H-Canada, the electronic discussion board for historians of Canada, has recently been discussing academic freedom. Someone quoted a journal called Academic Matters (Spring 2006 -- not a journal I know), which has an essay on the lives of sessional lecturers. The essayist used a pseudonym, evidently fearing the consequences of speaking freely about the working conditions of untenured scholars. The poster, Professor David Calverley, also quotes Michael Ignatieff saying (same issue of Academic Matters), "It is amazingly hard...to think an honest and independent thought in academic life." What does the essayist's fear of being identified say about freedom of thought in the academy, Calverley wonders.
It's always seemed to me -- a writer outside the university for many years -- that the issue is the nature of institutions, not the nature of political agendas about academic freedom. Universities are bureaucratic institutions. Inevitably they are run by rules, not personalities, like any other part of the civil service or corporate organization. If the person teaching History 123 is hit by a bus today, the university's need will be another person able to take up the course tomorrow with as little disruption as possible. It's in the nature of institutions to foster sameness and to inculcate institutional loyalty, obedience to hierarcy, commitment to the mission. Those things are not the university's intellectual mission, to be sure, but institutional behaviour drives them in that direction.
That institutional weight seems to me a greater threat to originality, honesty, independence, than any political agenda, or at least one that is much less easy to identify and resist. It's a professor's burden to be at once a loyal servant of the institution and a fearless independant intellectual at the same time, and of course the duties are incompatible.
This is not a factor that academic reflection upon academic freedom ever seems to consider very seriously.
