Academic Freedom*

"The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made know. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary, in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined‹not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts."

"...the rights of individual members of the faculty and of individual departments are never absolute, but are always to be defined in terms of functions performed, and these in turn are defined in terms of the ends for the sake of which the functions are carried on. This general principal [sic] may be applied to certain specific matters:

1. No individual or department has any absolute right to give any course he [she] or the department may wish to give. Courses are integral parts of curricula and are, as such, means to certain ends...
   
2. It follows that it is not an infringement upon academic freedom for the Committee on Courses or for the Colleges to ask each instructor to disclose the content of the courses which he [she] is offering, i.e., to supply a syllabus or outline of the ground covered by the course..."

 

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* Faculty Handbook: University of California (1986): 45-46.

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