Academic Freedom as a Civil Right

OTH civil rights and academic freedom are currently much in the public eye. They have been put there by various persons calling themselves liberals, but these persons have not always supplied the public with clear-cut definitions of what they mean by these terms. What follows, therefore, is more concerned with uncovering the real differences in the points of view being expressed under the same labels than with praising or blaming any of them. Starting, then, with academic freedom, there would seem to be two versions: Many liberal professors appear to construe academic freedom as a policy of job insurance sufficiently comprehensive to cover them in the exercise of as much speech as is guaranteed against criminal prosecution by the first and fourteenth amendments. Many liberal administrators, on the other hand, seem to identify academic freedom with mere abstention from arbitrary dismissals and personal discrimination-a kind of process of law conception. Faced with a choice between these positions the writer would side with the due process liberals because they seem to err less in defect of the proper definition than the free speech liberals err in excess of it. But there are ambiguities in both positions which ought to be cleared up before criticizing either. The first question is whether the authors of these definitions are trying to describe a sphere of special privilege or immunity for university professors, or whether they merely mean to assert for universi professors privileges which belong, or ought to belong, to all persons having jobs to lose. In the first event all thought of kinship between academic freedom and civil right can be abandoned because a special priilege is not even formal material for a civil right. In the second event, the kinship is indicated clearly enough, but in this case the problem is not academic freedom as such, but the compatibility of provisions for job security with the existing scheme of civil rights. This paper proposes to deal with academic freedom, therefore, as a claim to special privilege. But then another preliminary question arises: Are special privileges proposed for teachers because of their exceptional economic vulnerability to attacks on their jobs, or is it the function of the teacher which warrants this protection? Every professor will be inclined to agree that he belongs to a group generally at or near the level of subsistence. On the other

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