The ivory tower of academia has never really existed. As long as there have been institutions of learning, there have been political pressures on them. Want to ensure a subject is studied? Pay to employ a Chair in that discipline.
In England today, HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council For England) applies a number of criteria to the funding it provides to HE institutions. The government’s widening participation agenda is a key example, as is the notion of quality assurance. Institutions who do not buy into those agendas will lose out on funding. In the USA, most institutions have a much lesser reliance on government funding, but federal funds still carry some weight. In a cash-strapped sector, any income is important income.
What most ’enlightened’ societies have attempted to ensure is that that pressure does not impinge on “academic freedom.” Once again, that is very difficult to ensure and academics are often subject to a form of ‘market forces’ which influence which articles will be published in influential journals (without which an academic is unlikely to receive much funding), but by and large the notion remains.
In the 1950s, America suffered through what are now referred to as the McCarthyite Witch Hunts. Anyone suspected of communist sympathies was hounded out and to a greater or lesser extent persecuted. Recently that nomenclature has been floating around once again in whispered conversations, and now the US Congress has decided it’s time to shout its name proudly from the Hill.
As highlighted in this article at salon.com:
“On Oct. 21, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that could require university international studies departments to show more support for American foreign policy or risk their federal funding.”
Worried by the fact that Middle-Eastern Studies departments in universities across the USA are (shock, horror) filled with Middle-Eastern people, and concerned that they don’t emphasise the role of terrorism in Middle-Eastern society, neocons have passed a bill which constitutes the greatest threat to academic freedom which the USA has seen in 40 or 50 years.
It is difficult to understand how the “International Studies In Higher Education Act Of 2003” came to pass without outcry. The irony of it passing on the same day that one representative commented: “Mr. Speaker, I hope our elite universities will strive for true diversity and academic freedom” (Mr. Duncan, in the speech Conservatives Not Welcome On College Campuses) should not be missed. We can only hope some subsequent outcry will nullify the implications of this legislation.