Strange Bedfellows: Academic Freedom and Violence

Authors

Glenda Lawhorn, Southern Illinois University

Abstract

Although we are at the present time experiencing some relief from the violence of student unrest, the American society, especially the most formally educated part of it, seems to be even more confused than usual. On practically every campus in America, learned professors who vociferously decried the student's use of strikes as a means of gaining power are arguing in the same breath for the use of collective bargaining and the threat of strikes as a means of gaining power for themselves. More than ever, professors, college administrators and trustees are paying lip service to the idea of academic freedom, but are simultaneously surrendering without conscience the functions which are inseparable from academic freedom. The ideal of finding truth is being matched, and perhaps overmatched, by the practice of exercising power, and the ideal of seeking truth is not only being paralleled by the practice of seeking power but it is also being mocked by the malpractice of seeking money. Never has one had better cause to appreciate the cogency of Russell Kirk's observation that academic freedom is really desired only by a few men, and that a considerable part of the modern clerisy has neither the true desire for it, nor the true right to it.

Recommended Citation

Lawhorn, Glenda (1972) "Strange Bedfellows: Academic Freedom and Violence," Perspectives (1969-1979): Vol. 4: No. 3, Article 6.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/perspectives/vol4/iss3/6