Joseph Kinmont Hart and Vanderbilt University: Academic Freedom and the Rise and Fall of a Department of Education, 1930–1934

Abstract

No one can follow the history of academic freedom … without wondering at the fact that any society, interested in the immediate goals of solidarity and self-preservation, should possess the vision to subsidize free criticism and inquiry, and without feeling that the academic freedom we still possess is one of the remarkable achievements of man. At the same time…one cannot but be disheartened by the cowardice and self-deception that frail men use who want to be both safe and free.Discussions of academic freedom inevitably elicit revolutionary and conservative forces concurrendy. This conflict is apparent, for example, in the 1916 report of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). On one hand, the university is an “inviolable refuge” from various tyrannies, including the “tyranny of public opinion.” Here, professors are part of a revolutionary “intellectual experiment…where new ideas may germinate and where their fruit, though … [possibly] distasteful to the community as a whole, may be allowed to ripen.…” Accordingly, no professor “can be a successful teacher unless he [sic] enjoys the respect of his students, and their confidence in his intellectual integrity. It is clear, however, that this confidence will be impaired if there is suspicion on the part of the student that the teacher is not expressing himself fully or frankly, or that college and university teachers are in general a repressed and intimidated class who dare not speak with that candor and courage which youth always demands in those whom it is to esteem.” On the other hand, the liberty of the scholar “is conditioned by there being conclusions gained by a scholar's method and held in a scholar's spirit; that is to say, they must be the fruits of competent and patient and sincere inquiry, and they should be set forth with dignity, courtesy, and temperateness of language.” How to rectify the apparent contradiction between expressing oneself “fully” and “frankly” while at the same time being “temperate” in language is, perhaps, a key feature in the long history of, and the various debates about, academic freedom.