SECTION L.-EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE.

THE NATURE AND

CONDITIONS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN UNIVERSITIES.

ADDRESS BY

PRINCIPAL ERNEST BARKER, M.A., D.LITT., LL.D.,

PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION.

FREEDOM, in that sphere of politics in which we use the word most often, may be an attribute either of the individual, in his thought and action within the community, or of the community itself, in its relations and standing among other communities. It may be a right of the citizen, or it may be an attribute of the State. In the intellectual sphere, with which we are here concerned, freedom may similarly be an attribute either of the individual teacher, in his teaching and speaking and writing, or of the whole academic community, in its relation to the general environment of political authorities and economic interests in which it is set. These two freedoms of the mind are almost correlative. We may almost say that a free professoriate means a free academic community; and, conversely, that a free academic community means a free professoriate. But there are qualifications and limitations of this identity. A university which is free from control by the general social environment may seek to control unduly its own professors in the name of its own alleged freedom. We cannot, after all, treat academic freedom under a single head; and in any discussion of the subject we must distinguish the freedom of the teacher from that of the university.

The freedom of the teacher, like all freedom that is other than mere license and anarchy, must exist within a framework of law, because it exists within the framework of an institution, and because, again, any institution involves some system of law. The law of an academic institution is partly an unwritten code of professional conduct, and partly, it may be, a written set of principles and tenets. The unwritten code forbids

a teacher to use his class-room as a place for the inculcation of partisan views. It may be difficult to draw a clear line of division between what is partisan and what is impartial; but we should all agree that there is a line, and that, in his class-room, a professor is not free to wander on the further side of that line. What he may do outside the class-room is another matter, which we must consider later. A written set of tenets and principles is comparatively rare; but it may obviously exist, for example in a theological college or a general college founded on a confessional basis. A professor who has subscribed to these tenets has voluntarily limited his freedom by that subscription. The college to which I belong at one time required a written subscription from its teachers to the Thirty-nine Articles.

When F. D. Maurice was deprived of his chair, in 1853, for his views on eternal punishment, it was not definitely stated in the resolution of the governing body that he had contravened those Articles. It was stated, in vaguer terms, that his opinions were 'of dangerous tendency . . . calculated to unsettle the minds of the theological students . . . detrimental to the usefulness of the college.' None the less, though the action taken by the governing body was not grounded, and perhaps could not have been grounded, on a definite contravention of the Thirty-nine Articles, the existence of a rule of subscription to those Articles was the real basis of that action.

A much more difficult question arises when we turn' to consider the action of a professor outside his class-room. Here, again, the case of F. D. Maurice occurs to the mind. He was attacked in 1851, and virtually censured, though not deprived of his chair, for his connection with the Christian Socialist movement. The case is curiously typical, and curiously apposite to our modern difficulties, even though it occurred over seventy years ago. Croker had launched the attack in the Press, and besides attacking Maurice he had drawn the college into the issue, by stating that 'it added to his surprise to find the holder of such views occupying the professorial chair . . . in King's College, London.' Some general considerations of a large pertinence are suggested by Croker's action and words. The Press may defend, and by its own position as a natural champion of freedom of expression of opinion it will often actually defend, the freedom of a professor; but just because it is necessarily set on publicity, it is also a danger to that freedom. It does not help the free course of thought that its delicate difficulties should be cried in the streets. The Press, again, will always attach the label' professor,' and the name of his institution, when it chances to mention in any connection an ordinary citizen who is also a professor at any institution. By such attachment a sad result is entailed. If the citizen who is also a professor speaks on a public issue, he is made to involve his institution in what he says. If what he says is unpopular, he may make his institution unpopular: it may lose students: it may lose benefactions.1 What is the institution to do? Should it make a rule, such as the Principal of King's College seemed to suggest in 1851, * that you will do your utmost to bear in mind the duty and importance of not compromising the College'? If it makes such a rule, it will be bound to define what is compromising, and it will be bound in the last resort to enforce its definition. In order to prevent itself from being compromised, it will compromise itself terribly. A professor may compromise it in part : it will compromise itself as a whole. A wise president of a great American University President Lowell of Harvard-has put the point admirably in his annual report for the Session 1916-1917: If a University or College censors what its professors may say . . it thereby assumes responsibility for that which it permits them to say. This is logical and inevitable, but it is a responsibility which an institution of learning would be very unwise in assuming.' A wise university will run any risk of being compromised by its members rather than compromise its entire self.

But if the university is wise to tolerate, the professor is wise to be severely moderate and master of himself. It is true that he is a citizen,

1 This is stated, or implied, by the Principal and Council of King's College in 1851. See the Life of F. D. Maurice, by F. Maurice, ii., p. 80, p. 98, p. 101.

and has every right of an ordinary citizen-engineer, lawyer, doctor or banker-to express his opinions on civic affairs. It may even be urged that he has a special right to express himself, in virtue of the possession of special knowledge; and it is possible to contend that he has even a duty to aid the judgment of the community by contributing his knowledge and his opinion in vexed questions which lie specially within the ambit of his chair. A professor of Spanish, for example, may hold himself bound to instruct the public opinion of his community on Spanish affairs, and even to suggest the adoption of a definite attitude by his fellow-countrymen in relation to such affairs, if they have become the question of the hour, pregnant with issues of peace or war, and if he has a knowledge which has not yet been attained by publicists, journalists, and other such guides of public thought. On the other hand, it is a pity that a professor should become a publicist except in the gravest emergency. It is difficult to be at once a publicist and a scholar; and a professor is primarily a scholar. Here we touch a fundamental consideration. A professor is a citizen, with the general rights or obligations of a citizen: he is also a member of a profession, with the special obligations of that profession. Herein he is like the doctor or lawyer, who have also their special obligations, as, for example, the obligation of secrecy in regard to the affairs of their clients. The special obligations of the professor, which are contained in the unwritten code of which we have already spoken, are less definite than those of the doctor or lawyer; but they are there. He has embraced a profession devoted to the dispassionate search for pure truth. He seeks truth for truth's sake by a rigorous method of inquiry. The temper of his mind must be steeled into a resolute disposition to see every side and to weigh every factor. He is training young minds: what he is, and what he does, affects the growth of those minds, just because the attitude, the temper and the method of the teacher are always a suggestive force to the young, and are always, however unconsciously, in virtue of that law of imitation which sways so strongly all our minds, the fountain and source of a like attitude, temper and method among the taught. If there is a discipline which is a special obligation of the soldier, there is also a discipline which is a special obligation of the professor who serves under the banner of truth. To see, and to show to others, the six sides of a square question: to amass every relevant fact, and to leave no fact unverified: to shun the limelight of publicity, because it distorts and is not the clear light of truth: not to lend knowledge to the service of a one-sided cause, or to divulge research in aid of a journalistic scoop'-all these are parts of the discipline. the same time, the professor must be a man, and not an automaton. He may become the latter, if he is purely and solely of the laboratory. Some measure of outside interest and outside work is a condition of vitality and even of balance. Without it he may be anæmically academic, and lose himself in an exaggerated sense of the sovereignty of his subject. F. D. Maurice was not in error when he said of his colleagues that their classes in the college, I believe, are infinitely the better for their labours and studies out of it.' 2

At

There are certain subjects in which the freedom and the duty of a professor raise specially difficult problems. They are the subjects of history, government and economics-to which we may perhaps add the

2 Op. cit., ii., p. 85.

subject of modern languages, when the professor of such a subject concerns himself, as it is good that he should, not only with the language and literature but also with the history and contemporary civilisation of the nation with which he is concerned. If the cause of academic freedom was fought in the past on the ecclesiastical field, and in regard to chairs of divinity, it is likely to be fought in the future on the field of politics and economics, and in regard to the chairs which touch those subjects. A professor of such subjects cannot stop short of running into the actualities of the present. If he were required to do so, he would be stopped from reaching what we may almost call the point of fertilisation, where his knowledge touches actual life. I would not say that the history of the past is the guide to the solution of the problems of the present; I would rather say, with Croce, that all history is contemporary history, and that the historian explains what we are by showing to us the living past which makes our present life. Even on that basis, the present is the concern of the historian, as it is also, for that matter, of the teacher of political theory, or of economics, or of modern languages. The teachers of all these subjects are handling and interpreting the present. They move in a region of very special difficulty and very special obligation. They handle the live stuff of which actual political and economic questions, national and international, are made. Incedunt per ignes. They may write to the Times on current questions, according to our English habit, which has no doubt its American equivalent; they may publish pamphlets and books on current questions ; they may even (and this raises desperate difficulties) become parliamentary candidates. I cannot deprecate the trend of these subjects and of their teachers in modern universities towards what I may call actuality. At the same time, I cannot but register the difficulties to which it leads. Public attention may be drawn to a university which has become a live coal, and public criticism may fasten on its burning. What is more, a number of interests may interest themselves in controlling the manner of its burning. Universities are always in need of endowment. A benefactor, or a group of benefactors, may be very ready to found a chair-and that possibly a chair of a certain complexion-in a subject of history, or of politics, or of economics, or of the language, literature and civilisation of a given nation. If the professor is conformable to their expectations, all may be wellfrom one point of view. If he is not-surgit quaestio. But this difficulty belongs rather to the topic of the freedom of the whole academic community, and that belongs to another and later inquiry. Here we are concerned with the freedom of the individual professor. So far as that freedom is concerned, I can only repeat, with some qualification and extension, the conclusions I have already tried to state. My general principle is freedom, uncontrolled by any assumption of responsibility by the university, which is likely to run more danger thereby than can ever be involved in any possible indiscretion which a professor may commit in the use of such freedom. My qualification of that principle is two-fold. In the first place, the freedom of the professor is subject to the discipline of the profession, which commands him to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If he cannot submit himself with all his heart to that discipline, he had better quit the profession and become a politician or a journalist. In the second place, the freedom of the professor, while it is not subject to the control of the institution to which he belongs, must

at any rate be qualified by the duties inherent in his membership of that institution. If it gives him freedom, he must not give it obloquy in return. He will be wise, in many cases, to say, and to say very clearly, that he speaks in his own name, as a private citizen, without any warrant from his institution, or any power to bind or conclude his institution in any way by what he says. But I do not think that a professor will ever go far wrong if he submits himself to the discipline of the profession. The great safeguard of true professorial liberty is simply a stern sense of the sanctity of the academic vocation, cherished among all its members, and enforced by all its members through the sanction of disapproval against an erring colleague. What we need is the elaboration by the professors themselves, and the enforcement by the professors themselves, of a code of professional conduct. Here at any rate, without any subscription to the tenets of guild socialism, and without any confession to a creed of the government of the teaching profession by itself, one may see a field for professional self-determination. It is not exactly an easy thing. Some professors, of a conservative cast of mind, will always frown upon their colleagues who are hardier, even when they walk within just limits. Others, of more radical propensities, will always smile upon a bold colleague, even when he has obviously overshot any conceivable mark. But if the thing be difficult, it is none the less needful.

I turn to consider, in conclusion, the broader theme of the freedom of the whole academic community. The medieval university, as its very name implies, was a free guild of teachers, or sometimes of teachers and scholars. It was not subject to any local authorities (there were none, and anyhow it was not local); it was hardly subject to the State, for the State was a loose federal sort of body, which left all guilds pretty much to their own devices; it might be subject to the Pope, because its members were clerks, but it could be turbulently independent even in the face of the Pope. There were benefactors—munificent benefactors who founded great colleges within the universities; but though they were fond of making statutes for the government of their colleges, they left opinion alone, for the simple reason that there was no need for any sort of control. The curriculum was largely a traditional curriculum in the arts; and if theology was sometimes fertile of heresies, there was, at any rate, only a single Catholic Church, and all men were members of one communion. The modern university is set in a far more tangled web of environment. It is an object of lively interest to the State, which may sometimes exert, or seek to exert, a control of its teachers and its teaching, and may at any rate (I speak of Great Britain) appoint Royal Commissions to inspect and statutory commissions to reform its organisation. Local authoritiesa dominion in Canada; a county or city in England-may interest themselves deeply in what they regard as a local university. Benefactions and endowments from private sources may play a large part in determining the extent and the direction of university development. A Labour party may demand that the universities shall undertake extra-mural work among the working classes; an organisation such as our National Union of Teachers may ask that the universities shall make it their policy to accept and train as graduates all the members of the teaching profession in the country. What has become of the free guild of the Middle Ages? And should the free guild of the Middle Ages be our modern ideal?