By ROBIN KEAR and KRISTIN KANTHAK

The power faculty derive from academic freedom is vital to the healthy conduct of a university, which has as its central goal the production and dissemination of knowledge. Faculty must be able to engage in research and teaching free from the outside interference of administrators, politicians or other influences.

Typically, the University Senate is in the business of protecting the power of faculty, students and staff as it relates to our roles in shared governance. Recently, though, the Senate officers have been hearing stories about the misuse of this power, and that has us greatly concerned. It has been said in many ways by many people, but perhaps most succinctly by Spiderman’s beloved Uncle Ben: With great power comes great responsibility.

The concept of academic freedom is generally understood to be a preclusion on the power of others who might try to silence faculty: Outsiders cannot stop faculty from teaching, researching and talking about what we, having been led by our expertise, find to be most relevant. But academic freedom is not carte blanche for us as faculty to say what we want whenever we want.

Rather, faculty must use care in the classroom to respect our students’ diversity of views on different issues, especially when those issues do not pertain to the content of the class. Students are required to be in our classrooms, and we must respect that position of privilege.

This sets up a difficult problem, then. Faculty have ethical and professional obligations to the University and to their students to avoid forcing students to engage in dialogue or witness a monologue on topics irrelevant to their disciplines. But unfortunately, students are often reluctant to report their professors when faculty allow their personal, irrelevant views to intrude on the classroom. And even if they do report, because of the preclusions of academic freedom, administrators are (rightly, we think) limited in terms of how they can address these problems.

The result is that there are far more Pitt students feeling unsafe in their classrooms than there are official reports from students of improper faculty behavior. We as faculty must govern ourselves.

We should also demand better from our colleagues. The University Senate officers are committed to exploring this academic year how we can protect the important value of academic freedom while still respecting our commitment to the safety and well-being of our students. Most important, we as a community must be clear that faculty value our students and understand their professional and ethical obligations that we take on as part of the privilege of academic freedom.

Robin Kear is Senate Council president and a liaison librarian in the University Library System. Kris Kanthak is vice president of Senate Council and associate professor of political science.