When The Freedom Of Press And Speech Suppresses The Right To Learn

A Habit of Lies

Academic Freedom
The right of a worker in academic institutions to research and teach their beliefs without their livelihood being placed in jeopardy by those who disagree.

Tolerant" Left Tries To Censor Conservative Book

“Every individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective and therefore a bias. Professors have every right to interpret the subjects they teach according to their individual points of view. This is the essence of academic freedom.”

Inside CU Academic Freedom 101

““[A]cademic freedom” is defined as the freedom to inquire, discover, publish and teach truth as the faculty member sees it, subject to no control or authority save the control and authority of the rational methods by which truth is established. . . . Within the bounds of this definition, academic freedom requires that members of the faculty must have complete freedom to study, to learn, to do research, and to communicate the results of these pursuits to others.” (Laws of the Regents, article 5.D.1(B), (C))

These are scary definitions as far as I am concerned. They are also opposed to the ideal of accumulating or imparting objective knowledge. According these definition teachers and professors may teach their students a lie and claim it is they have the right to teach their opinion. Any student that dares to disagree will receive a lower grade for failing to learn the opinion the instructor is teaching them.

The Nature of Science

Objective Experimentation and Observation.

Science depends heavily on the repeatability of experiments, and on their giving consistent (e.g. almost identical) results. This repeatability hinges on objective comparison of observations of different researchers studying the phenomenon. Objectivity indicates the desire to observe things as they are, without manipulating the observational results to accord with some preconceived world view. All observation is potentially contaminated, whether by our theories or our worldview or our past experiences.

Scientists, like anyone else, may be swayed by some preconceptions to look for certain experimental results rather than others. Scientists are people and suffer the flaws of humanity too, and it cannot truthfully be said that every scientific theory has arisen from a perfectly executed process of 'scientific method'. Scientists have desires, opinions, and biases that may sometimes influence them in the selection of their data and hypotheses - even, very occasionally, to the point of fraudulence. We trust that this is very rare, and that science is a self-correcting process with checks and balances - such as empirical replication, and peer reviews of published work. The scientific community as a whole, however, judges the work of its members by the objectivity and rigor with which that work has been conducted.

In their search for knowledge scientist see a need for peer review and so should instructors in their imparting knowledge to their students. What do you do when one political ideology dominates a particular field of study? All I can say is that efforts should be made in order that instructors and researchers turn out a product that is unbiased as possible. That is not going to happen if the current definition of Academic Freedom is held to.