The Nature of Freedom

Freedom in Education

This past November I presented a paper in a symposium on Faith-Based Higher Education at the Association for the Study of Higher Education. My contribution to the discussion was an analysis of faith-based enrollment rates in Christian affiliated institutions with overall attendance rates as a measure of religiosity in the U.S. the point here was to show that overall attendance in these institutions and rates of church attendance run a parallel trend with a spike in enrollment and attendance in the 1950's and 1980's respectively. I also pointed out that the more conservative denominations and evangelical institutions in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) both report that their overall attendance and enrollment rates fair better than more mainline or liberal counterparts. I also spoke briefly about faculty practices and how one indicator of evangelicalism is that students and faculty conform to a covenant or some other statement of faith in order to be considered a member of that evangelical educational community. This inevitably raised a question of freedom. The assumption is that if a faculty member has to conform to a statement of faith, that academic freedom and the freedom of the intellect is compromised. My response was that such a notion was not true of those faculty and such an understanding of freedom as a concept was misconstrued.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is rather clear in the Redbook about academic freedom and naturally sides with the faculty on the issue. The notion itself came from the German research model of education in which the human intellect should be unfettered to pursue truth in discipline. In short, to allow the conscience of the investigator have sway in all academic matters. Combined with classroom activity in the American university, this issue raises a similar construct that faculty should be free to engage students in any manner that is appropriate to the subject matter to promote student learning. But what is also clear is that any conditions or constraints on either of these processes need to be made clear in the contract with the faculty and that the university has an obligation to meet the goals of that contract just as much as the faculty. Essentially, this means that with a faith issue, the faculty must be willing to uphold that part of their contract just as the university cannot fire that faculty member for anything it wishes and at anytime unless outlined in that contract. A contract is a set of limitations, obligations and rights. It has clearly defined limits of action in order to work in a given organization and receive remuneration for services rendered. It is a set of limits and constraints that one chooses to uphold – even those constraints that are of a religious nature. So it is clear that the person who raised this question incorrectly assumed not only the AAUP's position, but the very nature of freedom itself in his question and statement.

Freedom as Concept

The incorrect understanding of freedom by the person who addressed me about academic freedom in my presentation is not limited to issues of faculty practice and its intimate relationship to academic freedom, but to a larger misunderstanding of the nature of freedom itself that seems to be quite prevalent elsewhere. The misunderstanding is this: freedom is the degree to which we can act and behave without constraint or condition in the matters of thought or action. Thus, my interrogator assumed that academic freedom was a right in which no action of faculty should be constrained by any ideological, philosophical, or social boundary. That is to say, "freedom" is the right to act without and boundaries and our "rights" are the conduits through which we enact our freedom in the world.

I encounter this issue as well in a course I teach in critical thinking skills. When we discuss issues such as the legalization of marijuana or smoking in public places, many of the arguments against restricting these activities focus on the right of the individual to act in freedom without boundaries. Thus, if I am in my car, I should be able to choose my actions and preventing use of cellphones is one more example of the government stripping my right to act unconstrained in the world. And this goes for many other examples as well. But if I ask them what freedom looks like without any law or constraint they find an answer difficult to be forthcoming.

Freedom, by its nature, requires constraint. We act and think in necessarily bounded conditions that our minds and the entire universe press upon us consistently. The most useful argument in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is that we do act within the bounds of time and space as a necessary condition for thought itself. We simply cannot reason or have a thought that is rational unless bounded by these conditions. This structured understanding of our psychology is then picked up in an entire structuralist school of thought in Piaget and onward in psychology and in Levi-Strauss in anthropology among others. The notion of structure is of course well known in scientific investigation since all scientific investigation works within clearly defined structures and theoretical complexities. In any means of knowing therefore, there is structure. Perhaps paradoxically then, a good structure actually gives us the freedom to think and act even as it limits how we think an act in the midst of certain constraints. So to go back to the question of what freedom looks like without law or constraint the answer is anything but freedom since freedom requires structure.

But lest we conceive of structure as such a positive vehicle, it is also true that poorly conceived structures or the use of a structure for personal power or influence can have negative effects on freedom as well. The very structure that gives one the freedom to think and act can also snap back and squeeze the conscience out persons and communities rendering them less than human. This is true of totalitarian regimes and other systems in which human thought is dictated and choice is pummeled out of that system's inhabitants. Thus there needs to be the freedom to act and think even if we recognize that there are necessary limits of doing so. A boundary to a structure must therefore be open to critique as a condition of freedom as well. If we know these boundaries exist, a form of freedom is to call that structure into question and enter in a negotiation with those who maintain it in order to improve it to foster intellectual and social growth. This is the difference between being bounded by certain limits in which we can freely move and act, and having our actions determined by an outside force. But we very often miss or confuse the important distinction between boundedness and determinism which is why we also misunderstand the nature of freedom.

So the question is not so much about one's free will to participate in any research pursuit or teaching practice that promotes and supports learning, but about the kind of structures in which one does so. There are, in each discipline, very standard structures of knowledge in each generation. Thomas Kuhn calls these "paradigms". From within a structure, new structures can emerge thus forming new ways of structuring knowledge and investigation. This occurred when Einstein, working from within a Newtonian system, revealed a very different theory of the structure of the universe that is quite standard procedure today in physics. While the Newtonian system can still work on basic levels of reality as a predictor, on a particle or universal scale, it simply falls apart. But such paradigm shifts are not examples of one's unfettered free thought, but examples of a critical apprehension of the structures that shape thought and action at a given moment in time. It also shows us that most of us are simply unaware of those structures that shape our thought and action even as we are unaware of the billions of particles of energy that course through our bodies out entire lives. Or, as Marshall McLuhan said, we cannot be sure who first discovered water, but we can be sure that it was not a fish! The point being that we always exist, think and act within a structured reality composed of numerous structures that conflict and cooperate with each other, but the nature of those structures goes unnoticed to us most of the time.

Such is the nature of freedom. Freedom in the academic sense ought to be about the freedom to engage the structures and norms of academic discipline and knowledge even as one observes, examines and theorizes about the objects of the universe in the midst of those very structures. This leaves room for the religious dimension of our activity in as much as it leaves room for the feminist, the multi-culturalist, the postmodernist, the liberal, the conservative, the socio-biologist, etc. It is not about finding ways to remove our boundaries as much as it is about discovering them and seeing why they exist in order to form new structures or reformed structures of reality from within. Such is the nature of our development as free beings in the world.

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