International Perspectives on Academic Freedom

The beginnings of academic freedom are testimony to internationalism. European universities in the Middle Ages were self-governing to a degree, but the Church or the state controlled them for centuries. As modern science emerged in 17th-century England and as partaking in research and scholarship began to spread in the 18th and 19th centuries throughout Europe, an interest in the protection of free inquiry intensified. Students who pursued advanced education did so in Europe where many of them became professors, and where, consequently, the idea of Lehrfreiheit emerged: the right of the university professor to freedom of inquiry and teaching. Modern notions of academic freedom began to coalesce in the 19th century and on into the early and mid-20th century with the ascendancy of the research role performed by academics. Yet the point should not be lost that a broader interest in freedom of thought and teaching predates this process of formalization. Assertions of scholarly freedom in the 13th and 14th centuries at the University of Paris constitute a legacy of protections in the pursuit of knowledge, and the term scholastic freedom is traceable to Pope Honorius III in the 13th century. Owing to its span across time and cultural contexts, it is unsurprising that understandings of academic freedom have evolved and are thereby also susceptible to misunderstanding and misapplication. That there might be simply one way to construe academic freedom is a modern paradox. More accurately, academic freedom is nestled in a constellation of cultural, social, and political settings and traditions and histories. Academic freedom is often assumed to be a necessary condition for an authentic academic profession wherever professors are employed. In only a limited number of national systems, particularly the United States, academic freedom is strongly associated with tenure. But globally, most systems of higher education do not have tenure. This fact begs the question of how academic freedom, however construed, can exist in an absence of tenure protections. Answers to the question are again conditioned by histories and traditions, long or limited, that situate professors’ work in a relationship between the state and higher education. The reality that academic freedom is understood differently in different parts of world makes comparison difficult. This likely accounts for the relative paucity of explicitly empirical treatment of academic freedom in international comparative focus. In actuality it is challenging to offer a universal definition of “academic freedom.”