In the end, the minister closes the school. Is the story a true reflection of the contemporary world to some extent? The nature of education and how it shapes society can be examined in many contexts, from the fictional kingdom of Diamond King to the real-life America of Donald Trump. Given that Columbia, an Ivy League university, has abandoned its academic freedom, and Harvard, the oldest and wealthiest American university, has chosen to legally defend it, one wonders what academic freedom is and what its scope and limits are.
When the then President Pranab Mukherjee addressed the “International Buddhist Summit” in Nalanda in 2017, he called for an environment free from prejudice, anger, violence and dogma at Nalanda and Taxila, the ancient universities. “This free flow must be conducive to intellectual inspiration,” he said.
However, it is not always so easy. Scholars who disagreed with church theology or behaved in ways deemed unacceptable by the church posed a threat of persecution in medieval Europe. Then, the philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt founded a new university in Berlin in the early 19th century. The basic principles of academic freedom—freedom of scientific inquiry and the integration of research and teaching—were institutionalized in other countries, and the Humboldtian model of higher education spread to other countries. Today’s seemingly abstract concept of academic freedom can be summarized as follows: students have the right to learn in an academic environment free from outside interference, and teachers have the right to teach. However, teachers’ right to engage in social and political criticism is another definition. In a 2022 paper published in the Houston Law Review, Yale Law School professor Keith E. Whittington said that universities committed to the pursuit of truth and the advancement and dissemination of human knowledge require “strong protections for academic freedom for scholars and instructors.”
At an international conference organized by UNESCO in Nice in 1950, the world’s universities pledged “the right to seek knowledge for themselves and to go wherever the pursuit of truth may lead.” Then, at the first annual Global Bolchium of University Presidents held at Columbia University in 2005, academic freedom was defined as “the freedom to research, teach, speak, and publish, subject to the rules and standards of scholarly inquiry, without interference or punishment, wherever the pursuit of truth and understanding may lead.” But is defining and achieving academic freedom really that straightforward?
In the current academic environment, tenure, promotions, salary increases, research funding, and academic honors are all closely tied to research publications. Thus, today’s scholars are driven by peer pressure to publish. And the interest of funding agencies has a significant impact on academics’ research. Nowadays, universities are also concerned with their international rankings, which are based largely on research papers.
Is today’s “publish or perish” culture really that serious? A notable exception was the 2013 Nobel Prize winner, British physicist Peter Higgs, famous for the Higgs boson. Higgs never published aggressively. He said that he “became an embarrassment to the department when it came to research evaluation exercises” and that if he had not been nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1980, he would have been fired from his job at the University of Edinburgh. However, he thought that because he would not be considered “productive” enough in today’s academic system, no university would hire him. Thus, today’s academic system does not even allow a future Nobel laureate to conduct his research peacefully without regularly producing research papers.
Nowadays, there is little room for leeway in the pre-determined structure of university curricula. Moreover, as the American biologist Jerry Coyne put it, a geology teacher who tells his students that the Earth is flat is not exercising academic freedom but rather failing in his duties. Compared to general freedom of speech, academic freedom of speech is more limited. For example, a non-academic can criticize the effectiveness of vaccines, but they can only do so with academic freedom if they have the necessary academic credentials. Unlike public speeches, academic perspectives are often subject to peer review.
And, importantly, academic freedom can be as much as a country’s politics and society want to present to academic institutions at the time. For example, many fields of research, including sociology and genetics, were outlawed in the Soviet Union in the 1930s as “bourgeois pseudoscience.”
What, really, is the freedom of a flying kite? When a kite is flying high, it means that the person holding the spool is letting it fly. Without the generous funding of kings and the permission of foreign scholars and students, would ancient Nalanda or Taxila have been able to exercise their academic freedom? What if that person believed the kite was behaving strangely? Of course, in a democracy there are checks and balances, such as the judiciary and
and periodic elections. Therefore, academic freedom and political interference in it are constantly being redefined by changing socio-political dynamics.
Academic freedom certainly establishes a protective umbrella over the activities of scholars; however, this protection is neither absolute nor guaranteed. As some powerful politicians still view universities as the “enemy”, the Heerak Rajar Desh becomes a timeless principle that believes that education is more than just imparting knowledge; it is also about molding souls, developing minds and enabling people to think critically and behave ethically. A university acts as a prism of knowledge for the community it serves. However, efforts should be made to define a framework for acceptable academic freedom and ensure its continuation.
