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Speaking Out

The Right of Faculty to Teach

Given the recent confusion in some quarters—especially in some legislatures—over the the rights of students and the rights of faculty, I’d like to clarify what NEA and most faculty mean by academic freedom.

It is important to distinguish between academic freedom and free speech; they are similar but not identical concepts and the differences have important consequences for college and university classrooms. All of us in a campus environment, faculty and students alike, have free speech rights under the First Amendment.

The classroom is different than the campus at large. Professors have academic freedom in a professional capacity, not simply as individuals. Academic freedom allows professors to exercise their professional judgment in teaching and research. The exercise of this professional judgment is based on the years of training that faculty undergo to prepare for their work.

Students do not have the same level of training to provide the expertise in the classroom or laboratory. That is not to say that students do not contribute to the production of knowledge. They often do, and good teachers incorporate those contributions into the classroom experience. But students are not responsible for the presentation of the material in the same kind of systematic professional manner as the faculty member.

Students are ill-served to be told they have the same sort of discretion in the classroom as the faculty member. Students also need to understand the difference between offering an interpretation and indoctrinating an audience.

Faculty members offer interpretations all the time, and it is important that we do so. Especially in the humanities and the social sciences, higher education is about learning how to develop interpretations, how to communicate those interpretations, and most critically, how to support those interpretations with facts, theories, models, and the other tools of scholarly interpretation. A faculty member offering a scholarly interpretation is emphatically not the same thing as telling students how to vote.

Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on subjects examined in their courses is a responsibility of faculty. NEA believes faculty have this responsibility and that it is inappropriate intrusion into the academic process, and a serious violation of academic freedom, for an outside entity to determine academic questions that are properly the responsibility of faculty.

Kathy Sproles, a professor of English at Hartnell College in Salinas, California, and a 30-year veteran of community college teaching, is president of the National Council for Higher Education, NEA’s higher education caucus.