After this hiatus, we return now to the book review of Rousas Rushdoony's Law and Liberty with a chapter on what "real" academic freedom is and how its perversion is nothing more than an application of totalitarian subversion of universities.
Rushdoony shows as that academic freedom, as currently understood today, is defined in the following way. "First, academic freedom means that a teacher has the right to teach and write without any interference, even if his work is hostile to and subversive of the basic purpose of the school. Second, it is a merit when any school permits, tolerates, and encourages such teaching. Third, those who refuse to support teaching which is subversive of their faith are guilty of suppressing opinions and are regarded as hostile to liberty/ Fourth, the basic function of any school is to encourage new ideas rather than propagate older ones."
Clearly this is the way in which the term "academic freedom" is understood today. But the real question is why have we allowed this to happen when the end result is that it leaves instructors beyond control of the administration that they work for and even leads to teachers working against the entire founding principles of an institution. In contradiction to this, Rushdoony rightly observes that academic freedom is not rightly understood as instructors free of all restraint, but "freedom of the school...that anyone has the freedom to establish a school to propagate his ideas and to maintain that school without interference, as long as it does not violate the criminal and moral laws of society." Unfortunately for Rushdoony, while I think that he was ahead of his time in identifying many of the ways the totalitarian state would infringe on the other spheres of church/family government, he did not foresee how his last statement would play out in a society that was so far removed from biblical morality that the government could use the language in his statement to shut a Christian school down should it violate the morals of society. That being said, Rushdoony is right that the modern idea of academic freedom is entirely destructive to the idea of a Christian(or any other University) for that matter because "[it] would rob us of the right of controlling our own school, because it would demand the total independence of all faculty members to be without control or restraint...The practical result of this doctrine of academic freedom is the DESTRUCTION(my emphasis) of freedom."
In the summation of things, this notion of academic freedom is nothing more than the totalitarian/humanistic centers of power to consolidate their grip on university grounds and society. When the overwhelming number of professors and institutions are already beholden to a philosophy grounded in man and humanism, the mere presence of a few conservatives for the sake of "academic freedom" is not going to make a dent in their program to indoctrinate the youth of today. Ultimately, the real goal of this type of talk concerning "academic freedom" is nothing more than an attempt to subvert the few remaining schools that actually draw a distinction in their founding principles, morality, and doctrine that separate them from society's amoral, humanistic, postmodern views on life.
By the way, if you really want to know where the students of today, raised on this diet of academic freedom jargon would like to go, then read this article from Harvard on academic justice. You see, the discussion is never just about academic freedom, it is all about control...and once you realize that, everything else begins to make a lot more sense.
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