Globalizations

ISSN: 1474-7731 (Print) 1474-774X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rglo20

Academic Freedom and the Critical Task of the

University

Judith Butler

To cite this article: Judith Butler (2017): Academic Freedom and the Critical Task of the University,
Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2017.1325168

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Globalizations, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2017.1325168

Academic Freedom and the Critical Task of the University

JUDITH BUTLER
Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Keywords: academic freedom, critical thought, university, higher education, Turkey, Aca-
demics for Peace (BAK)

Why is academic freedom essential to the idea of the university? To answer this question, let us
first ask, what is academic freedom? Academic freedom is both a right and an obligation. It
allows faculty to pursue lines of research and modes of thought without interference from gov-
ernment or other external authorities. It gives faculty rights of participation in the making of cur-
ricula and the governance of the university. Faculty may consider themselves individuals
pursuing their lines of research, but they are also obligated to participate in governance, to
foster and direct those institutional relations that secure the tasks of higher education, which
include the task of the university to preserve and support critical thought, even when it is not
in line with official views of the state or other external institutions.
Freedom of thought or freedom of expression is surely related to academic freedom, but they
are not precisely the same. Someone on the street or in public life may well exercise a freedom of
expression, espousing a point of view that is that individual’s right to express. But those who
work within the framework of academic freedom are already within institutions and so have a
certain obligation. Those institutions provide the condition for the academic thought and
research they do, but those institutions have to be reproduced and maintained precisely by
those who wish to exercise a freedom of inquiry and expression within those institutions. In
other words, academic freedom implies a right to free inquiry within the academic institution,
but also an obligation to preserving the institution as a site where freedom of inquiry can and
does take place, free of intervention, and censorship.
For academic institutions funded or regulated by the state, academic freedom takes on a
specific meaning and urgency (those funded by private donors also have a conundrum if
donors seek to establish some lines of inquiry and to foreclose others). The state’s funding
ought properly to be a commitment to higher education, that is, to the institutional structures
that embody and facilitate academic freedom, that allow the classroom to be a site where new
ideas are considered, that provide the possibility for research in new directions that cannot
always be anticipated in advance. So public funding and regulations must embody a commitment

Correspondence Address: Judith Butler, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, 4125 Dwinelle
Hall, Berkeley, CA, USA.
# 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. Butler

to preserve the institution as one where forms of thought can be neither fully predicted nor con-
trolled by the state or any of its private or religious constituencies. The state funds that which it
cannot fully control—that is how democracies should work—and that freedom from censorship
and control is a central meaning of academic freedom. Academic freedom preserves the incal-
culable dimension of thought, the future of thought that eludes prediction and control.
In fact, states have an obligation to secure a freedom of inquiry that may well include critical
perspectives on the state itself. They also have an obligation to provide higher education to their
publics. A number of international resolutions have supported this dual obligation of the state
toward higher education: higher education must be offered, and it must be offered on the
grounds of academic freedom. In article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(1948) and in article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural
Rights (1966), it is made clear that all states have an obligation to provide higher education
(‘Academic Freedom Statement’, 2005).1
Higher education is not only a public good that every state should provide, but higher edu-
cation based on principles of academic freedom is necessary for an informed public, a public
that can understand and evaluate issues of common concern and form judgements on the
basis of a knowledgeable understanding of the world. Further, higher education grounded in aca-
demic freedom opens up the possibility of free and critical thought, including intellectual pos-
itions that call into question the status quo, the policies of government, and even the possibility
of new political formations. Within the academy, a ‘critical’ position is defended on the basis of
academic freedom. From the perspective of public life, that critical position may well count as
dissent. Thus, viewpoints pursued within the academy ought rightly to be protected and sup-
ported by the principles of academic freedom; viewpoints that constitute political dissent in
public life ought rightly to be protected and supported within democracies as freedom of
expression.
Within the natural sciences, the very possibilities of invention, discovery, or innovation
depend on academic freedom. At the UNESCO conference convened in 1950 in Nice on the
topic of ‘Universities of the World’ the principle was put forth that knowledge must be
pursued for its own sake, and that it must ‘follow wherever the search for truth may lead.’ If
an industry has a product and does not want that product to be replaced in the future by an
alternative product, they may seek to influence a government to constrain research on university
campuses. But they would be wrong to do so, and any government or administration that sought
to implement their wish would be in clear violation of academic freedom. But how does this
principle hold for the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts? If we live in a society
with a particular form of government and we start to ask whether that form of government is
just, we are in effect following the procedure of Plato’s dialogues. Although we are supported
by that state—perhaps we are citizens or the university is funded by the state—we are also in
the position to call a particular form of government into question when its actions prove to be
unjust. Of course, we have to consider what we mean by justice, and we have to find evidence
for our claims, but if we undertake that conceptual and evidentiary work and arrive at the thesis
that the current government is unjust, we are exercising our academic freedom, and if we move
into the broader public world to argue our case in the public sphere, we are practicing dissent,
one expression of our right to free speech. In both cases, we are exercising a freedom of thought
and expression that is not only essential to higher education and to democracy, but also to the
very meaning of human freedom. Indeed, there is no human freedom without freedom of
thought and expression, even though freedom implies other sorts of freedom as well, including
freedom of mobility and assembly, the freedom to live without the fear or injury or death. In the
 Academic Freedom and the Critical Task of the University 3

academy, we are also free to imagine alternative forms of society and of the very relation
between society and the state, to develop new accounts of justice and freedom in response to
historical realities that compel our thinking. When we develop forms of thought in relation to
an historical crisis, our thought becomes critical—critical in the sense that it is a form of ques-
tioning presuppositions, tracking forms of power, but also imagining possibilities of transform-
ation. The freedom to imagine the transformation of society is part of academic freedom. And
the state and various forms of administrative power are obligated to protect and support that
freedom.
At that same UNESCO conference, two other principles governing university life were clearly
enunciated: ‘tolerance of divergent opinion’ and ‘freedom from political interference.’ It is the
state and the university administration that must tolerate opinions that ‘diverge’ from their own.
That means that universities must actively provide support for positions that conflict with their
own, or even those that call the legitimacy of their own official views into question. Further,
administrators, faculty, and students ought to be free from political interference as they hire
and terminate faculty positions, develop and approve curricula, designate research topics, and
conduct research. The state may not move into the proper domain of the university to decide
which dissertations may be written and which may not. The state may not terminate the positions
of those who advise dissertations on topics that may be critical of the state. The administration
ought not to comply with requests from the state to terminate faculty who express views critical
of the state or who conduct research in areas of which the state does not approve. If adminis-
trations do comply with state interference, they are instruments of that same interference, under-
mining both academic freedom and the fundamental obligations of the university. In saying ‘no’
to state intervention, the principles of academic freedom can, and should be, invoked. That said,
it ought to be underscored that these principles of academic freedom have become international
standards, and that those who fail to honor these principles remove themselves from the inter-
national community and its developed and respected norms.
Lastly, the UNESCO principles established for global higher education include an injunction
that makes clear why academic freedom is central to the university, and why the university is
central to the cultural and social life of people throughout the world. Universities, as ‘social insti-
tutions’, are obligated ‘to promote, through teaching and research, the principles of freedom and
justice, of human dignity and solidarity, and to develop mutually material and moral aid on an
international level.’ This formulation articulates the obligation of the university in an even more
robust way. For the point is not only to refuse political interference in research and teaching, but
also to establish forms of inquiry that have as their central aim the understanding of the prin-
ciples of freedom, justice, human dignity, and solidarity. In other words, a university that
fails to include and support teaching and research on these areas is failing its public obligation
and losing its right to claim a place among world universities. The premise of this last UNESCO
principle is that higher education provides one of the central ways that people come to under-
stand democratic and humane principles, to develop bonds across national boundaries, and to
develop forms of life in common that honor human dignity. Indeed, the UNESCO claim does
not separate the abstract inquiry into human dignity, freedom, justice, and solidarity from the
obligation to provide material and moral aid on an international level. This last principle
implies that universities are not self-sufficient units, not islands in a sea of parallel universities.
They are bound together through obligations to provide support when the infrastructural con-
ditions of university life—and academic freedom—are failing and when political assaults on
academic freedom imperil the work and livelihood of professors. In other words, universities
must not only teach about forms of solidarity that enhance the prospects for freedom, justice,
4 J. Butler

and dignity in the world, but they themselves must exemplify and enact these principles, forging
bonds of solidarity with one another. The task of the university is thus not only to protect criti-
cism from suppression and retaliation, but to sustain bonds with other universities in an effort to
clarify and promote the aims of higher education within a broad conception of public life com-
mitted to justice, equality, and dignity. This means that universities must articulate and defend
points of view that seek to enhance these democratic principles within society, but also that, in
the service of such principles, diverge from state policy. When universities resist state interfer-
ence—censorship, retaliation, and faculty terminations—they ought rightly to be joined and sup-
ported by other universities across the world. This is not only their ethical and political
obligation, but a critical task of the university itself.
The consequences of this view are all too clear for our times. In Turkey, we see now that
nearly 5000 public workers and more than 400 faculty members, who signed a peace petition
as ‘Academics for Peace’ calling for an end to military operations in the Kurdish region, have
been censored, denied traveling privileges, and relieved of their positions in universities. More-
over, there is no appeal process for those summarily terminated from their university posts. The
number of those terminated continues to increase. They can no more continue their research than
they can leave the country to pursue research opportunities elsewhere since their passports have
been annulled. What did they do? Apparently, they made the ‘mistake’ of calling for peace
between the Turkish government and the Kurds which means that they took a stand that departed
from official Turkish policy, increasingly formulated by the President alone, by formulating a
critique of military solutions, calling for the opening of diplomatic channels. It is well within
the protections afforded by academic freedom to formulate this kind of critique. But also,
their democratic right to free expression and dissent are clearly denied by a state that seeks to
intervene in the workings of the university, to punish or terminate faculty on the basis of
their critical or dissenting viewpoints, and so to undermine the global norms that govern
higher education in our time. It is not only that the rights of faculty on such occasions that
have been brutally denied, but state retaliation has taken the form of summary and unjust termin-
ation of positions as well as the suspension of full rights of citizenship.
It is also the case that in denying academic freedom, the state is destroying the very basis for
the independent university, undermining the principles that establish its role in public life, and
isolating its academic community from universities across the world. The response should be to
assert and protect those rights of faculty whose terminations and suppression are in clear abro-
gation of the norms governing both higher education and open democracy. But it is now the obli-
gations of universities around the world to supply aid to those unjustly punished by the state, and
to support the universities that resist the flagrant overreach of the state. The demands imposed
upon us by academic freedom and by the principles that govern world universities during our
time are clear: international university organizations and individual universities must lend
their material support to defend those who have been punished for their critical viewpoints
with the loss of a livelihood. If the university is a place where academic freedom is supported
and embodied in the practices of the university and the international organizations that represent
higher education across the globe, then the implications are clear: it is time for radical and per-
sistent solidarity, for speech and action, for new and indefatigable forms of solidarity.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
 Academic Freedom and the Critical Task of the University 5

Note
1 All following references to UNESCO principles can be found in this document.

Reference
The United Nations Global Colloqium of University Presidents. (2005). Academic Freedom Statement of the First Global
Colloquium of University Presidents. Retrieved from www.columbia.edu/~md2221/academicstatement.doc

Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California, Berkeley where she
teaches comparative literature and critical theory. She is the author of several books, including
Gender trouble, Bodies that matter, Precarious life, Frames of war, and Toward a performative
theory of assembly. She has co-edited with Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay a volume
entitled Vulnerability in resistance (Duke University Press, 2016). She has written on
LGBTQ rights, feminist theory, the politics of human rights, academic freedom, literary
theory, and social and political philosophy. She is currently a board member of the Center for
Constitutional Rights in New York City and serves on the international board of the Jenin
Freedom Theatre in Palestine. She is also the co-director of the International Consortium of Criti-
cal Theory Programs. She has several honorary degrees, awards, and prizes, and her work has
been published in over 20 languages.