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Using lists of great universities, the locations of Nobel laureates, or the extent to which folks from other countries attend colleges, American universities still stand as the world’s best. This is because the curriculum is anchored in the liberal arts, research is curiosity-driven, social mobility is central to the mission, governance is grounded in faculty autonomy and academic freedom, and the partnership with the federal government is unique and extraordinary.

Two key issues stemming from the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution are discussed: freedom of speech and academic freedom. These two ideals are largely non-existent for faculty members working at private colleges, and universities and they are probably more restricted than faculty at public institutions might imagine. This chapter focuses on U.S. Supreme Court cases (e.g., Garcetti v Ceballos) as well as AAUP definitions of academic freedom. Defamation and other free speech issues are also discussed.

The role of faculty forms the heart of the university in terms of its scholarship, patient care, and teaching. It is important that the university and the faculty rededicate themselves to outstanding teaching; the erosion of teaching by tenured faculty is contributing to the strain in the relationship with the public. Tenure, academic freedom, and shared governance are all indispensable concepts in the functioning of a great university that are mysterious to those outside the academy. Communicating the importance of these concepts is a critical need for higher education.

This chapter examines the anticommunist hysteria—the phenomenon known as McCarthyism—that engulfed Cornell University during the Cold War. It begins with an overview of the controversy involving two Russian émigrés, Joshua Kunitz and Vladimir Kazakevich, who had been hired to teach in the university's Intensive Russian Language and Culture Program. It then considers how Edmund Ezra Day and his successor, Deane Waldo Malott, addressed the issue of communism on campus. It also discusses Robert Fogel's role in putting Marxism on the postwar campus map; the House of Representatives's indictment of Cornell zoology professor Marcus Singer for contempt; and the involvement of two acting university presidents between June 1949 and July 1951, Cornelis de Kiewiet and Theodore P. Wright, in controversies over academic freedom issues that rocked the campus. The chapter shows that Cornell did not purge left-leaning faculty members and refused to exclude unpopular ideas from the institution's definition of academic freedom.

This chapter provides an account of the controversy involving Columbia University Professor Nicholas De Genova’s exercise with respect to free speech and the principle of academic freedom. It examines the suppression of dissent among academic intellectuals within—and against—the imperial university. Professor De Genova argues that the news media can never provide a genuine forum or platform for the substantive articulation or clarification of any complex ethical, intellectual, or political position, particularly any that radically disrupts or seeks to subvert the dominant order of society. The chapter also provides a historical outline of colonial conquest, genocide, slavery, and imperial warfare as forming the bedrock of U.S. nation-state formation. It then examines the important role of universities to encourage, nurture, and protect critical thinking and political dissent.

This chapter focuses on the concept of campus democracy and academic freedom. It argues that the question of affordability of higher education is significant to any discussion of academic freedom. A survey from 2000 of 850 U.S. residents found that less than a tenth of adults who enjoy a family income of between $30,000 and $75,000 believe that college education is affordable. Those who make less than $30,000 fear that their children won’t be able to go to college. In addition, the survey found a majority worried more about college tuition than about the academic freedom of the faculty. The freedom to think is encroached upon by the encumbrances of money.

Collegiality is an elusive and poorly-defined concept—one that is hard to articulate but "We know it when we see it." This chapter examines cases in which the ideal of collegiality is at issue. But because of its vagueness, no one is exactly sure where collegiality fits in to hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. The notion of collegiality is examined from the perspective of the literature on organizational citizenship behavior (commonly known as OCB). Included in the discussion are the similarities and differences between collegiality and civility. The chapter also examines the socialization process in academia and the possible dampening effect of collegiality on academic freedom.

Between 1945-1989 we can trace a growing conflation of economic liberalism with social and cultural liberalism, such that social liberalism becomes engulfed by neoliberal capital and subsumed under market fundamentalism. As a consequence, there emerges a political debate about liberal societies – in Popper’s terms, ‘open societies’ – and their relation to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and institutions. However, this misses the point that, when social values are essentially monetized, the institutional values of academic freedom – characterised by an ‘open university’ - are potentially compromised. The chapter examines the historical constitution of the UK’s ‘Open University’ – as an explicitly democratising institution - and sets that against the contemporary logic of zero-sum competition, which envisages the failure and closure of some universities as a sign of the success of the national and global system. The paradox is that, as more universities open, so the range of intellectual options for critical thinking actually diminishes. The consequence is the enclosure of the intellectual commons, and the re-establishment of protected privilege and the legitimization of structural social inequality. Organisations such as the Russell Group embody this entrenching of inequality.

To many, the role of the faculty in academic institutions is unclear. It is important to understand how professors impact the reputational quality of a university. This chapter explores how faculty earn their doctor of philosophy (PhD) degrees, the differences between tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty positions, the academic promotion and tenure process, academic freedom, and shared governance.

The contemporary institution fails to understand the real meaning of ‘mass higher education’. A mass higher education should address the concerns of those masses of ‘ordinary people’ who, for whatever reasons, do not attend a university. Instead, the contemporary sector simply admits more individuals from lower social and economic classes. Behind this is a deep suspicion of the intellectual whose knowledge marks them out as intrinsically elitist and not ‘of the people’. An intellectual concerned about everyday life is now seen as suspicious, given the normative belief that a university education is about individual competitive self-advancement. This intellectual is now an enemy of ‘the people’, and incipiently one who might even be regarded as criminal in dissenting from conformity with social norms of neoliberalism. There is a history to this, dating from 1945; and it sets up a contest between two version of the university: one sees it as a centre of humane and liberal values, the other as the site for the production of individuals who conform to and individually benefit from neoliberal greed. The genuine exception is the intellectual who dissents; but dissent itself is now seen as potentially criminal.

The coming together of the racial crisis, bitter internal divisions over the Vietnam War, campus upheavals, political radicalism associated with the New Left, the growth of the counterculture, and the emergence of new forms of feminism made the 1960s an epoch of revolutionary change for all Americans. But for American Catholics the profound religious reorientation associated with the Second Vatican Council multiplied the disruptive effect of all the other forces of change. This clashing of the tectonic plates of culture produced nothing less than a spiritual earthquake in the American church. Although the dust has still not fully settled, it was clear from an early date that the old ideological structure of Catholic higher education, which was already under severe strain, had been swept away entirely. As institutions, most Catholic colleges and universities weathered the storm. But institutional survival in the midst of ideological collapse left them uncertain of their identity. That situation still prevails. To explore it fully would require another book. Our task now is to review the emergence of the problem, sketch its general outlines, and point out why it marks the end of an era in the history of Catholic higher education. For a number of reasons, freedom became the central theme in American Catholic higher education in the early 1960s. As the most basic of American values, it was, of course, immensely attractive to the socially assimilated generation of younger Catholics for whom John F. Kennedy’s election and Pope John XXIII’s aggiornamento vindicated the hopes of the earlier Americanists, whose travails Catholic historians had so recently explored. Moreover, the contemporaneous demand by African Americans for “Freedom Now” linked freedom to the religious idealism of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violent crusade for civil rights. Freedom was, in addition, the polar opposite of the rigidity, formalism, and authoritarianism that had become so distasteful to American Catholic intellectuals; by contrast, it meshed beautifully with their growing insistence on the importance of individual subjectivity.

Chapter 7 considers the question of whether successful interdisciplinary lines of inquiry will congeal into new research fields or disciplinary subspecialties. The analysis suggests that the enduring success of any interdisciplinary system will require the recreation of established organizational forms. The discussion emphasizes the importance of research communities to the vitality of the current disciplinary system. The emphasis here is on the role of disciplines or discipline-like units as functioning intellectual, social, career and political systems. The chapter includes a discussion of multiple meanings of the term “integration.” Chapter 7 also considers the theme of antidisciplinarity that is evident in the writings of some scholars in this area, as well as a brief review of extant interdisciplinary doctoral degree programs.

During My Nearly five decades in the academic world, the character of the university has changed, and not entirely for the better. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, America’s universities were heavily influenced, if not completely driven, by faculty ideas and concerns. Today, institutions of higher education are mainly controlled by administrators and staffers who make the rules and set more and more of the priorities of academic life. Of course, universities have always employed administrators. When I was a graduate student in the 1960s and a young professor in the 1970s, though, top administrators were generally drawn from the faculty, and even midlevel managerial tasks were directed by faculty members. These moonlighting academics typically occupied administrative slots on a part-time or temporary basis and planned in due course to return to full-time teaching and research. Because so much of the management of the university was in the hands of professors, presidents and provosts could do little without faculty support and could seldom afford to ignore the faculty’s views. Many faculty members proved to be excellent managers. Through their intelligence, energy and entrepreneurship, faculty administrators, essentially working in their spare time, helped to build a number of the world’s premier institutions of higher education. One important reason for their success was that faculty administrators never forgot that the purpose of the university was the promotion of education and research. Their own short-term managerial endeavors did not distract them from their long-term academic commitments. Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience, and even those who spent time in a classroom or laboratory hope to make administration their life’s work and have no plan to return to the faculty. For many of these career managers, promoting teaching and research is less important than expanding their own administrative domains. Under their supervision, the means have become the end.

Relations between Catholic institutions and the North Central Association (NCA) played a key role in the organizational strains that developed in the early 1930s. As we saw in Chapter 2, the example set by this pacesetter among the regional accrediting associations contributed importantly to the NCEA’s launching into the work of accreditation. Pioneering Catholic reformers like James A. Burns, C.S.C., and Albert C. Fox, S.J., had close ties with the North Central, a tradition carried further by later progressives like William F. Cunningham, C.S.C., who was appointed to its board of review in 1926, and Alphonse M. Schwitalla, S.J., who served as its president ten years later. The North Central welcomed Catholic involvement. After all, Catholic schools constituted a significant proportion of its clientele, so it made good organizational sense to cultivate friendly relations with Catholic educators. Besides, as Raymond M. Hughes, president of Miami University (Ohio) and a leading figure in the North Central, pointed out in 1926, the accrediting standards being used by the NCEA were “practically identical” with those of the NCA. This suggested the desirability of closer cooperation between the two bodies, especially in dealing with problems distinctive to Catholic institutions. The example Hughes cited to illustrate this kind of problem was the difficulty NCA inspectors had in evaluating the “educational backgrounds” of faculty members who were members of religious communities. This was in one sense a mark of recognition, but it was linked to something less reassuring to Catholics—the North Central’s steadily rising expectations about the amount and quality of graduate training college faculty members should have. The NCA did not evaluate graduate programs as such, but it was very much interested in the professional competence of faculty members, and that was rated in terms of the graduate training they had received. As more Catholic schools began offering advanced work, the NCA felt some concern about its quality, especially since so many faculty members at Catholic colleges took their graduate degrees from other Catholic institutions.

The eruption of anti-Catholic feeling that reached its climax around 1950 is best understood as a backlash against what was regarded as undue Catholic influence in politics, public morality, and general social policy. Although it testified in a negative way to the reality of the Catholic Revival, it came as a shock to Catholics who did not think they had given just cause for complaint. Their predominant reaction was an impassioned rejection of the charges against them. At the same time, however, reasonable Catholics wished to mitigate the existing tensions by removing any grounds for legitimate criticism. Hence a more irenic and accommodationist line of thought developed, which, though based on the natural law, set in motion tendencies not fully consonant with the premises of the the Catholic Revival. To understand how these crosscurrents affected the ideological context of Catholic higher education, we turn first to the anti-Catholic backlash. Suspicion of and hostility toward the Catholic church, which had subsided after the Al Smith campaign of 1928, began to reawaken in the mid-thirties. Political liberals, a group which included secular humanists as well as Protestants and Jews, were the first affected. On the domestic scene, Father Coughlin’s shift to an anti-New Deal position in 1935-36 alerted them to the fascist potentialities of his influence. Over the next few years, their fears were reinforced by his growing extremism on the menace of Communism, his increasingly open anti-Semitism, and the sometimes violent behavior of his “Christian Front” followers, especially in New York City. Internationally, the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936, was the decisive issue. To American liberals, the war was a clear-cut contest between fascism and democracy, and the church had shown its true colors by rallying to the fascists. But most American Catholics, deeply shocked by the widespread desecration of churches and slaughter of priests that marked the early months of the war, saw the struggle as a conflict between Christian civilization and atheistic Communism. They bitterly resented the indifference displayed by American liberals to the persecution of the church in Spain.

Some of the hits taken by administrators will be delivered by those faculty members who have forgotten (or never knew) what their job is and spend time trying to form their students’ character or turn them into exemplary citizens. I can’t speak for every academic, but I am not trained to do these things, although I am aware of people who are: preachers, therapists, social workers, political activists, professional gurus, inspirational speakers. Teachers, as I have said repeatedly, teach materials and confer skills, and therefore don’t or shouldn’t do a lot of other things—like produce active citizens, inculcate the virtue of tolerance, redress injustices, and bring about political change. Of course a teacher might produce some of these effects—or their opposites—along the way, but they will be, or should be, contingent and not what is aimed at. The question that administrators often ask, “What practices provide students with the knowledge and commitments to be socially responsible citizens?” is not a bad question, but the answers to it should not be the content of a college or university course. No doubt, the practices of responsible citizenship and moral behavior should be encouraged in our young adults, but it’s not the business of the university to do so, except when the morality in question is the morality that penalizes cheating, plagiarizing, and shoddy teaching. Once we cross the line that separates academic work from these other kinds, we are guilty both of practicing without a license and of defaulting on our professional responsibilities. But isn’t it our responsibility both as teachers and as citizens to instill democratic values in our students? Derek Bok thinks so and invokes studies that claim to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between a college education and an active participation in the country’s political life: “researchers have shown that college graduates are much more active civically and politically than those who have not attended college” (Our Underachieving Colleges). But this statistic proves nothing except what everyone knows: college graduates have more access to influential circles than do those without a college education.

Of course, there’s no shortage of people who will step in to do your job if you default on it. The corporate world looks to the university for its workforce. Parents want the university to pick up the baton they may have dropped. Students demand that the university support the political cause of the moment. Conservatives believe that the university should refurbish and preserve the traditions of the past. Liberals and progressives would like to see those same traditions dismantled and replaced by what they take to be better ones. Alumni wonder why the athletics teams aren’t winning more. Politicians and trustees wonder why the professors aren’t teaching more. Whether it is state legislators who want a say in hiring and course content, or donors who want to tell colleges how to spend the funds they provide, or parents who are disturbed when Dick and Jane bring home books about cross-dressing and gender change, or corporations that want new departments opened and others closed, or activist faculty who urge the administration to declare a position on the war in Iraq, there is no end of interests intent on deflecting the university from its search for truth and setting it on another path. Each of these lobbies has its point, but it is not the university’s point, which is, as I have said over and over again, to produce and disseminate (through teaching and publication) academic knowledge and to train those who will take up that task in the future. But can the university defend the autonomy it claims (or should claim) from public pressures? Is that claim even coherent? Mark Taylor would say no. In a key sentence in the final chapter of his book The Moment of Complexity (2001), Taylor declares that “the university is not autonomous but is a thoroughly parasitic institution, which continually depends on the generosity of the host so many academics claim to reject.” He continues: “The critical activities of the humanities, arts, and sciences are only possible if they are supported by the very economic interests their criticism so often calls into question.”

The opening chapters of this book were a story of expansion, in which more and more universities were created after progressive reformers finally broke the Oxbridge duopoly. And, just as important, in the second part of the book we have seen it is also a story of personal growth and advance as more people have their lives transformed by higher education. In the previous two chapters we have then seen how useful this institution has become—broadening its role in professional training and promoting growth and innovation by working with business and government. The university is one of the key institutions of the twenty-first century and finds itself deeply embedded in the market economy. But there are doubters who are wary of this very success because it is changing the character of the university. One of my main objectives as universities minister was to create a more open and diverse higher education system which would work better for students. That meant more choice and competition between universities and easier entry for new providers as well as removing the number controls which limited the scope for universities to grow in response to student demand. I believed these changes would ensure students were better served and make British universities stronger in a higher education market which is increasingly global. In effect our funding reforms gave students an education voucher to be spent at the university of their choice if they met its admission requirements, to be repaid when they were graduates if they could afford to. We replaced funding via a Government agency providing grants to universities with funding via the fees (funded by loans) which students brought with them. Many people in higher education are suspicious of this wider agenda. They worry about ‘marketization’ and, just as bad, ‘consumerism’. Those market values pervade the wider environment within which Western universities operate. All these changes open up a key question: to what extent should universities themselves absorb these values or should they deliberately hold themselves apart? There are sceptics who fear that as universities grow bigger and more economically significant they betray their distinctive values.