Welcome to the APA Mini-Series Blog organized by the APA Committee on Professional Rights and Academic Freedom, formerly, the Committee on the Professional Rights of Philosophers. We changed our name last year in order to highlight the centrality of Academic Freedom to our charge. Given recent events, it was not a moment too soon.

Much of the discourse around academic freedom focuses on (1) freedom for faculty, and (2) freedom from interference by forces outside the university. 

There are good reasons for this. It’s important that faculty members be able to freely pursue knowledge and that they be able to speak openly about their theories, findings, ideas, etc. Such freedom is under attack in the U.S. by both the Trump Administration and various state governments. Thus, it is important that we make clear what academic freedom rights faculty have and that we fight back against attempts to limit such rights.

However, one downside of this focus is that it can cause us to fail to attend to other aspects of academic freedom. Here, I want to focus on two ideas that I think are underexplored in the current discourse about academic freedom.

First, I want to champion the usefulness of the concept of freedom of discussion for thinking about the kind of positive liberty that academic freedom should try to secure for members of university communities. 

Second, I’ll try to defend the idea that students also have academic freedom. What it looks like for students to have academic freedom is different from what it looks like for faculty and other university staff members to have academic freedom. But they ought to be viewed as having a form of academic freedom nonetheless.

Free Discussion as a Component of Academic Freedom

Chapter 2 of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is often viewed as a quintessential defense of free speech. But Mill never actually discusses free speech, freedom of expression, or any other such concept. Instead, as suggested by the chapter’s title, he focuses on freedom of thought and freedom of discussion. 

People often treat “freedom of discussion” as merely another name for freedom of speech. But I think this is a mistake for various reasons.

First, not all acts of speaking are acts of discussing. Commands are typically given by speaking, but often do not contribute to the discussion. Similarly, trolling normally involves using words to try to goad or irritate the troll’s target. Yet most of us think it’s appropriate to ignore trolls on the grounds that they are not really interested in having a discussion.

Second, many of the goods we associate with speech generally are especially, or only, achieved by discussion, not by speech generally. For example, discussion may help us obtain true beliefs in a way that many other modes of speaking do not. Discussion also seems crucial for successful democratic self-governance in a way that many other modes of speaking are not. 

If freedom of discussion is distinct from freedom of speech, this naturally leads to the question, “What is discussion?” Here’s a first attempt at a rough answer. The discussion is a cooperative, norm-governed social activity.

In offering this account, I’m thinking of ‘discussion’ as roughly synonymous with ‘conversation’ and have Paul Grice’s work in mind. Grice argued that conversation required at least some level of cooperativity between conversational participants. Otherwise, the activity simply isn’t a conversation. 

This seems right. You and I cannot discuss anything if I cover my ears and start singing every time you try to talk to me. Similarly, you and I cannot discuss anything if you pretend I’m not there when I talk to you. Instead, we must cooperate to some degree.

Connected to this, I think it’s plausible that discussion is bound by a good faith norm—i.e., discussion requires that participants act with at least some level of good faith. This doesn’t mean that conversational participants must be completely transparent or can’t seek to persuade. But the good faith norm of discussion does forbid creating a pretense of discussion as a means of actually trying to do something else, such as deceive or manipulate. 

The good faith discussion norm generates the expectation that those who act as if they are engaging in discussion are actually engaging in discussion rather than in manipulation, coercion, or deceit.  

On this account, freedom of discussion is the freedom to engage in speech that satisfies the conditions of discussion. It is distinct from free speech generally. I think both freedom of speech and freedom of discussion are important, but I also think that freedom of discussion should be a goal of academic freedom in a way that freedom of speech generally is not.

Academic Freedom for Students

While academic freedom is typically conceived of as a faculty right, there is, quite literally, precedent in favor of academic freedom extending to students.

For example, as part of a discussion of academic freedom in the 1957 U.S. Supreme Court case Sweezy v. New Hampshire, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that “[t]eachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding” (emphasis added).

What should academic freedom for students look like? I think part of the answer is that colleges and universities should be places that provide students with a robust level of freedom of discussion. This means that students should be free—and should feel free—to discuss in good faith a wide variety of ideas, views, and perspectives without fear of sanction, even if their ideas are radically misguided. We can’t require that students have the right or good answers before permitting them to engage fully in discussion.

That said, creating a space where students can freely discuss a very wide set of topics doesn’t mean that students should be able to freely engage in various forms of malicious speech, such as bullying, trolling, or hurling slurs.

This framework helps us distinguish the student who says something deeply misguided and offensive in class because that is something they’ve been taught, they don’t know any better, and they are genuinely trying to sort out their views, from the student who knowingly says something deeply misguided and offensive in class in hopes that they will provoke their professors or classmates in order to generate new content for their inflammatory blog or YouTube channel. 

The former student, acting in good faith, is exercising freedom of discussion. The latter is not. The former deserves protection under academic freedom. The latter does not.

Of course, there are sometimes tricky issues in practice about determining when someone is sincerely seeking to think through their views versus trolling. These practical difficulties require that universities take a cautious approach in sanctioning student speech. Still, some cases are clear enough. 

Thus, I think it is worth trying to cultivate spaces where students feel free to voice and work through even their bad ideas. But I think it’s valuable to try to do this in a way that minimizes the potential negative impact on other students and that does not turn the university into an unrestricted free speech zone akin to a public park or sidewalk.

We hope you enjoy these excellent contributions to our Mini-Series blog. Please email: mzinkin@binghamton.edu, if you would like to submit a short paper to this blog on any topic related to academic freedom and the professional rights of philosophers.

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