UNC System Faculty Seek to Define ‘Academic Freedom’

References to “academic freedom” are sprinkled throughout the UNC System’s policy manual, which sets out the many rules the state’s 17 public campuses must follow. Most references state that the system supports academic freedom and will not seek to infringe upon faculty rights.

But what, exactly, does academic freedom mean? The policy manual doesn’t include a formal definition.

Some faculty want UNC System leaders to spell out exactly what they’re promising to protect, as professors and administrators around the country warn that Trump administration policies threaten the very principle. 

The administration has canceled research grants that don’t fit its priorities on subjects like race and gender identity, and it offered universities special access to federal funds if they agreed to certain guidelines. Last fall, even before President Trump was re-elected, an Inside Higher Ed survey found that more than 90 percent of faculty around the country somewhat or strongly felt academic freedom was under threat. 

“Academic freedom has been a core value, but it has very rarely and very vaguely been defined,” said Wade Maki, a lecturer at UNC Greensboro and chair of the Faculty Assembly, which includes elected representatives from across the system.

On October 10, the Faculty Assembly approved a resolution that seeks to create a standard, “consensus definition” of academic freedom to be used across the system. The group developed the definition over about a year, with input from campus-level faculty chairs, provosts, and attorneys.

“Academic freedom is the foundational principle that protects the rights of faculty to engage in teaching, research/creative activities, service, and scholarly inquiry without undue influence,” the proposed definition reads. “It ensures that faculty can freely pursue knowledge; express, discuss and debate ideas; and contribute to the advancement of knowledge and understanding related to their areas of expertise.”

Maki plans to speak about the proposal at next month’s meeting of the UNC System Board of Governors and advocate for them to adopt it in some way, possibly as a clarification to the references to academic freedom in the policy manual. 

“Ultimately, it’ll be up to the system, the board, and campus administrations if they think the project is worthwhile,” Maki said. “But this issue is too important for us to be the last to the table, so we wanted to put something on the table before anyone else had a chance to make decisions.”

In a statement to The Assembly, UNC System spokesperson Andy Wallace wrote: “We appreciate the Faculty Assembly’s thoughtful work to help define and reaffirm the principles of academic freedom across our universities. We look forward to continuing the conversation with university stakeholders as this work moves ahead.”

Competing Definitions

Multiple definitions of academic freedom already exist. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has perhaps the best-known version. Approved in 1940, theirs references protection from outside influences on professors’ research and teaching. It also says that when faculty “speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline …”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression says that academic freedom “gives faculty the right to teach, research, and speak about matters of public concern without being punished—even where their views, findings, or methods are controversial.”

The current UNC policy manual does say that the system supports teaching, learning, research, discussion, and publication “free from internal or external restraints that would unreasonably restrict … academic endeavors.” 

Maki said the AAUP’s definition is “quite broad,” while FIRE’s definition “doesn’t really get into the level of detail that we’re trying to offer.”

Academic freedom is an “amorphous concept,” said Neal Hutchens, a professor at the University of Kentucky who researches free speech in higher education. Some universities have adopted the AAUP definition, while others have defined academic freedom through collective bargaining agreements, Hutchens explained. (North Carolina law prohibits state employees, including those in the UNC System, from collectively bargaining.)

The definition the UNC Faculty Assembly has proposed is fairly narrow. 

Both the definition and the accompanying resolution make clear that—if approved and accepted—academic freedom in the UNC System would extend only to “classroom practice,” “course development,” “research/creative activities,” and “scholarly inquiry,” which are each further defined in the document. And the protections of academic freedom would apply solely to a faculty member’s expertise as “determined by academic credentials, academic work, and/or professional practice.”

Hutchens noted the concept of expertise could be blurry in some fields. For instance, he questioned whether the definition, as written, would protect a political science professor who comments on the activities or decisions of a governor or president.

Professors speaking outside of their professional capacity or about issues not within their expertise would still “have the same free speech rights as everybody else,” Maki said. He noted that those activities are already protected by the First Amendment and existing UNC System policy on free speech.

Maki said the recent suspension of UNC-Chapel Hill professor Dwayne Dixon illustrates a limit of the proposed definition. Dixon was suspended after Chancellor Lee Roberts said he saw a years-old video of the professor, who was formerly a member of a now-disbanded antifascist “community defense” group, “talking about the need for confrontation while loading a semi-automatic weapon, and then firing that weapon.” The university performed a risk assessment while Dixon was on leave, finding “no basis” that he posed a threat to campus.

In that case, Maki said, the issue didn’t concern Dixon’s expertise as a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies. Instead, it centered on issues of free speech and safety.

Dixon agreed with Maki’s assessment that his case wasn’t an issue of academic freedom, though he wrote to The Assembly that he had reservations about faculty leaders attempting to define the term. Doing so could lead professors to self-censor, Dixon wrote, with faculty possibly “believing that they can only teach or speak freely if that topic or view is within their ‘expertise’ which is likely an artificial box that can be used to stifle speech.”

“It’s always a canard that professors are ideologues rather than interlocutors of ideas,” Dixon wrote. “Our job in the classroom is to sharpen students’ ability to identify issues, ask complex questions, and know how to evaluate sources that can help address those issues and questions.”

In seeking to define academic freedom, “our goal was to protect faculty, primarily the classroom and research, and those are the areas that have been most under threat nationally,” Maki said.

Enforcing the Definition

Left unclear in the resolution is exactly how those protections would be enforced if complaints were lodged against a professor. That’s a common shortcoming of academic freedom definitions and policies, Hutchens said. 

“Institutions will have this kind of language, but in some ways it’s window dressing or aspirational,” Hutchens said.

Hutchens said the mechanisms used to uphold the definition would be important in an instance where a powerful official, like a legislator or a donor, might wield their influence against a professor. He asked how a university would determine whether a faculty member was speaking in the purview of their expertise and whether the process would be governed by a single administrator or a larger body, such as a faculty committee. 

“That matters a whole lot,” Hutchens said.

Last month, Texas A&M University’s president fired a professor after a video of a student objecting to the professor teaching that there are more than two genders went viral. Republican lawmakers shared the video and criticized the professor prior to her firing, the Texas Tribune reported.

Maki said he worries about the possibility of such an episode here. Already, two non-faculty employees in the system have lost their jobs after implying their universities were skirting policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion in undercover videos filmed by a conservative group.

“We think that by doing this now, we can be in front of anything before there’s organizations surreptitiously recording faculty in the classroom, before there’s a public outcry,” he said.

In addition to being added to the system’s policy manual, Maki suggested the definition could serve as the basis for standard training on academic freedom, helping administrators and board members “see quite clearly where they should and should not be intervening.” It would also help faculty, Maki said, understand the lines between academic freedom and free speech—issues that sometimes overlap, but are also distinct in the policy manual.

Hutchens said setting a standard definition could offer a real benefit in the current moment, as higher education is facing significant pressure from the federal government and is “under attack from a lot of corners.” 

In the long run, Hutchens said, academic freedom protects much of the research that universities produce, which benefits society more broadly. For instance, as the Trump administration promotes unproven theories about autism, professors who study the disorder may benefit from the protections, Hutchens said. 

“Academic freedom is not really about the individual,” Hutchens said. “It’s about what it can mean for the students in their learning, and the institution in the society.”