The CAUT Policy Statement on Academic Freedom defines it as the right of academic staff, “without restriction by prescribed doctrine,” to:
- Freedom to teach and discuss.
- Freedom to carry out research and disseminate and publish the results thereof, including the freedom to produce and perform creative work and to acquire, preserve, and provide access to documentary material in all formats.
- Freedom to engage in service to the institution, to participate in its academic governance, and to express one’s opinion about the institution, its administration, and the system in which one works.
- Freedom to exercise one’s rights as a citizen (restricted only by law), including the right to contribute to social change through free expression of opinion on matters of public interest.
These four principal components of academic freedom – in teaching, research, intramural expression, and extramural expression – are also reflected in the definition of academic freedom in the 1997 UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel:
26. Higher-education teaching personnel, like all other groups and individuals, should enjoy those internationally recognized civil, political, social and cultural rights applicable to all citizens. Therefore, all higher-education teaching personnel should enjoy freedom of thought, conscience, religion, expression, assembly, and association as well as the right to liberty and security of the person and liberty of movement. They should not be hindered or impeded in exercising their civil rights as citizens, including the right to contribute to social change through freely expressing their opinion of state policies and of policies affecting higher education.
28. Higher-education teaching personnel have the right to teach without any interference, subject to accepted professional principles including professional responsibility and intellectual rigour with regard to standards and methods of teaching. Higher-education teaching personnel should not be forced to instruct against their own best knowledge and conscience or be forced to use curricula and methods contrary to national and international human rights standards. Higher education teaching personnel should play a significant role in determining the curriculum.
29. Higher-education teaching personnel have a right to carry out research work without any interference, or any suppression, in accordance with their professional responsibility and subject to nationally and internationally recognized professional principles of intellectual rigour, scientific inquiry and research ethics. They should also have the right to publish and communicate the conclusions of the research of which they are authors or co-authors.
31. Higher-education teaching personnel should have the right and opportunity, without discrimination of any kind, according to their abilities, to take part in the governing bodies and to criticize the functioning of higher education institutions, including their own, while respecting the right of other sections of the academic community to participate, and they should also have the right to elect a majority of representatives to academic bodies within the higher education institution.
The broad understanding of academic freedom expressed in the CAUT Policy Statement and the 1997 UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel, while widely recognized, is contested by university and college administrators. In 2011, the Association of Universities and Colleges Canada (since renamed as Universities Canada) adopted a revised policy on academic freedom that narrowed its scope and application. The policy is silent on intramural academic freedom – the right of academic staff to participate in the academic governance of and to criticize the institution where they work. There is also no recognition of extramural academic freedom even though some of the most prominent academic freedom cases historically involved academics who were targeted and dismissed not because of what they taught in their classrooms or published in scholarly journals, but because of their political or social activism.
Students, too, have freedom in relation to their educational pursuits – lernfreiheit, as it was called in Germany in the 19th Century. They can choose their university or college, and their programs, courses, and professors. They can lodge complaints about individual professors through appropriate channels. They also have expressive rights consistent with those enjoyed by all citizens. However, students do not have academic freedom – lehrfreiheit. It is the professor or other academic professional who decides the course content, sets the examination, and determines the student’s final grade. It is the professor whose employment status, rights and privileges are protected against arbitrary actions by the employer.