Threats to Freedom in Higher Education; C. Hepburn

Threats to Freedom in HigherEducation CHARLES M. HEPBURN THE DECLINE OF FREEDOM is the critical issue in higher education in America. This alarming trend has resulted from developments within colleges ,and universities as well ,as from failures in the pre coll~ge education of entering fresh men. The future state of the college teacher as an independent profes sional dedicated to free inquiry and free expression of ideas with in his competence has been brought into question more than ever dur ing the pas,t decade as 'a result of pressure from three important de velopments. The first of these is a dr.astic increase in direct interDr. Hepburn is Professor of History and Chair man, Division of Social Sciences at Wayne State College in Nebraska. ference by the federal government in both public and. private higher education; the second is the in creasing willingness of faculty members themselves to give up their freedom in order to organize to lobby and strike; and the third is the lack of responsibility of fac ulty and administrators in defend ing freedom on the campus against threats of force.

As a result of government inter vention, many institutions either because they have chosen to be a part of a federal program, or be cause they must comply with a federal regulation, or both, have found their free choice limited. They have been forced to offer particular courses in order to re ceive proferred funds, have had to 155 156 THE FREEMAN March engage in special research proj eets encouraged by W'Rshington, or have had to hire, on occasion, those whom they felt to be less qualified so that a federal agency would be satisfied. An this has been expensive; but, worse, it has hampered free ;choice in an are'a where freedom of choice is vital. In Defense of Liberty We who share in a college com munity must begin to turn away from such controls by being as completely fair as is humanly pos sible in all dealings with each other, while at the same time we must not 'allow government agen cies to use threats of force against us unjustly. We must, whenever possible, avoid federal funding which restricts our free choice in academic decisions. We all possess separate and unique viewpoints, desires, and backgrounds, but one thing that all faculty members should have in common is a love of libertY,and this most precious commodity is worth defending at all costs.

Next, a growing militancy of professors at many institutions is noticeable in their encouragement and expansion of the assumed sep aration of interest between mem bers of the faculty andadminis tration, a separation which is thought by many to be inherent in the nature of educational institutions. This militancy has now gone to the point where faculty mem bers in some colleges have formed labor organizations modeled on those of industry. Many of these militant instructors declare that they will now use the same meth ods of organized force, which have done so much to bring havoc and disruption to our economy, to deal with boards of trustees. If this movement succeeds, faculties will be regimented as never before. They will be told finally how many students they can teach, when they cam teach, what duties are those of faculty, and which those of "man agement" and so on. Let us heed the restrictions placed upon union workers, not by their managers, but by their unions. Few of us could live up to our personal pro fessional standards under such condi tions, and most of us never had such things in mind when we entered the profession. A brick layer lays to the specifications of an architect. He may want to lay more bricks per day than the un ion allows, but he can practice his skill to a reasonable degree within union requirements. A teacher, like the artist, the poet or the sculptor, is a creator and inno vator; he cannot bind himself to group controls.

Current faculty interest in col lective bargaining and unioniza tion may be blamed in part on the 1976 THREATS TO FREEDOM IN HIGHER EDUCATION 157 lack of support for salaries in higher education in both public and private' institutions when the economy showed a healthy expan sion during the fifties and sixties. Teachers in particular did not ben efit in relation to their peers in other professions. Everyone was for better education but rno one wanted to pay faculty. Yet resent ment over low salaries and meager fringe benefits cannot be the cen tral cause' of the new militancy. That higher education is an at tractive Icareer, particularly in academic areas, can be shown by the numbers of people wanting to enter college teaching in spite of the lack of jobs. Salaries, though low by comparison with other pro fessions, are acceptable to many. A better answer may be found in a new attitude toward teaching among younger members of the profession who sometimes seem less interested in service than in what they can obtain from it. They show little patience with the no tion that some years of active col lege teaching ought to precede senior status with its rank and privileges. This observation a,p plies only to a minority of young er faculty, but their voices are often he'ard advocating labor-style organization.

The third development in higher education whieh encroaches on free academic inquiry is the misinterpretation, by mistake or design, of the concept of academic free dom. We have been told recently by some of our colleagues that "academic freedom" covers such acts as being absent from class to lead demonstrations against the Viet Nam war, against the institu tion'sadministration, or in pro test of another faeulty member's dismissal. The protection of acade mic freedom became a rationale at one major university to justify, in a course on maj or American writers of the twentieth century, the sole study of Marx, Engels, and Mao Tse-tung; and it has been used to justify the acts of faculty members in organizing students and sympathetic colleagues to dis rupt the classes of teachers who disagreed with the minority on an issue and even to justify the use of force against those who opposed such action. In the face of claims like these, academic freedom, a worthy ideal whose achievement should be the goal of everyone in volved in higher education, has been condemned by the layman. If the ideal is to survive at all, those of us who be1ieve in it must come to its support; we must identify what we mean by it and denounce attempts by a few among us to hide behind its protections while destroying all it stands for by their behavior. If we lose freedom of thought and expression in our 158 THE FREEMAN March educational institutions, freedom in our society will wither and die.

Our failure in the past has been a failure of moral perception fol lowed by a failure of nerve. As fac ulty members we have refused to condemn attacks on freedom by our colleagues but rather have been content to ignore them, hop ing the administration would do the condemning so that we would not need to take a stand on an is sue that might prove controversial. Administrators, faced with situ ations demanding quick and decis·· ive action, instead of meeting their oblig,ations, have held com mittee meetings, formed study groups, or left for Washington on business. Loss of Public Confidence The result has been an immea surable loss of confidence on the part of the public for the institu tions which should be providing intellectual and moral leadership at a critical time in history. Uni versities must be places where freedom is supreme and this can only exist, as is true everywhere when each member of the commun ity, whether he be student or pres ident, respects the dignity and rights of every other member. It is imperative that those who have committed themselves to an insti tution through the acceptance of salary also commit themselves to the maintenance of order under which freedom, not license, can reign. There can be no freedom where there is no security against coercion and intimidation.

Freedom is further threatened by the decline in the level of com petence of students entering col lege. This year's College Board and Scholastic Aptitude scores show significant drops in both verbal and quantitative abilities. These new scores are the lates t records in a general decline in such scores over the past several years. No one seems to ~now whom to blame, and perhaps correctly so, because the fault belongs to all of us in some degree. Yet, anyone reading a set of freshman essays must realize that Americans can do better than they have been do ing in teaching fundamentals. When students enter college after twelve years of school and still write "sentences" without verbs and are unable to turn fractions into decimals or to understand basic vocabulary, then their time has been poorly used. Worse than that they are handicapped by being unprepared for life. The student who is terribly worried about the plight of Portugal can not write three coherent para gra phs to explain why.

It is true that the growing num ber of open admissions policies - a healthy development that win un1976 THREATS TO FREEDOM IN HIGHER EDUCATION 159 doubtedly rescue some potential talent otherwise overlooked - has encouraged many students to enter college today who might not have done so a generation ago. With open admissions we can expeet many more poorly prepa.red stu dents to come to college. Yet it al so seems apparent that the phe nomenon we are dealing with at the college level is only a symptom of a much larger and far more pressing issue in society at large: that is, the changing values of Americans. Among· other things, this has meant that with the lure of more activities that distract, study time has lost the high prior ity it once had. Parents frequently condemn public school teachers who ask for quality classroom per formance at the expense of student participation in some other func tion.

Emphasis on Ethics Many of us have come back to the idea that we need toemphasize ethics in education and that learn ing and ethical purpose go togeth er. Values not only need thoughtful consideration in the classroom, but we can do much towa1\I developing an awareness of values by the way we approach learning. We can de monstrate that when study is cor rectly pursued so that the student makes a subject his· own, the re sult is satisfaction of the soul and increased creativity; that a job done well is worth a great de-al no matter what the job is; that a mathematical principle mastered can be more satisfying than an evening at the movies; that a thought put to prose so that it ra diates the mind of the writer has its· own special reward which makes· the effort worthwhile; that a new word learned expands one's ideas countless times; that certain literary masterpieces last through the ages because they deal with eternal truths; and that any ad vance toward satisfactory answers to the essential question, "Who am I?" is what education is all about.

In short, I believe that the correct teaching of fundamentals pre sumes the ethics of free inquiry and mental discipline. By not in sisting from the beginning that students do the best that they can do, we have failed not only to help them master needed foundation skills, but we have encouraged them in the belief that any per formance is a;cceptable, and that so long as one's peers accept him, ethical considerations are of sec ondary importance. The thrill of learning in most cases has never been a part· of their Iives. We have encouraged the belief that continu ing efforts to understand are not important, that machines can work out problems, that telephones can substitute for writing letters, and 160 THE FREEMAN March that the experts can explain any thing beyond the rudimentary so that critical thinking is not neces slary for most people. It Finally Comes Down to Parental Responsibility Those of us in higher education must accept a degree of responsi bility for all this, although, of course, the final blame must lie with the majority of American parents who do not want their chil dren to be required to meet rea sonable standards of scholarship in grade and high schools, and who are willing to see the teachers of ,their children tuvned into tax supported baby sitters instead of highly prepared professionals. For our part we have too often dis missed the inadequacies of our college students by 'arguing that they should have le;arned funda mentals in high scho01 and that there are other things to be done now. Our students are allowed to go through college without learn ing to write or read well or to do simple mathem,atlcs. They receive diplomas but gain no real sense of accomplishment ; and, since they have not mastered the tools for acquiring knowledge and for think ing and self-expression, their col lege years have been of minimal value. Many of these same stu dents become teachers themselves and perpetuate the process.

The cycle can be reversed by an insistence upon mastery of the es sentials as a part of higher eduea tion. We should turn away no in quiring mind; but we should de velop in that mind the skills of or ganized thought. This will mean a great deal of work for all of us. It will mean long hours of grading exams, but this is the only way it can be done; and we can do it only when boards and legislatures un derstand the need to fund ade quate staffs for the job. Teaching is basically a person-to-person ac tivity depending for success upon the willingness of on.e caring per son to encourage another who wishes to 'learn, and this is true whether a. class is large or small. Na matter what the odds for suc cess, we must stop catering to the inadequacies of our students by shaping our readings, lectures, and discussions for ninth-grade abilities. We must expect them to read and write well; and if not, we must help them to learn to do so with the normal assignments.

One suggestion might be to assign less reading with the expectation that it be thoroughly absorbed. Careful sele,tion can provide suf ficient thought-provoking material for advanced students while not overwhelming those less capable. When we expect mastery of funda mentals in our colleges, we will be in a position to lead the grade 1976 THREATS TO FREEDOM IN HIGHER EDUCATION 161 schools and high schools and to show the public what is to be gained in terms of human values. Then we may expect. changes in the first twelve grade levels; and by then, hopefully, teachers from our colleges will be aware them selves of the loss in human crea tivity and personal liberty which accrues when millions of young men and women have not adquate ly developed mental discipline. Ignorance of the rudiments on the part of m'any college students The Frontier is Freedom may be classified ,as a loss of in dividual liberty on two counts: first, such students are dependent upon others and second, they may be easily led beeause they can not acquire and assimilate knowl edge. Today, more than ever be fore, free men must be able not only to identify the elements of freedom, they must be able to ex press them in terms of every as pect of daily life. Colleges should provide the greatest opportunity for this activity on all levels. , IDEAS ON LIBERTY CERTAINLY, the backwardness of many an underdeveloped nation today is related to the fact that the enterprising individual is stigmatized and ruined by his neighbors and the local officials. To have lived in some remote "native" village long enough to know how their social curbs on progress operate is to understand why the best laid plans of economic development schemes have a way of failing utterly. Without freedom to achieve and without a measure of security for life and property, aid is useless; and with freedom, it is unnecessary. Any enterprising investor is happy to put his money into a going concern and nothing succeeds like suc cess. But the rigidities of a managed economy stifle initiative and scare off venture capital, keeping the depressed area stagnant and backward. Only a rich country can afford the economic interven tions of socialism - and they can't afford it for long.

Freedom is not a luxury for a few wealthy nations, as many of our liberal pundits try to tell us, but a necessity for the poor and hungry as Erhard's Germany so eloquently demonstrated after her crushing defeat in World War II. EDWARD P. COLESON THE POSTAL MONOPOL~ BRIAN SUMMERS IN 1974 six children in New Jersey earned a few dollars by delivering Christmas cards for five cents each - half the United States Postal Service rate. They were breaking the law.1 In 1971 a private corporation, the Independent Postal System of America, offered to deliver Christ mas cards for five cents each three cents less than the U.S.P.S. rate. They were stopped by a court injunction. 2 In 1966 the CF&I Steel CorporMr. Summers is a member of the staff of The Foundation for Economic Education. 1 New York Times, December 20, 1974 (New Jersey Edition). 2 John Haldi, Postal Monopoly (Amer ican Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., 1974) pp. 16-17.