An 8-year-old girl was killed in Anchorage in the late 1980s when a mass of icicles broke loose from a roof, crushing her as she played under the eaves. Soon after, Rich Seifert wrote a piece in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner that criticized the construction methods that had created the deadly conditions.

Alaska builders organizations denounced Seifert because of the article, which he wrote as part of a regularly appearing column.

"They said I was calling them murderers," Seifert says. "I told them, 'But we know how to do this right. We know how to build roofs that won't do this and it's just because of shoddy building practices that this happened.'"

When Seifert, now a professor of engineering, was hired by UAF's Cooperative Extension Service, he says he was told, "We want you to be the people's consultant on energy and building practices. Nobody is buying you. You are the watchdog for technology, to give people good advice about building practices."

Seifert believed he was doing that -- using his expertise to promote safe buildings in Alaska -- and he stood his ground. The News-Miner canceled his column, but his supervisor, the CES director and the university president stood by him.

"I was protected by academic freedom before I even had tenure," Seifert says.

(Eds'. note: Postpublication we learned that Mr. Seifert's column in the News-Miner may not have been canceled as related in the story, but we are unable to verify the actual circumstances.)

Academic freedom is a key tenet of university life. It protects the freedom of faculty to teach and research without unreasonable interference or restriction from law, institutional regulations or public pressure. Closely related to it is tenure. (At UAF, tenure may be granted after a probationary period of up to seven years and after completing certain requirements.) Tenure means faculty can be fired only on grounds of serious misconduct, incompetence or misbehavior, not just because the professor took a politically unpopular stand.

Academic freedom, says biology professor Abel Bult-Ito, "allows faculty to study subjects that may be controversial in society but are nevertheless legitimate research topics that might otherwise have a politician saying, 'Fire that person because of such and such.' It's a mechanism to protect faculty from political interference."

"I have the obligation to teach the [required] subject material," he adds, "but how I teach it and what types of materials I include in the classroom are for me to decide."

The guidelines for academic freedom in the U.S. come primarily from the American Association of University Professors, initially in the "1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure," and augmented with other, more recent documents dealing with topics such as electronic communications.

Provost Susan Henrichs says the AAUP guidelines reflect what she believes are the two key aspects of academic freedom: with the right comes the responsibility. Faculty have the right to communicate the results of their research and their opinions about it to students, the public and other faculty members, she says.

"With that also comes the responsibility to be thoughtful, accurate and unbiased."

Faculty must also understand the rules are different in different settings, Henrichs says. The responsibility of an instructor in an introductory course to deal with controversial subjects is different than in an advanced graduate student seminar.

Continued: 1 | 2 | 3 | Next: "What it isn't"

Comment on this story

April 15, 2011 6:31 AM

Thanks for this important story. I read The Firecracker Boys long after my own experience of being wolf-packed for exercising my responsibility to both my art and my profession. I saw in the book what might easily have happened to me and why many in the state could believe that they still could pull political levers behind the scenes to do their dirty work without facing consequences. President Hamilton's immediate and strong defense of my work not only kept me employed, it kept me standing.

F.I.R.E. -- founded by two intellectuals, one on the Left and one on the Right -- took up my case as an instance of "the Left eating its own." Rick Siefert refers to the trauma of the attack on him, and the word applies to mine as well: a two year investigation by OCR (Ed. note: Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education) for my temerity in introducing class and gender as topics for discussion in a graduate seminar called Left Out: Poets of the Political Imagination. And an endless cesspool of harassment that a theologian friend called "an ecstasy of sin" and to which the Anchorage Daily News actually had to declare a halt after a particularly ugly diatribe on me and my French and Indian grandparents from the stage of the Alaska Native Heritage Center. It was a soul-jacking, and I was an easy target: alone in Alaska, aging (called "the old white hag of the north"), and working class, having come to the state not for adventure but for work.

Since my case, UAA has tried to raise issues of student bullying, especially of women faculty, and to put into place policies that rebalance student rights with those of faculty. Things had to be very out of whack in that regard for my story to have happened as it did. When people speak of the "responsibility" end of academic freedom, they generally do not consider that the greatest responsibility an artist or a professor has is critique of the close-by hypocrisies that are sustained by the fear of standing out among one's peers, but making nice is not necessarily making art.

"Indian Girls" is not a very "literary" poem, but it is a bardic one, public speech, uttered for the sake of the tribe. I did not escape the attacks on me at all unscathed, but I would publish the poem again (that only I, and not the publishers, was the object of vengeance, gives the lie to the alleged rationale for the siege) because it is part of the effort to bring human rights to those most in need of protection. The protections of tenure allowed me to do that. Demanded that I do that. President Hamilton's immediate call to cease "investigation" (and the public re-education I was being set up to experience) gave to the state and the university a very different public face and to tenure a rare championing by administration.

April 13, 2011 3:36 PM

I really enjoyed the Academic Freedom article. Nicely done!

April 4, 2011 4:50 PM

"Indian Girl" can be found at http://thefire.org/article/4944.html for those who want to read it. Very sad, but often true...

April 6, 2011 12:47 PM

Interesting and informative article.  But why was there no mention and no discussion of the Rick Steiner controversy, which was the latest high profile example of alleged violation of academic freedom at UAF?

April 1, 2011 9:51 AM

Thanks for this article at last LJ!! Wonderful job and well done all around.  I appreciate your treatment of my traumatic event, well described and accurate in the article.  John Craven's comments at the end are also important. We cannot relent in protecting tenure, to the max.

It is a crucially important concept and tenet of university life which is not as well respected as it should be. With my experiences, and there are many in which I was protected by tenure, I shall never be smug or complacent about tenure and its protection. It also requires great perserverance by faculty to continue with performance and activities reflecting the highest integrity of our profession, in order to warrant and defend this enormous special privilege. -Rich Seifert