The University of Texas at Austin on Monday released a statement affirming its “non-negotiable” commitment to academic freedom, which, it says, “lies at the core of the academic enterprise” and “is foundational to the excellence of the American higher-education system.”
While talk of drafting a statement began before the White House released its proposed “compact” for higher education and initially invited nine colleges to join — with Texas the only institution not to respond publicly since then — the administration’s proposal “became part of the context under which we were working,” one of the statement’s signatories told The Chronicle.
“We wanted to make it very clear that the university is not going to negotiate away academic freedom in any way, shape, or form, and we’re not going to engage in banning ideas,” Zachary Elkins, a professor in the College of Liberal Arts and a member of the faculty working group that wrote the statement, said.
The use of the word “non-negotiable,” Elkins added, was meant to “preserve some autonomy and some independence from external actors who may not have the best interests of the university at heart and may not be respecting academic freedom as fiercely as we do.”
Elkins, who studies democracy and institutional reform in the department of government, said he is not part of any official conversations between the university and the Trump administration about the compact. A university spokesperson said there was no update on the institution’s response. Of the eight other initial invitees, seven rejected it and one submitted feedback before the White House deadline for input on its proposal, which was last month. A second deadline, to formally accept or decline the compact, is later this month.
Though the UT-Austin statement on academic freedom — which largely affirms existing norms surrounding professors’ free-speech rights — doesn’t explicitly mention the compact or other forms of political involvement in academe, it was conceived as a response to the national climate as well as several high-profile cases pitting academic freedom against political pressure in the state of Texas, Elkins said.
In September, an associate professor at Texas State University was fired, then reinstated after he sued, only to be fired again, after making hypothetical comments at a conference of socialists about overthrowing the government. An instructor at Texas A&M University at College Station was also terminated after video of a discussion of gender and sexuality in her children’s-literature class went viral. The Texas A&M chancellor ultimately resigned amid the fallout, too.
‘Open Inquiry’
With these events in the background and concerns proliferating among conservatives about a lack of viewpoint diversity on the nation’s campuses, UT-Austin’s president, James E. Davis, created the faculty working group and charged it with devising a statement.
In an October 8 announcement, he wrote, “Some question whether our University has strayed from our duty to steward curiosity, open inquiry, and productive debate, while others worry that we have narrowed or even excluded opportunities for dialogue or dissent.”
To lead the work, he tapped William Inboden, the provost, who discussed the impetus for the statement in a recent interview with The Chronicle Review. “The responsibility of our academic freedom includes exposing students to multiple views,” Inboden said in the interview. “A lot of the public backlash or concern we’re seeing, or even some of the legislative measures, come from a sense that some faculty at some universities have presented these controversial topics in a dogmatic or doctrinaire way.” (A UT-Austin spokesman referred to the same interview when asked about the university’s response to the compact. In it, Inboden said the institution was aligned with “the principles of conduct” in the compact, but that there were procedural and enforcement questions.)
Inboden and Davis also recognized, Elkins said, that the geographic proximity of the cases at Texas State and Texas A&M made them “something that we should be thinking about, and something that we should have a preemptive answer for, about what we believe and what we think and what we stand for,” and so they convened an interdisciplinary group of 20 faculty members to develop one.
The resulting statement defines academic freedom as “the liberty to research, teach, and educate students in our collective pursuit of truth and knowledge,” and academic integrity as “the responsible exercise of academic freedom.” Faculty members, it says, are responsible for protecting students’ “right to learn in an environment of open inquiry,” particularly where differing views are concerned. All of that, the working group notes, is simpatico with the American Association of University Professors’ landmark 1940 statement on academic freedom, the Chicago Principles, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s stance on the classroom as the “marketplace of ideas.”
While the 900-word statement doesn’t contain any information about how it will be enforced or interpreted, Elkins said the working group wanted to ensure due process and “some humility and grace in terms of how we’re treating somebody who might be caught up in this.” The group recognized that in the classroom and “especially the freewheeling discussions in a seminar, people are going to say things that they wish they had said better, whether it be a faculty member or a student.”
Political Pressures
Other faculty members expressed wariness about the statement, or doubted the need for it. Karma R. Chávez, the president of UT-Austin’s AAUP chapter, sees it as as administrators’ attempt to “craft some public materials that seem to respond to” political pressures and may “take a little bit of the heat off” the institution.
She also doesn’t think the document is necessary, given that UT-Austin has long endorsed the AAUP statement and therefore has already made clear its commitment to academic freedom. The term “academic integrity,” she’s concerned, will be “leveraged in some way to suggest that certain teaching that doesn’t conform to whatever the standard of balance is” will be scrutinized. (The UT-Austin AAUP chapter’s executive committee released its own statement in response on Monday.)
The fact that the statement doesn’t directly mention political pressure is a key fault, said Isaac A. Kamola, an associate professor of political science at Trinity College, in Connecticut. “If you’re talking about academic freedom, you have to talk about the threat of political interference. That’s the core of academic freedom.” Without such an acknowledgment, Kamola said, he was “pretty skeptical” of the document.
Kamola speculated that Monday’s statement “may be setting the stage” for UT-Austin to sign the Trump compact. “To me, it’s saying, ‘We need a new compact with the university, because public trust is diminished and we need more academic integrity’ — kind of using the trappings of academic freedom to define what that means.”
