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Encouraging greater access to higher education for deserving students, regardless of their socio-economic status, and ensuring that curricula reflect the diversity of human experience have been longstanding priorities for higher education and thus for the Ford Foundation. But in the wake of 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the war on terror, a third challenge to university-level education has resurfaced: the growing threat to academic freedom inside and outside of the academy.
Threats to academic freedom typically come in times of political polarization like the McCarthy era and especially during wartime. In 1915, as World War I engulfed Europe, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) formally articulated the concept of academic freedom. By 1940, when a second world war loomed on the horizon, the AAUP expanded its set of principles and asserted that teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and publication, freedom in the classroom to discuss their subjects, and freedom to speak or write as citizens without institutional censorship or discipline.
But with rights come responsibilities and obligations. As Elaine Hansen, president of Bates College, wrote in a 2005 convocation address, “The concept of academic freedom does not merely protect one’s right to offer controversial statements or offend ... but also obliges scholars and officers of educational institutions to remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. ... Hence, at all times, they should strive to be accurate, show respect for the opinions of others, and make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.”
Defending Academic Freedom
In response to the complex contemporary terrain in which academic freedom must be understood and protected, the Ford Foundation launched a major initiative a few years ago, Difficult Dialogues: Promoting Academic Freedom and Pluralism on Campus. This national competitive grants program highlights the foundation’s continuing commitment to preserving academic freedom at colleges and universities. In starting this $3.5 million program in 2004, the foundation was not making a decision that would affect only one campus—it was hoping to influence higher education as a whole.
In the early 1990s, the foundation had developed the Campus Diversity Initiative (CDI), which gave competitive grants to colleges and universities to help them address increasing racial, ethnic, and gender tensions on campus. Projects under this initiative also were implemented by several national higher-education associations, most notably the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which continues to make diversity a priority in its programming.
The Campus Diversity Initiative had its roots in troubling incidents of racial bias involving student groups in the late 1980s, but it was not only focused on the changing demographics of students on campus. It also focused on the faculty’s engagement with the more diverse student population, largely through curriculum reform and innovation. CDI was credited at the time and in subsequent evaluations as one of the first philanthropic efforts to spotlight the educational benefits to all students—not just to students of color—of more diverse campuses in terms of the curriculum, the co-curriculum, and faculty development.
Encouraging “Difficult Dialogues”
More than a decade later, the CDI initiative served as a model for Difficult Dialogues. The new grants program borrowed three philanthropic tools from the prior project. CDI had used a letter from a distinguished group of higher-education leaders, co-signed by the president of the Ford Foundation, to invite a group of about 300 college and university presidents to work innovatively on the issue of campus diversity. Second, the invitation, rather than pre-identifying institutions to support, included a request for proposals.
Finally, the foundation offered relatively small grants per campus, since we believed that big infusions of funds were not necessary but rather that university presidents needed some catalytic support to make diversity a more powerful priority on campus.
Difficult Dialogues updated these approaches in significant ways. The letter on academic freedom and pluralism was signed by a diverse group of higher-education leaders. The letter itself borrowed some language from the past but focused on a number of new challenges. It asked for deeper engagement on the part of campus leaders, including faculty, with threats to academic freedom and pluralism. And new language—phrases like “growing religious intolerance” and “attempts to silence individuals, faculty and students alike”—extended academic freedom to students, not just to faculty members.
Other language focused on faculty responsibility, pointing out not just the rights of faculty but also their obligation “not to exploit students, coerce their views or display
a demonstrable lack of competence in their discipline.”
The letter also recognized that the Internet had inflamed opinions off campus and argued that threats to academic freedom and pluralism could not be combated by student-
affairs staff alone.
Most important, instead of sending the letter and grant guidelines to a relatively small group of carefully chosen four-year residential colleges and universities as CDI had done, more than 2,400 two- and four-year institutions were invited to compete for funds. It was the largest such invitation in three decades of higher-education grant-making at Ford.
An Unexpected Response
Of the 2,400 invitations sent to university presidents, an astonishing 685 replied with proposals—more than one in four. Obviously, the initiative had tapped into a widely shared desire to promote pluralism and academic freedom on campus.
After the reviews of the final proposals were completed, 27 institutions received $100,000 grants and another 16 received $10,000 grants (see http://www.difficultdialogues.org/projects/ for the full list). In spring 2006, the foundation asked Harold Wechsler, a respected historian of higher education at New York University, to analyze the final proposals. He found that:
• Most proposals took a reactive, not a proactive, stance: Typically, a hostile environment or specific incident had produced a difficult situation on campus to which the institution needed to respond.
• Most campuses lacked adequate strategies for articulating and confronting sensitive issues, especially religious ones.
• Proposals addressing religious strife predominated—especially hostility between Muslims and Jews and between evangelical Christians and gay students.
• Most proposals did not target the most ideologically entrenched or politically committed students. Instead, many applicants suggested that dialogue is particularly difficult for “sheltered” or “protected” students, who for the most part were silent.
• Proposals from public colleges and universities tended to speak of what Wechsler called a deep “ambivalence when contemplating the place of religion in their curricula.”
Campuses Ill-Prepared for Conflict
In short, Wechsler’s analysis of the proposals revealed that whether it was the Middle East conflict, the right of gays to marry, or the challenge to science teaching posed by religious beliefs or intolerance, campuses were under-prepared to conduct difficult dialogues, let alone learn from them. In addition, the mere presence of students’ religious beliefs and practices posed dilemmas, especially for public universities. But as William Sullivan, a scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, noted, “To live in America is to live in a religiously charged atmosphere and that includes colleges—whether they like it or not.”
Beyond problems with grappling with religious expression in the classroom, the proposals also revealed that faculty members needed to engage in wider public discussions focused on the meaning of academic freedom itself. Too often, the principles of academic freedom have been twisted to defend the freedom of students not to hear views that might cause offense; the focus has become freedom from hearing rather than a freedom to express controversial perspectives.
Early Lessons Learned
Most Difficult Dialogues projects have only recently begun, so it is too early to offer claims about impact or lessons learned. Yet, a few tentative observations are worth making:
• Institutions that sought foundation support recognized to an unprecedented degree the central value of protecting the academic freedom of faculty and students.
• The substitution of “dialogue” for “debate” suggests that no one is aiming at a final resolution of campus differences but rather at serious, respectful explorations into divergent perspectives. One of the most pressing inquiries that faculty must address is how to reconcile the certainty of belief with the provisional nature of scholarship.
• Colleges and universities are more embedded in the broader society than ever before. They are deeply entwined with business, government, industry, and the military in ways that could be hardly imagined 50 years ago. The new technologies make campus conflicts known worldwide instantaneously, and these conflicts are frequently misunderstood by those who wish to bring down ideas or people with whom they disagree.
At this stage in the life of Difficult Dialogues, Ford is supporting efforts on 43 campuses, encouraging campus leaders—faculty and administrators alike—to defend academic freedom aggressively. But the foundation is convinced that grant money will not prove to be the most important factor in determining whether these projects succeed. Rather, the cumulative effect of helping university presidents, general counsels, faculty, and trustees amass the political will and moral clarity to make the right kind of defense of academic freedom may turn out to be the initiative’s most important and lasting legacy.
Alison R. Bernstein is a vice president of the Ford Foundation, where she directs the Knowledge, Creativity, and Freedom (KC&F) program. In 2006, the program awarded more than $165 million to innovative projects across the world in higher and K-12 education, the arts and culture, media, religion, and sexuality. A former associate dean of the faculty at Princeton University, Bernstein also has taught and served as an administrator in an urban community college and a Midwestern state university. This essay is adapted from a speech at the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education.