While the phrase "academic freedom" is associated with the process of inquiry and scholarship, there is little about professors' ways of thinking that is free of the cultural assumptions learned at a taken-for-granted level when they are learning to think and communicate in the language of the larger culture, and in the specialized language of their chosen disciplines.
The Hidden Assumptions in Our Discourse
Most professors still think of language as a conduit in a sender/receiver process of communicating ideas, data, and information to others-even when they are critically reflecting on the prejudices reproduced in the culture's "languaging" processes. The result is that they remain largely unaware of how their academic freedom is constrained by the analogs carried forward in the metaphorical language they take for granted-analogs that too often reproduce the prejudices and silences of earlier thinkers who were also unaware of environmental limits.
An example of the unrecognized linguistic constraints that led professors to perpetuate the prejudices and other misconceptions of earlier thinkers can be seen in the fact that, until recently, most professors took for granted the gender biases that limited the prospects of women.
Today, leading scientists such as E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins continue the long tradition of relying upon analogs that represent organic processes, such as the human brain, as having the characteristics of a machine. The seemingly unending quest for new ideas, values, and technologies is also rooted in Enlightenment thinkers' practice of associating traditions with analogs that suggested backwardness, impediments to progress, and critical reflection.
After I sat in on a meeting of humanities professors who discussed their relevance in today's world without mentioning the ecological crisis, it became clear to me that the cultural assumptions they take for granted prevented them from recognizing how to make the transition from an individually-centered to an ecological form of intelligence-which is far more complex than it is represented as being in Daniel Goleman's new book, Ecological Intelligence. Evidence of being unable to make this transition can be found in many disciplines.
For example, the cultural assumptions reproduced by generations of Western philosophers are audacious in their claims, and for the silences they have helped to perpetuate in other academic disciplines. The rational process, which philosophers claim to exercise more judiciously than any other group in the university, has been represented as free of all cultural influences-including the influence of Enlightenment thinkers. This view of the rational process, which is shared by most faculty in other disciplines, led past and current philosophers to claim that both abstract and empirically based thinking are free of cultural traditions, that rational thought is the activity of autonomous individuals, and that other cultural ways of knowing are irrelevant.
Thus, the questions seldom asked include: What can we learn from the misconceptions of past thinkers who have contributed to marginalizing the knowledge of cultures that have learned to live within the limits and possibilities of their bioregions? How have the giants in the history of Western philosophy contributed to the hubris that characterizes the various systems of high-status knowledge that failed to recognize environmental limits and the short- and long-term consequences of colonizing other cultures?
Reading Plato, Descartes, Locke, and other Western philosophers-including present-day iconic figures such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty-would be justified if it led to examining how they contributed to the misconceptions and silences about human participation in the complex interacting webs of cultural and environmental ecologies. But this is not what most students are asked to consider. Unfortunately, most students graduate with a fragmentary understanding of the history of abstract theories. Graduates think of themselves as critical thinkers-and are totally unaware of the silences about the changes their world is undergoing that will make irrelevant what they learned from their courses.
The problem of academic freedom's entanglement with the culture's taken-for-granted assumptions is not limited to philosophy professors. The power of a received vocabulary and its interpretive frameworks are acquired in each professor's own education, and generally reinforced by colleagues who are unable to throw off their own taken-for-granted traditions of thinking encoded in the language of their discipline.
As we move closer to the tipping point beyond which the rate of global warming cannot be slowed, the question of whether professors of philosophy, economics, sociology, classics, political science, education, and so forth are exercising a form of academic freedom that contributes to the public's ability to recognize the ideas and values that are major contributors to the ecological/cultural crises becomes increasingly critical. Unfortunately, when compared to today's scale and rate of environmental change, most of the issues that professors pursue in the name of academic freedom are really quite trivial. Even the knowledge of genuine achievements in the arts and civil liberties will become irrelevant as potable water, sources of protein, and the ability to meet the most basic human needs become limited to the point where armed conflict is seen as the only way of ensuring survival.
Previous Misuses of Academic Freedom
When we consider how scholarship and research have been justified in the name of academic freedom over the years and in different cultures, there is clear evidence that its exercise has been framed by the prejudices held by the larger society-and by the political centers of power in the society. We have only to examine the role of philosophers, jurists, and scientists in giving legitimacy to the Nazi regime in Germany. Martin Heidegger's overtures to Nazism are especially noteworthy, along with the decision by the University of Bonn to strike the name of Thomas Mann from its list of honorary doctors. More than 900 German scholars and scientists signed pledges endorsing Hitler's "patriotic" actions.
Our own history of misusing academic freedom includes research and scholarly writings that perpetuated racist and gender prejudices, the Tuskegee experiment involving the study of the death process of over 360 African American men who were suffering from syphilis, the long history of involvement in the eugenics movement, and the development of intelligence tests that favored speakers of English. More recently, academic freedom has been used to justify developing new weapon systems, and now surveillance technologies that are strengthening our downward slide toward a police state.
The penchant of liberal professors for arguing from competing paradigms of understanding simply reinforces the idea that all people, regardless of how well informed they are, have the right to their own opinions-both as to whether there is an environmental crises and to what steps, if any, should be taken to reduce its impact. But one thing is clear: it seems that no amount of scientific evidence about the nature of the ecological crises, and no amount of reporting on the human suffering directly attributable to changes in the sustaining capacity of natural systems, will cause more than a small minority of faculty to make more than minor adjustments in their courses and research. Past experience has shown that there is little likelihood that the widespread reforms in curricula and research that must be undertaken can be achieved when academic freedom is used to justify ignoring the cultural roots of the ecological crisis.
A Precedent for Overriding Academic Freedom for Progressive Purposes
However, there is a way of overcoming the resistance that the minority of ecologically oriented faculty face in their departments. The precedent for supporting a minority point of view within otherwise traditionalist thinking can be seen in earlier responses of the academic community to changes in the public consensus about the need to address discrimination in the areas of gender and race. That is, the exercise of leadership by university administrators contributed in many instances to a new climate of opinion within departments that led to avoiding granting appointments to new faculty who exhibited racial and gender biases.
Unfortunately, the record of leadership on the part of university administrators, from the president to department chairpersons, is uneven. But if administrators exercised leadership, they might motivate otherwise indifferent faculty to reframe the content of their courses and scholarship in ways that clarify the connections between cultural and environmental issues that stand in the way of achieving a sustainable future. Thus, the problem becomes one of identifying the sources of authority that university presidents and administrators will take seriously-even when they personally fail to understand that humankind is at a turning point and that daily life is undergoing fundamental changes that have their roots in the degradation of natural systems. The sources of authority that would influence many university presidents and administrators to exercise a more visible form of leadership include the president and Congress. Unfortunately, most members of Congress reproduce the patterns of thinking, including the assumptions and silences, acquired from their university experience.
If the nation's foundations fail to provide leadership in promoting university-level reforms that address the cultural roots of the ecological crisis, and if the people occupying the highest levels in the political process, including university presidents, give only lip service to ecologically sustainable university reforms, it is likely that most faculty members will continue to think that their own cutting-edge thinking and research makes it unnecessary to take seriously the ecological crises. The fact that many faculty see research based on ecologically destructive conceptual traditions as cutting-edge thinking is part of a tragedy that few of their former students will recognize. The fragments of knowledge students acquire from the diversity of courses and faculty perspectives will also leave them unable to recognize that the spread of social chaos (the chaos that will follow the further decline in the life-sustaining capacity of natural systems) opens the door to a fascist form of government. The technological infrastructure is already in place for this development, and graduates of our most elite universities are already demonstrating the political and legal skills necessary for ensuring that the interests of corporations, the military, and the fundamentalist religious groups that have merged their theology with an extreme form of patriotism will not be adversely affected by the environmental changes.
Just as we need to reframe the idea of the autonomous individual by adopting culturally and ecologically informed analogs, we need to reframe the focus of academic freedom in ways that address the multiple political and ecological crises of our era.
Chet A. Bowers is the author of nineteen books that address the cultural roots of the ecological crises and the role that educational institutions have played. His most recent writings are available at http://cabowers.net.
