The writer is the president of The New York Academy of Sciences and former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley
During the tumultuous years I was chancellor of UC Berkeley, I thought I had lived through it all: controversies over intercollegiate athletics, sexual harassment, debates over free speech, protests and riots, massive budget deficits, and state-level political tensions. Since last year, after the horrendous violence in Israel and Gaza, things have spun even further out of control. In the Ivy League alone, four of its eight presidents resigned in the space of a few months.
Now, within weeks of Donald Trump’s inauguration, we have seen draconian cuts at the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, threats to revoke funding for schools with racially inclusive programmes, and the cancellation of federal funding for research at universities such as Columbia and Johns Hopkins.
As if the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in research money was not bad enough, the letter from the US government to Columbia last week laying down the preconditions, “for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government”, is any president’s nightmare. While it begins with a reasonable tone, as in the first demand to “enforce existing disciplinary policies”, it soon becomes clear that these words are meant in a very specific sense: “Meaningful discipline,” it clarifies, “means expulsion or multi-year suspension.”
As we read on, the letter becomes increasingly sinister. It insists that the department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies be taken “under academic receivership” for a minimum of five years. As the relevant dean at Columbia, I once did that, to preserve academic governance and protect the department from outside interference. But it is likely that the intent now is to pressure the university to impose political views through its curriculum and faculty. That would sound the death knell for academic freedom.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, presidents, along with trustees, ruled over campuses with impunity. They made all hiring decisions for faculty and staff, created and imposed curricula, and were in sole control of student admissions and discipline. In order to dismantle this system, prominent academics circulated the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. It defined academic freedom as made up of three basic elements, “freedom of inquiry and research,” “freedom of teaching” and “freedom of extramural utterance and action”. Academic freedom is not the same as freedom of speech protected by the first amendment, but it was immeasurably strengthened by that fundamental protection.
In the years after the first world war, faculty assumed far greater control of internal governance. Over the next several decades, US universities took pre-eminence over the once dominant German research university, which collapsed under the weight of Nazi rule after 1933. Academic freedom was fundamental to the rise of US universities.
As universities became global research powerhouses postwar, college educations became basic to the newly expanding middle class. University presidents became major figures in American society. Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967, built new campuses, encouraged institutional change and innovation, and articulated the importance of higher education. In time, he was caught in the crosshairs of the university’s growing politicisation and held to account by the new California governor, Ronald Reagan, who had campaigned on a platform to clean up the mess at Berkeley. His first act was to fire Kerr.
In recent years, as tuition fees have soared, admission has become ever more selective and campus politics increasingly polarised, presidents once again find themselves in impossible situations. Administrators are blamed for ushering in the “neoliberal” university as public universities were defunded. As fundraising has become a major presidential obligation, votes of no confidence have followed just about any institutional crisis. The average length of presidential tenures has plummeted to about five years.
These are not ordinary times. As difficult as these jobs may be, this is the time to assert in the loudest possible way the extraordinary value of our universities, and the paramount need to maintain their research programmes as well as their commitment to academic freedom. Yes, universities can be made much better, and they must accept their failures while being open to change. But without them, our democracy, our science and our security as a nation will be gravely imperilled.
