by Bill Tierney
Assume our usual email address is the university’s server. I get, roughly, 50 email messages a day and another 20 that are purely junk. I work at a private university, and like the mailbox where I receive paper correspondence, I always have assumed that the university has the right to circumscribe what I receive. What about what I send?
Say that a colleague is frazzled with a graduate student who hasn’t turned in a dissertation chapter (something that of course would never happen with any of my graduate students). “I’m going to come over to your house and whip you if you don’t get it done. Now stop fooling around and get it to me ASAP,” the colleague writes on a late Saturday afternoon.
The student, of course, is upset, and then hopefully thinks about it and gets angry and talks to the dean. The dean comes to my colleague and says he shouldn’t send such emails. Does the dean have the right to intervene in this situation: a private correspondence between professor and student about an academic topic?
If asked, I would say the statement was unpolitic, my colleague used poor judgment, and the message was likely to be counter-productive. But does the author have academic freedom to write such a statement?
This is messy. We get into dopey arguments about whether such statements can ‘light a fire’ under a student, and if anyone actually believes the author really intended to ‘whip’ the poor grad student. Perhaps the grad student could claim being frightened or harassed and that such statements should be banned. But if we ban that statement, then don’t we need to go on a case by case basis with all language? The professor might claim that it was a private statement to an individual, he has written such things in the past, and he has an excellent record of getting students to finish dissertations.
I’m not so sure about what the outcome would be. I am certain it’s a dopey statement. I’m equally certain that it could be hurtful. But my simple point here is that your email is not necessarily in your private domain – it’s in the public domain, and because it is, whether you get to say whatever you want on email to whoever you’re sending it to is not an open and shut question.
So email writer beware – and give the poor grad student a break, why don’t you?
This raises some interesting issues – not so much about the academic freedom of staff but about the historical reasons for the absence of students’ academic freedom in the USA.
The idea of Lernfreiheit, students’ academic freedom, was a central aspect of the Germanic model of scholarship. Paulsen [The German Universities: Their Character and Historical Development, transl. by E. Perry, New York: Macmillan & Co. (1895, p. 201], for instance, described how Lernfreiheit in German universities was ‘as good as unlimited. The student selects for himself his instructors and course of study as well as his university and professions: what lectures he shall attend, in what exercises he shall take part,’ and some University Presidents took on the task of implementing Lernfreiheit in the USA. For example Harvard President, Charles Eliot Eliot, [‘Liberty in Education’, in Charles William Eliot, Educational Reform: Essays and Addresses, New York: Century, p.125-148. (1898, 125)] believed that a ‘university of liberal arts and sciences must give its students three things: I. Freedom in choice of studies. II. Opportunity to win academic distinction in single subjects or special lines of study. III. A discipline which distinctly imposes on each individual the responsibility of … guiding his own conduct’. Consequently, as Kuehnemann [Charles Eliot: President of Harvard, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. (1909, 11)] relates, Eliot extended ‘the elective system to almost the whole list of studies, … it was left to the student to designate the courses he desired to pursue. … Manifestly, what the change really meant was the transition from school instruction to academic study.’ Similarly, reporting to the Trustees of Cornell, President Andrew White [Report of the Committee on Organisation Presented to the Trustees of the Cornell University, October 21st, 1866, Albany, N.Y.: Van Benthuysen. (1867, 12)] argued that ‘the usual imposition of a single, fixed course is fatal to any true university spirit’ and that ‘an overwhelming majority of students are competent to choose between different courses of study, carefully balanced and arranged by men who have brought thought and experience to the work.’ However, Helmholtz, [‘On Academic Freedom in German Universities’, in Hermann von Helmholtz, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, London: Longmans Green and Co., (1908, 251)] in his Inaugural Address as Rector of the University of Berlin in 1877, cautioned that ‘any institution based upon freedom must also be able to calculate upon the judgment and reasonableness of those to whom freedom is granted. … The majority (of students) … must come to us with a sufficiently logically trained judgment, with a sufficient habit of mental exertion … Thus prepared they have hitherto been sent to us by the Gymnasiums. It would be very dangerous for the Universities if large numbers of students frequented them, who were less developed in the above respects.’
Hence the success of lernfreiheit as an academic policy was dependent on German students receiving a high level of education in the gymnasia system prior to entering university. The situation was very different in the USA where Andrew West, Founding Dean of Princeton’s Graduate School, remarked ‘Inexperience, immaturity, incomplete preparation, want of acquaintance with his own powers, half shaped desires and purposes, with a conscious willingness on the part of the diligent to be trained and taught, – these are the very marks by which the entering freshman is regularly detected. … The American college-student at entrance is decidedly immature’ [‘What is Academic Freedom’, (1885) The North American Review, 140(342), p.434]. Similarly Hart (p.287f) observed that ‘there is no analogy between the German student and the American undergraduate, nothing that can help both the reader and the writer to make a fair comparison. The American collegian is … simply a school-boy of larger growth. … he is still a school-boy, he learns set tasks. Whereas the German student is the direct opposite. … He is a young man, and can look after himself.’ Other educators were overtly hostile to the idea of lernfreiheit. Farnham [‘Academic Freedom in Germany’, New Englander and Yale Review, 46(202): 67-71. (1887, p.71)], for instance, argued ‘we should not copy one of the worst features of the German system and allow our students an excess of liberty, which is regarded by some of those who are best acquainted with it as a relic of barbarism.’ Beyond Harvard, Eliot’s experimental free elective system never prevailed so completely or for so long, and was widely criticised, (more particularly by the President of Princeton, James McCosh [The New Departure in College Education, Being a Reply to President Eliot’s Defense of It in New York, Feb24, 1885, New York Charles Scribner’s Sons], who publicly deplored the ‘new departure in college education’), before being largely undone by his successor at Harvard, Lawrence Lowell who, in his first Presidential Report to the Board, introduced a new ‘major and minor’ curriculum with two objectives ‘first, to require every student to make a choice of electives that will secure a systematic education, … second, to make the student plan his college curriculum … as a whole.’ [Lowell, A. Lawrence, Annual Report of the President of Harvard University to the Overseers on the state of the University for the Academic Year 1980-09, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University. (Lowell, 1910, 9)] Where Harvard led, others followed. Consequently, as Magsino [Magsino, R. F., (1978) ‘Student academic freedom and the changing student/university relationship’ in Ethics and educational policy, ed. K.A. Strike and K. Egan, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p.36–57. (1978, p.37)] has concluded, ‘in the latter part of the nineteenth century, American educators trained in Germany brought with them to North America a rich German concept of student academic freedom. This concept embraced specific freedoms relating to students’ determination of the course of their study and of their personal and social lives within the university, Unfortunately these educators failed to transform the concept into reality.’ The consequence was that while Lerhfreiheit was protected in the USA, Lernfreiheit seems to have been, and remains, largely neglected, despite the fact that, assumedly, students entering university today are much better prepared than were their counterparts in the 19th Century.
Speaking as an academic in the UK, (which does not have a Humboldtian tradition, much less any protection for academic freedom), I would never use such language in an email to a graduate student, even if I knew that student very well and the comment was in jest, for fear of possible unanticipated consequences. All the UK universities are obliged to conduct an annual students’ satisfaction survey, the results of which are published nationally – any action which might jeopardise (however unwittingly) a good rating would lead to dire consequences for the member of staff concerned. Additionally, such events might affect the periodic rating of our departmental teaching by the national government’s Quality Assurance Agency, which in turn impacts on student recruitment. Furthermore, such actions might lead (for example) to a member of staff being excluded from the departmental submission to the periodic national Research Assessment Exercise, which determines our level of research grant from the government (pretty much equivalent to professional suicide as far as one’s research profile is concerned). Although I could be in error, it seems to me that academic life in the USA appears more relaxed about such matters. Lucky you!!!