Research Catalog
An integrated approach to academic freedom at American universities : a merger on constitutional rights, professional norms, and contractual duties / Philip Lee.
- Title
- An integrated approach to academic freedom at American universities : a merger on constitutional rights, professional norms, and contractual duties / Philip Lee.
- Author
- Lee, Philip, 1975-
- Publication
- 2013.
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- Additional Authors
- Harvard University. Graduate School of Education. Thesis.
- Description
- v, 281 leaves; 29 cm.
- Summary
- Academic freedom in America is discretion given to university actors over their educational decision-making. It protects both universities from state encroachment on their educational decisions and university professors from external interference in their scholarly work. The former involves institutional freedom for universities, while the latter is professorial freedom for scholars. The constitutional basis for institutional academic freedom was articulated in a series of cases that challenged state authority to infringe on universities in their educational decisions. Other cases defined the contours of professorial freedom to engage in scholarly work by relying primarily on free speech principles.
- Contract law is an effective alternative to constitutional law for three reasons. First, unlike constitutional law, it covers professors at both public and private universities. Second, it allows for the consideration of the custom and usage of the academic community as either express or implied contract terms in resolving disputes between universities and professors. Third, contract law enables courts to structure remedies that take into account the specific campus contexts that give rise to various disputes instead of crafting broad remedies that may ill fit certain campus environments. My proposed re-conceptualization of academic freedom merges constitutional protection for institutions and contractual protection for individual professors. This combined approach would provide a more comprehensive framework than is currently available under the constitutional paradigm.
- My dissertation will detail the legal and historical development of institutional and professorial academic freedoms to better understand the relationship between these concepts. While some judges and scholars have focused on the divergence of these protections, my goal is to articulate an aligned theory that brings both the professorial and institutional theories together. I argue that while constitutionally based academic freedom does its job in protecting both public and private universities from excessive state interference, or at the very least it asks the right questions, it is inadequate because it fails to protect many individual professors in the same way. My solution entails using contract law to fill in the gaps that constitutional law leaves open in regard to protecting individual professors.
- Subject
- Note
- Vita.
- Thesis (note)
- Thesis (Ed. D.)--Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2013.
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (leaves 197-217).
- Processing Action (note)
- committed to retain
- Owning Institutions
- Harvard Library