Upholding Academic Freedom, Free Speech while Building Community
Academic freedom is the foundation upon which every university is built — the foundation
upon which we continue to build the University of Northern Colorado. It is the essential
foundation of our students’ learning process. It ensures that scholars are free to
be scholars — to ask hard questions, to test new ideas, to weigh in on controversial
topics as they teach and do research unfettered by outside interests. Only through
the free inquiry and exploration of ideas afforded by academic freedom can we deliver
on our promise for transformative education.
Hand-in-hand with academic freedom comes community. One scholar does not make a university;
this requires a community of scholars. UNC’s greatest strength lies not in the sum
of our individual efforts, but in how much more we can achieve by working together.
Building community is hard and messy work. It can’t be accomplished by rules, laws,
regulations or codes. It depends instead on human beings — on our good faith effort
to do what is right, on the give and take of personal interactions, on trial and error,
on some measure of trust that together, we will figure it out.
As you may have heard or seen in the news this summer, part of our ongoing, messy
community-building process recently became very public. Some practices we developed
in a good faith effort to respond to students’ concerns raised serious questions about
our commitment to academic freedom, indeed, about our commitment to uphold the basic
Constitutional right to free speech. Before I explain how we arrived there, let me
say this: UNC is unequivocally committed to free speech and academic freedom and to
community.
I am pleased to tell you that we’ve already begun to re-think our process for student
concerns. Provost Robbyn Wacker is working with the Faculty Senate to establish how
we will handle student concerns about academic matters through the colleges, and Interim
Dean of Students Gardiner Tucker is leading the work to clarify how to handle non-academic
concerns. Our new approach will uphold the principles of free speech and academic
freedom as well as our commitment to create a safe and supportive environment for
students. It will address all student concerns not covered by the Discrimination Complaint
Procedures, and we will no longer have a separate process for bias-related concerns.
UNC is not alone. Questions about how to navigate the intersection of academic freedom,
free speech and community are at the fore across the nation as universities welcome
a generation of students who are more diverse than ever, connect to the world through
social media as never before, get inundated with increasingly polarized messages,
and, sometimes, question the value of the rights and responsibilities that have long
been considered essential to the nature of universities. Our promise to students is
the opportunity for transformative education — but we cannot fulfill this promise
without the benefit of free speech and academic freedom, so it remains our obligation
to uphold these fundamental concepts.
–Kay Norton, excerpted from her annual fall address to campus, Sept. 7.
