1958.Concerning

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Concerning Academic Freedom and Tenure "[T]here is little consensus regarding the meaning of academic freedom although there is agreement that it is something worth protecting. The concept has been invoked in support of many contrary causes and positions. It, for example, was used to justify student activism and to repressit, to defend radical faculty and to defend their suppression, to support inquiry into admissions or promotions or tenure decisions and to deny such inquiry. It is at best a slippery notion, but clearly a notion worthy of analysis" (C. Kaplan and E. Schrecker [eds.], in Regulating the Intellectuals: Perspectives on Academic Freedom in the 1980s, 1983). "The practical fact in most places, and the unexceptional rule at Yale, is that tenure is for all normal purposes a guarantee of appointment until retirement" (Kingman Brewster as quoted in Ralph Brown and Jordan Kurland, "Academic Tenure and Academic Freedom," in William Van Alstyne [ed.],Freedom and Tenure in the Academy, 1993). "Tenure, accurately and unequivocally defined, lays no claim whatever to a guarantee of lifetime employment. Rather, tenure provides only that no person continuously retained as a full-time faculty member beyond a specified period of probationary service may thereafter be dismissed without adequate cause" (William Van Alstyne [ed.], inFreedom and Tenure in the Academy, 1993). "Academic freedom and tenure do not exist because of a peculiar solicitude for the human beings who staff our acdemic institutions. They exist, instead, in order that society may have the benefit of honest judgment and independent criticism which otherwise might be withheld because of fear of offending a dominant social group or transient social attitude" (Fritz Machlup as quoted in Rolf Sartorius, "Tenure and Academic Freedom," in Edmund Pincoffs [ed.],The Concept of Academic Freedom, 1975). The academy, simply defined, is the community of fully critical reflection that is always only more or less .adequately realized in any so-called academic institution, i.e., college or university.

Academic freedom may be defined, accordingly, as the freedom proper to the academy as the community of fully critical reflection, and therefore also proper to, but always only more or less adequately institutionalized in, any college or university. As such, academic freedom, positively, is freedom

There are two levels of academic freedom thus defined: (1) the level of the individual members of the academic community, and therefore of the college or university, whether permanent faculty, probationary faculty, students, or administrators; and (2) the level of the community and therefore of the institution-college or university-as such. Academic freedom at this second level may also be called community or institutional autonomy. Just as individual members of the academic community, and thus of a college or university, must be free

Of course, any college or university, like the academic community it institutionalizes, exists to serve the larger human community and its other institutions, as well as their individual members. But because the academic community is the community of fully critical reflection, and because this also identifies any academic institution as such, the service of any college or university, as of its individual members, may never be direct, but must always be only

Consequently, while individuals and communities, including ecclesial and political communities, may found institutions constituted with a certain identity and mission to which they may be expected to be faithful, they have the moral right to designate these institutionsfor fully critical reflection and, negatively, freedom from anything and everything that in any way impedes such reflection. for fully critical relection and free from all that impedes it, so the community or institution itself must be free to pursue its own distinctive mission as an academic community or institution and thus to promote and protect the academic freedom of each of its members, without interference from other communities, institutions, or individuals. indirect: the indirect service of fully critical reflection. "academic institutions," i.e., | One way to understand the basic issue between Diekema's concept of a Christian college or university and my own is to adapt the well-known typology employed in a report of the Danforth Commission on Church Colleges and Universities in 1965(d. DTT: 81). The adaptation consists in (1) dividing one of the original types into two new ones (Types 3 and 4); and (2) adding one new type (Type 1), thereby yielding a five-fold typology, as follows: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |