MIT faculty adopts “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom”
Was reading the policy document when this “innocuous” paragraph struck me. Am I misunderstanding something?<p>&gt; Regarding freedom of teaching, faculty do not have total discretion over their course content. For example, a class titled “Beginning Chinese” cannot be taught as an advanced calculus class. And department heads would be within their rights to consider faculty members’ expertise in the process of making or adjusting teaching assignments. Working within our standard administrative structures such as curriculum planning committees, faculty generally should be able to teach the scholarly content they wish. Academic freedom does not give faculty members the unfettered right to advocate political beliefs in their classrooms that are irrelevant to the course content. Such political expression should be grounded in the faculty member’s expertise, relevant to the subject matter, and consistent with both sound pedagogical principles and the achievement of learning objectives.
The exercise of academic freedom with respect to research, publication, and teaching takes place in a context of scholarly rigor. Evaluating the strength of arguments and the quality of ideas is intrinsic to research and education processes. Aside from cases where evidence of invidious discrimination exists, faculty members cannot claim that the denial of tenure based on a professional assessment of the faculty member’s scholarship constitutes censorship. Nor can a student receiving a less than desired grade in a class claim that wrong answers are a form of protected speech. Though faculty and researchers have a good deal of freedom, that freedom is exercised in an academic context in which disciplinary competence and professional judgment are crucial to knowledge production and education.19
Freedom of intramural expression means that faculty members should be able to speak their minds about their own institution and its policies. MIT strongly values this freedom<p>Isn’t this saying “stay in your lane and only express political views if it’s relevant to your academic discipline”. An engineering professor might have a thing or two to say about copyright but since their academic profession isn’t law, they’re not allowed to opine on it? A biology professor might not agree with climate policy of the current administration and that means they can’t speak their opinion because they’re not a climatologist nor a political scientist? Isn’t academic freedom supposed to be the opportunity to mix in thoughts from outside the field so that blind spots can be examined? Stratifying and isolating freedom of speech in this manner would seem to encourage intellectual isolation. Not something I’d want to see from an institution that’s supposed to be educating the next generation of great thinkers who aren’t bound by conventional thinking. Of course, I probably just misunderstood what this is saying. I didn’t go to MIT and I never did do well in English class.