End of Academic Freedom

This book is premised upon the assumption that the core purpose of universities isto create, preserve, transmit, validate, and find new applications for knowledge. Itis written in the perspective of critical university studies, in which universitygovernance processes should take ideas and discourse about ideas seriously, farmore seriously than they are often taken within many of today’s universities, sincedoing so is the key to achieving this purpose. Specifically, we assert that the bestway for universities to take ideas seriously, and so to best achieve their purpose, is to consciously recognize andconserve the entire range of available ideas. Though the current emphasis upon factors such as studentheadcounts, increased efficiency and job creation are undoubtedly important, far more is at stake in universitiesthan only these factors.From this premise, we deduce insights and arguments about academic freedom, as well as factors such as controland monitoring of the market place of ideas, the structure of information flows within universities, the role oflanguage in university governance, and relationships between administrators, faculty members and students. Weidentify impediments to achieving the core purpose of universities, including the idea vetting systems ofauthoritarianism, corporatism, illiberalism, supernaturalism and politicalcorrectness. We elucidate how these impediments inhibit successfulachievement of the core purpose of the university. In response to theseimpediments we prescribe relatively autonomous universities characterizedby openness, transparency, dissent, and the maintenance of balance betweenconflicting perspectives, values, and interests.