Academic freedoms may be under attack, but professors have legal protections as well.
Kent Kauffman, professor of business law at Purdue University Fort Wayne, discusses this.
Faculty Bio:
Academic freedoms may be under attack, but professors have legal protections as well. I’m Dr. Lynn Pasquerella, president of The American Association of Colleges & Universities, and today on The Academic Minute: Kent Kauffman, professor of business law at Purdue University Fort Wayne, discusses this.
Transcript:
Academic freedom has an almost kaleidoscope effect. It looks differently to various groups: university administrators; faculty; students; and certainly politicians. For faculty, academic freedom is an essential prerogative, allowing them to decide what to study and research, and what and how to teach – even when those choices are controversial. Over a half-century ago, the United States Supreme Court, in one case, declared academic freedom vital to a democracy, and in another case said academic freedom required safeguarding because of its “transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned.”
The sources of academic freedom include tradition (to the extent academic freedom’s history is valued), binding employment policies that detail its contours to faculty, and, for public university faculty, the First Amendment, for which teaching is considered a “matter of public concern” and worthy of constitutional protection.
Regrettably, some states are restricting academic freedom in various ways, including prohibiting the kinds of courses or content that can be taught, allowing students to secretly record their instructors in class, and giving students the right to file complaints against their instructors for what those students would consider offensive teaching statements. But faculty have for decades been protected by a legal doctrine, the Germaneness Standard, which evaluates whether controversial content is pedagogically related, not if it makes students uncomfortable. In a noteworthy case, an adjunct instructor of interpersonal communication sued his college after he was fired because a few students got offended by a social deconstructivism, word association exercise he conducted in class. In ruling for the instructor, a federal court of appeals concluded the exercise was germane to the subject and, thus, protected by the First Amendment, because teaching is a matter of public concern.
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