Abstract
In this paper, I employ the pioneering works of Nussbaum, Sen, Saito, and Walker, in conjunction with the U.S. tradition of academic freedom, to outline a capability-centered vision of undergraduate education. Pace Nussbaum and Walker, I propose a short list of learning capabilities to which every undergraduate student should be entitled. This working definition of undergraduate education offers a starting point for discussion and experimentation. I employ it here to engage the current controversy in U.S. colleges and universities over the nature, value, and legitimacy of undergraduate students’ academic freedoms. In contrast to the anti-indoctrination emphasis of David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights, I argue that students’ academic freedoms can be more effectively secured through the articulation of “essential freedoms for liberal learning” whose principal focus is not the behavior or political affiliations of teachers but the intellectual needs and circumstances of students.
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Notes
Despite the overtly political overtones of the SAF campaign, Horowitz insists that the ultimate agenda of the Academic Bill of Rights “is not about Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, left and right. It is about what is appropriate to a higher education, and in particular what is an appropriate discourse in the classrooms of an institution of higher learning” (Horowitz, 2005). Versions of this document have twice reached the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, and have been adopted as policy by 10–15 state legislatures and by governing bodies within numerous private and public universities, including the Princeton University student body in April 2006.
This statement paraphrases Sen (1999, p. 36).
According to Pavela (2005), the Court’s concern with the academic freedom of university faculty and students is illustrated by their opinions in several cases over the past five decades, including Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), Keyishian v. Board of Regents of New York (1967), and Rosenberger v. Rector and Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia (1995).
The negative and positive dimensions of academic freedom are recognized (in concept if not by name) by other participants in these debates, e.g., Horowitz’s claim that “academic freedom is most likely to thrive in an environment of intellectual diversity that protects and fosters independence of thought and speech” (Horowitz, 2002; emphasis added); and the AAC&U statement that “academic freedom implies not just freedom from constraint but also freedom for faculty and students to work within a scholarly community to develop the intellectual and personal qualities required of citizens in a vibrant democracy and participants in a vigorous economy” (AAC&U 2006, p. 7; original emphasis).
Nussbaum confines her argument to the U.S., where “the idea of ‘liberal education’… has been taken up most fully” (Nussbaum 1997, p. 9).
Walker notes also the practical problem that capability is “counterfactual and difficult to measure or evaluate. Thus functioning is often taken as a proxy measure of capability… The point is that in education we probably do have to evaluate functioning but we need to do this in the context of not prescribing to students the choices they make about their own lives, and respecting a plurality of conceptions of the good life within a democratic society” (2006, p. 54).
In its latest official statement, the AAUP (2007) endorses ABOR’s “nonindoctrination principle” (i.e., the principle that “faculty members will not use their courses or their position for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or antireligious indoctrination”) but argues that the ABOR is “an inappropriate and dangerous means for its implementation… because (it) seeks to distinguish indoctrination from appropriate pedagogy by applying principles other than relevant scholarly standards, as interpreted and applied by the academic profession.”
One important problem not addressed here is the inequality of capabilities among students and the consequent need to treat students differently in pursuit of educational equity. As Nussbaum observes:
If education is understood in the Socratic way, as an eliciting of the soul’s own activity, it is natural to conclude, as Socrates concludes, that education must be very personal. It must be concerned with the actual situation of the pupil, with the current state of the pupil’s knowledge and beliefs, with the obstacles between the pupil and the attainment of self-scrutiny and intellectual freedom (Nussbaum 1997, p. 32).
While cogent and laudable in principle, the notion of “capabilities equalizing education” raises a complex set of teaching, grading, and curriculum issues that lie beyond the scope of the present inquiry.
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Garnett, R.F. Liberal Learning as Freedom: A Capabilities Approach to Undergraduate Education. Stud Philos Educ 28, 437–447 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-009-9126-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-009-9126-6