On the Justification of Academic Freedom and of Free Speech on the University Campus

Questions of academic freedom, and of free speech on university campuses, have arisen in a variety of specific contexts, all of which this Essay ignores.Instead, this Essay offers a partial explanation of the current status of both academic freedom and of free speech on university campuses in general.We do not herein affirm or deny that academic freedom, on the one hand, and free speech on campus, on the other, may be very different and partly conflicting phenomena.For present purposes, though, all such concerns may be referred to herein, merely for simplicity, as matters of academic freedom.One sensible approach to questions of academic freedom assumes that the answers to such questions should, ultimately, depend on what are taken to be the most fundamental purposes of the university.This approach seeks to encompass public as well as private universities, including distinctly religious universities.As well, this approach seeks to encompass academic freedom at the level of the university as an institution and at the level of any individual or group speaker within the university.Finally, this approach aims to encompass university purposes as judged by the university, by relevant government actors, and by the broader public.As it turns out, our universities invariably pursue, whether expressly or not, a range of typically shifting and often conflicting purposes.Rarely do universities articulate any genuinely meaningful, as opposed to a largely rhetorical, sense of the tradeoffs among such institutional purposes.Among the most commonly cited, such basic university purposes have been the pursuit, testing, inculcation, or dissemination of significant knowledge and meaningful truth at one level of the university community or another.Merely for convenience, this purpose will be referred to herein as the pursuit of knowledge and truth.For present purposes, we need take no position on whether the university goal of pursuing knowledge and truth, in any context, is ultimately well-advised or not.Crucial for our purposes, though, is the general academic and cultural shift in attitudes toward the very meaning and value of the ideas of knowledge and truth themselves.Broadly put, over the last century especially, a number of partly conflicting academic and cultural schools of thought have had a jointly significant effect on how universities, and some elements of the public, think of the very ideas of knowledge and truth.To oversimplify, the long-standing prominence of various sorts of objectivity-oriented and metaphysically realist understandings of moral and other forms of knowledge and truth has, over time, been eroded.The specific metaphor of erosion itself is dispensable.Alternative metaphors, such as