Academic Freedom Talk To Highlight Eldredge Library Annual Meeting

What does academic freedom on a college campus mean today? As universities face threats of government defunding and charges are raised of widespread cancel culture, the subject has never been more relevant.

 According to Dr. Pippa Norris, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where you come at the issue politically may make all the difference in how you see it. 

 Norris will be speaking on "The Two Faces of Academic Freedom" at the Friends of the Eldredge Public Library annual meeting on June 10 at 4 p.m. The meeting is free of charge and open to the public.

 A political scientist and public speaker, Norris has taught at Harvard for more than 30 years. Her extensive research compares elections and public opinion, democracy, political communications and gender politics around the world.

 In a recent phone conversation, Norris talked about the internal and external threats to academic freedom. 

"There are two different actors," she said. On the one hand, as liberals often see it, the challenge comes from the state, from government leaders directing actions related to curriculum and funding decisions.

 On the other hand, there has been a "liberal skew" on college campuses for decades, she said. As a result, even though there may be academic freedom to speak out, those who disagree with the mainstream may feel that they can't advocate for their positions without fear of retribution, reflecting what is described as "cancel culture." 

 As a result, when conservatives are in power, Norris said, they feel they can use the state to intervene in the university culture, to reverse those biases. 

"This is relevant to Harvard today," she added. "However, the grounds being put forward for these actions by the administration are spurious, inaccurate and misleading," she said.

 "It's a very depressing period," she said, adding, "Harvard can resist, but it's not just Harvard." Two lawsuits have been filed by the university, citing the withdrawal of research funding and the ban on international students. Everything depends on the outcome of the lawsuits, she said. "But the courts are too slow." She called the actions, which are now affecting students' lifechanging career choices, "so shortsighted and disastrous."

 Over the past 20 years, Norris has focused her research on democratic backsliding, where she examined key indicators of the decline of liberal democracy around the world. She stressed that the backsliding is not global; in fact some countries have moved forward. 

"Where it occurs, people blame leaders," she said, "They are visible but it's not simply leaders...there's an important link to culture."

 The form of government is a significant factor, she noted. Parliamentary systems, with multiple parties in the government, are less likely to wind up with what she called tyranny of the minority. An example is the Scandinavian countries, where multiple parties wind up having a seat in the leadership as compared to the winner-take-all system where the loser has no voice at all. 

 Norris, the author of 50 books, is currently focused on writing "The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding" for the Oxford University Press. Her work has generated widespread coverage in the news media around the world. She has served as the director of the Democratic Governance Group at the United Nations Development Program in New York.

 The winner of numerous honors, including election in 2024 as an International Fellow of the British Academy, she holds a bachelor of arts in politics and philosophy from Warwick University and masters and doctoral degrees in politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

 At Harvard she teaches two fall semester classes — on Democratic Backsliding and on the Rise of Authoritarian-Populism — at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. 

 The annual meeting of the Friends of the Eldredge Public Library will be held in the library's Forgeron Room. The meeting will also include the election of officers for the coming year as well as reports from the president and the library director. For more information, visit eldredgelibrary.org/friends-of-the-library.