What Academic Freedom Means
Abraham Sarmiento, Jr., 1975-1976

The argument is strong enough that on matters of student concern, the administration must not fail to consult the students. That is one lesson, the truth of which clear notions of fair play would have been enough to drive home, without the recent sorties against authority which participants in the recent Rollback Movements found effective.

But to found it unqualifiedly upon academic freedom as one other supposed inherent right of the students, is error that should not be made, if only to avoid disparaging attacks from the authorities that the vocal critics among the students do not know what they are talking about.

Often used as the concept may have been, academic freedom is obscured by the failure of the to distinguish between collective and individual liberty. To claim that academic freedom pertains to the students and as such may be raised against the authorities is only partly right. To claim exactly the opposite, that it belongs to the university and not to the students, shares the same deficiency.

Academic freedom, the enjoyment of which by all institutions of higher learning is guaranteed by the constitution, pertains to the university as an institution. What is removed by one hand from state regulation, and by the other, granted to the university, that it may transmit by critical teaching higher education and create an atmosphere conducive to scholarship, is academic freedom. It consists in the right of the university to determine who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.

But academic freedom has also its personal aspect. Though not guaranteed by special constitutional provisions, it is, if properly viewed, a limited field of the more general freedoms of speech and press. In a questionably over-narrow treatment, academic freedom of the scholar as distinguished from academic freedom of the university, has been limited to the freedom of the teacher or the student to inquire into the problems of his science and to impart his findings either through publication or instruction without interference from the authorities, unless the scholars of his own profession finds his method professionally unethical or incompetent.

But it has a broader scope than that. In supplanting outmoded ideas with new ones, the status of the scholar as an academician is irresponsible from his status as citizen. One is at least as important as the other, and in considering academic freedom, both are as important as the status of the university.

There is too much truth in society that will be left unexposed if the academic freedom to seek and to express the truth as one personally sees it is unduly limited to the confines of laboratory walls. And to so construe the concept as a right pertaining to the university as an institution and not to the scholar as well is plain confusion.

Arguments are understood and refutable least when words are not given their accepted meaning, and convenient shifts in meaning made as often as arguments are threatened with refutation make the resolutions of conflict unduly postponed.