University Governance, Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech: Perspectives from Constitutional Law
Monday 12 August 2024
Universities have recently been at the centre of heated controversy and debate. Academic freedom and freedom of speech are said to be under threat from rising intolerance. At the same time, worries abound about the rise of mangerialism and of the commercialisation of research.
These controversies raise fundamental questions about the nature of power within universities and of their place within a democracy. Nonetheless, the insights of constitutional law – a discipline squarely focussed on the nature and distribution of power and on the place of institutions within democracies – have been absent.
In this seminar, panellists brought the insights of constitutional law to bear on these questions. First, the panellists considered how the university is governed. This search for the ‘constitution of the university’ involves questions such as: How is power organised within the university? What influences shape this organisation of power? And does this constitution of the university best reflect the overall values of the university?
Second, the panellists considered universities as an institution of democratic government and the role they play in supporting civil society, holding governments to account and in enabling democratic government. This perspective on the university raises questions as to the purpose, nature and extent of the university’s core commitments to academic freedom and freedom of speech.
This webinar was delivered as part of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies Global Public Law Seminar Series.
About the panel
William Partlett is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School. His research is interested in the insights that history (particularly intellectual history), historiography (historical method), and comparative methodology can bring to constitutional law, theory, and related questions. His most recent book - entitled Why the Russian Constitution Matters: The Constitutional Dark Arts - explores the growing and problematic influence of centralisation in our understanding of liberal constitutional governance.
Adrienne Stone is a Melbourne Laureate Professor and Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School. She researches in the areas of constitutional law and constitutional theory, freedom of expression and academic freedom. Among her recent works is Open Minds: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech (2021) (co-authored with Carolyn Evans). She is a foundation editor of Comparative Constitutional Studies and the immediate past President of the International Association of Constitutional Law.
David Rabban served as counsel to the American Association of University Professors for several years before joining the Texas faculty in 1983. He served as General Counsel of the AAUP from 1998 to 2006 and Chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2006 to 2012. His teaching and research focus on free speech, higher education and the law, and American legal history. He is best known for his path-breaking work on free speech in American history. He is the author of Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920 (Cambridge,1997), which received the Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for “the best book in intellectual history published in 1997.” His many articles have appeared in Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and elsewhere. He was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2016 and of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University in 2016-17. His most recent book is Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History.
Scott Stephenson is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne. After receiving his BA and LLB(Hons) with the University Medal in Law from the Australian National University, he worked at the High Court of Australia for two years, first as the Court’s Legal Research Officer and subsequently as Associate to Justice Virginia Bell AC. He then obtained his LLM and JSD from Yale University. He has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge, University of Copenhagen, King’s College London and University of Oxford. He is the Treasurer and a Council Member of the Australian Association of Constitutional Law.
Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash