Academic Freedom

WE KNOW that in the halls of learning there must be freedom to speak the truth_freedom for the discovery of new truth, freedom for the acceptance of new truth, and also (sometimes overlooked) freedom for the acceptance and preservation of old truth. In other words, there must be freedom for the presentation of facts as they are. But with our insistence upon academic freedom, we must equally resist academic license. Grave difficulty always follows when men fail to distinguish between freedom and license. This isn’t true only in academic circles. It is true in all human activities. Freedom that has exceeded the bounds of freedom, freedom that has been permitted to become a perversion of freedom, becomes a devastating license. By the misunderstanding of academic freedom, some of the instructors of youth may sometimes be led to suppose that they have a right deliberately to plant seeds of unbelief, to suppose that they may teach unproved theories as inviolate facts, to suppose that they may dogmatically proclaim their own opinions as incontrovertible truths. The abuse of academic freedom, as is true of the abuse of any other freedom, is something to be reckoned with, because the impact of ideas, true or false, is far-reaching in its effect upon the lives of all of us. But still we must insist upon this freedom. Education without it is a mockery. But we must also insist that theories and inferences will not be mistaken for law, and that unverified beliefs and personal opinions will not be arbitrarily presented as universal truths. One of the most solemnly sacred responsibilities in the world is that of teaching other men’s children. It is a responsibility that may well bring an earnest teacher to his knees in humility and in supplication that he may not implant in the heart or in the mind of any child, by statement or suggestion, anything that is not true, anything that would undermine our heritage of freedom, anything that would cast doubt upon the basic realities of life, anything that would devaluate the great moral verities that time and Providence have given us. The theories and the opinions of men change much and often. And we must vigilantly preserve freedom to teach truth, and we must vigilantly guard against letting freedom become a license to teach anything else.