The concept and social utility of academic freedom and university autonomy
Intellectuals—defined as embracing the leading thinkers in all spheres, including the traditional and the religious, artists, newspaper persons, etc.–need, and are entitled to, all the human and civil rights enjoyed by all others in their society. But there are certain freedoms whose absence can be said to constitute a major constraint on intellectual creativity and production, and which are, therefore, of particular significance to intellectuals as such. These include the freedoms of belief and conscience, of expression, and of association. The reasoning is that, in general, the optimal conditions for intellectual creativity must be those that encourage the challenging of established orthodoxies, the critical exploration of all ideas, the maximum sharing of insights, all in the push for the frontiers of knowledge. This leads to the steady expansion of the social stock of knowledge. These freedoms, which we classify as “core” intellectual freedoms, are said to be to intellectual production what parliamentary privilege is to parliamentary democracy and democratic governance in general. That is the social justification for the protection of the intellectual freedoms. Members of the academic community, i.e. persons engaged in research, teaching and dissemination of knowledge in the centres of higher learning, constitute a sub-set of the general category of intellectuals. The principle of academic freedom entitles members of this sub-set, beyond the core freedoms mentioned above, “to teach, to research, to express opinions in the areas for which they are qualified and the advancement of which they are professionally committed and to do so without fear that such considered views will make them answerable for delit d’opinion”. Other descriptions of the principle abound.