Scholarly freedom under political attack

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): The Aug. 6, 1997 edition of The Jakarta Post carried an article by Andrew Higgins discussing a possible threat to academic freedom in Hong Kong. Higgins mentioned two events which denoted this possibility.

The first was the forced departure of Prof. Nihal Jayawickarama, the only expert in international human rights law, from the law faculty at the University of Hong Kong. This happened on June 30, one day before the transfer of sovereignty took place.

The second event was a political attack launched by David Chu, a prominent member of the legislative council, and directed at two visiting scholars at Hong Kong's Chinese University and Baptist University. Chu attacked them because they criticized the Hong Kong government's policy of rewriting school textbooks and other steps to promote "patriotism" among students.

It should be noted here that this particular policy has been resisted by many teachers and scholars in Hong Kong who argue that, in mainland China, patriotism is defined as "loving the Communist Party".

These events are only an example of attempts to constrain scholarly inquiry through political means. Throughout the world such practices are abound. Even in societies with mature democracies evidence concerning such practices can easily be found.

According to French professor Jean-Claude Pecker, political constraints on scientific inquiries placed on French scientists has reached an alarming level. The French Academy of Science felt it necessary to create a committee in 1978 to defend the rights of scientists.

Political impediments are not the only constraints facing scholars. The Committee on Freedom of Scholarship and Science of the Royal Society of Canada lists four main categories of constraint: political; economic; a very broad category encompassing social, cultural, religious and ethnic constraints; another broad category relating to scholarly and scientific communities, accepted methodologies and dominant paradigms.

Each of us has more or less a clear idea of what political and economic constraints are. We also know more or less what is meant by social, cultural, religious, and ethnic constraints. But what exactly are "constraints due to scholarly and scientific communities"? How can such things become obstacles to scientific inquiries? And how can methodologies and paradigms constitute constraints to scholarly activity?

Keith Griffin from the United States mentions three developments which have generated what can be called "associational" or "professional" constraints to freedom in scientific inquiry. These three developments are the professionalization of scholarship, the growth of academic bureaucracies and the globalization of the knowledge industry.

These developments have led to institutions with a capability of exerting subtle constraints on free inquiry. They have also brought about accepted mechanisms and conventions which made individual scholars feel compelled to conform to "mainstream ideas", "mainstream opinion", and "mainstream interpretation" to avoid marginalization. This also enabled them to protect themselves from being branded and treated as "eccentrics", "skeptics" or "dissidents".

This kind of social pressure has forced individual scholars to restrain themselves -- don't think too much; better to be engaged in research than to think; and better to participate in research on topics approved and recommended by the establishment. These responses have resulted in the "domestication" of scholarly life.

Big ideas are no longer the driving force of scholarly pursuit. Instead, the scientific chase has been directed at big grants. Controversies that occur within academic communities are merely "a storm in a teacup" and "genuine intellectual storms" occur elsewhere.

Are the constraints due to accepted methodologies and dominant paradigm? Adebayo Adedeji from Nigeria provides an interesting example in his paper which was presented at a Royal Society of Canada seminar on scientific constraints. He mentioned that in Africa, Nigeria in particular, the tendency among social scientists and development economists was to imitate methods from the natural sciences. This has created: "too much economism, too many dogmas and too great a tendency to globalize local experiences and turn particularistic and ethno-centric situations into universal truisms."

The dominance of this paradigm has made social scientists and development economists in Africa ignore the principle that "development is a multivariate, quantitative and qualitative process in which the so-called economic and non-economic factors interact equally with each other". The result, according to Adebayo Adedeji, is that the problems of Africa's development is greatly misperceived, misunderstood and maltreated.

It has been shown that during any period in human history there were always scientists, scholars and intellectuals who refused to surrender to these constraints and fought to maintain and enhance freedom in their pursuit for truth. These fights were sometimes waged at great personal costs.

Why do scholars persist in conducting this taxing fight to preserve freedom? I think it is because scholars and thinkers just love freedom and tend to reject authority imposed upon them in violation of their reason.

John C. Polanyi, a Canadian physicist and a Nobel laureate, said scholars are very aware of "the corrupting effects of power -- the natural tendency for yesterday's democrat to become today's autocrat."

"Freedom, with its attendant confusion of competing claims, is the price we pay for a society that is responsive and creative," he said.

The fight to preserve freedom in scholarly pursuit is part of the fight to bring about the proper relationship between the government and the governed.

Prof. Polanyi said: "To be a good citizen requires more than loyalty to the state." To which he added: "We should not be too ready to cast the state in the role of villain."

The matter is, of course, one of striking a balance. And in our efforts to strike this balance, it is always wiser "to err on the side of freedom".

How does Indonesia measure up in this respect? Are we also facing constraints in our scholarly life? And have we put up enough of a fight to maintain and enhance the freedom of scholarly inquiry? Somehow I feel this is not the right question to ask. The words "fight" and "freedom of scholarly inquiry" somehow do not seem to fit into our present political reality.

Perhaps all this talk about scholarly freedom is a foreign language that has to be translated into an Indonesian idiom to be properly understood. In 1991, in Ottawa, I could talk this language. Now in 1997 I feel constrained.

The writer is an observer of social and cultural affairs.