined? The West is in the middle of a knowledge crisis—which includes a crisis of public acceptance of the idea of knowledge as a guide in politics, policy, and the everyday life of gender relations, racialization, and everything else.   And universities, their officers and their faculty, are actively discouraging themselves from getting involved in the public’s knowledge needs.

I mean by this not just making specific cases, like Gaza is a genocide, important as such cases are to make, but making the case for knowledge as an essential social function.  Kalven gives administrators de facto authority over the faculty’s professional and extramural speech. Worse, Kalven turns nearly every external and environmental element in the world into a political intrusion on the core mission—including the core mission to support valid knowledge as a public or common good. The world is actually the university’s subject and active interlocutor, and partner. Kalven blocks a meaningful partnership.

In short, Kalven inhibits the building of direct faculty governance over finance that would enable real faculty control over their own academic freedom in research. And it inhibits the faculty’s real influence over the institution’s relations to society.   I’d advocate for both of these projects—democratized fiscal governance and direct public address on the social life of knowledge. Both require a direct confrontation with the Kalven legacy, and a deep transformation of university governance.