THE 1940 STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND TENURE

WALTER P. METZGER

I

In the field of American higher education, prescriptive dicta concerning academic conduct seldom exhibit much staying power. Some are meant to be ephemeral, to answer a transient public criticism with an immediately placating response. Some are designed for longer duty but are quickly reduced by the swift pace of events to a remnant of a changing geist and then to a relic of a forgotten past. Especially short is the life expectancy of pronouncements on the proper scope of academic freedom and the proper terms of employment of faculty personnel. On such subjects, the collective expressions of academic groups, especially if they seek improvement on a global scale, seem to pass from birth to eternal rest at the speed with which American foundations finance academic conferences with similar agendas or one edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education is followed by publication of the next.

One of the arresting features of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure is its exceptional durability. Compared with the high infant mortality rate of its species, its ability to stay alive for as long as fifty years stacks up as a Methuselah accomplishment. That it stayed alive during the last fifty years makes its longevity all the more remarkable. Born to an academic world that was relatively small, self-contained, and stable, it came of age in a world that had grown immense, delocalized, and volatile. Nevertheless, except for the reinterpretation in 1970 of certain illegible or outmoded passages, it has managed without amendment to take these transforming years in stride. It has weathered any number of roller coaster swings: the rise and fall of McCarthyism, the flow and ebb of student riotousness, and the feasts and anticipated famines of college student enrollments. It has survived the quickening of academic trends that had been set in motion prior to 1940, such as the steady decline in the share of material and human resources going to the private sector of American higher education and the rise in the public sector of multicampus universities under statewide systems of control; it has survived the initiation and acceleration of trends that had hardly been sighted before 1940, such as the spread of faculty unionism and the rise of the federal government as a major academic rule-giver and financier. If it deserved no other praise, the 1940 Statement would merit admiration for its hardiness in the face of incessant, often rapid, sometimes convulsive, change.

But it is not on this ground alone that we who are academics find it praiseworthy; were we inclined to honor mere persistence, no matter how marginal or vestigial, we would pay homage to the vermiform appendix. As it happened, this holdover from another era, far from paying for the gift of life with loss of function, has added to its significance as it aged. During the first two decades of its existence, it secured the endorsement of no more than a handful of learned societies and academic administrative associations. During the 1960s, it gained the backing of as many as sixty-five such legitimizing bodies; during the 1970s, when stock-taking on academic freedom and, especially, academic tenure came into vogue, it suffered but one organizational defection and picked up thirty-five new subscribers; during the 1980s and early 1990s, as though to demonstrate that its charms were ageless, it added thirty-four new endorsers to the list. Moreover, as time wore on, more and more colleges and universities (they have not been counted but they are surely numerous) saw fit to incorporate bits and pieces of it into their regulations, or by reference or quotation to embrace it whole. In the field of law, it seems not to have had much of an impact until the 1970s, when a spate of contested academic discharges on grounds of financial exigency led lawyers and judges to use it as an authoritative guide to academic usage on that subject; thereafter, it would be paid the compliment of citation when the courts sought to explicate other terms of faculty employment contracts. Only with respect to professional self-regulation may it be said that the 1940 Statement did not put on weightiness late in life, and this is because, to the American Association of University Professors ("AAUP"), the chief nonlegal monitor of academic freedom and tenure in this country and the co-author and primary user of this document, it was of signal importance from the very start.

Even its celebrants will admit that the 1940 Statement has not been a hit in all academic quarters. A roll call of its endorsers would disclose the conspicuous absence of the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, and several other prominent members of the academic administrative establishment. In institutions where the reflexive cautiousness of the house attorney is allowed full sway, allusions to the 1940 Statement in bylaws and handbooks may be accompanied by a boilerplate reserve clause disclaiming any legal obligation to adhere to some or any of its terms. And in institutions, highly visible but still quite few, where universal limited-term appointments are the rule, the 1940 Statement has obviously been ignored or recanted. But these evidences of standoffishness or opposition are not surprising: one does not expect everyone in this fractured and diverse domain to give unreserved consent to anything. What is surprising is that support for the 1940 Statement cuts across so many internal divisions. These include divisions between administrators and professors, first and foremost; divisions between public and private, church-connected and independent, teaching-oriented and research-oriented institutions; and finally, divisions between the specialist profession of the "discipline" and the ecumenical profession of the "faculty"—the two academic professions that both liberate their overlapping memberships by sanctioning dual loyalties and oppress them by generating counterpulls. When and if the time comes to write the funeral address for the 1940 Statement, the fair memorialist will stress, not that it went just so far, but that it bridged so much.

II IL NOME! IL NOME!

All in all, the fifty-year record...