President Mauch on Academic Freedom

As the former vice president of academic affairs, I feel fortunate that I had the opportunity to get to work with our faculty for over a year before having the honor of leading Bethany College. During that time, we worked on developing courses, program reviews and tenure decisions. This allowed us to develop a mutual trust because a trustful process will allow us to do what is right for our students. My goal was to communicate the challenges and opportunities, work to solve them with transparency, and always be listening for ways to improve.

More recently, there have been questions about academic freedom. I am a strong advocate for faculty academic freedom. As a former faculty member, myself, I am so passionate about it because I know that it is what allows a free exchange of ideas on our campus. But any faculty member will tell you that academic freedom can only be achieved with its companion academic responsibility (or sometimes referred to as professional responsibility). As an administrator, I am evaluating these two companion priorities each time I interact with my faculty - whether it be as they create a new general education program, how they teach introductory level courses, or how they are choosing certain types of professional development for themselves. It is in those moments that my trust in my faculty is developed - so that when there is a particularly public topic, I have the utmost confidence in supporting my faculty to teach our students so that they have an amazing educational experience. In this experience, our students learn what it is to be lifelong learners, what it means to assimilate new information, and how to have respective dialogue.

I know why our faculty are passionate about higher education and what keeps them at Bethany. I know that they believe higher education is the home of debate and rhetoric. If controversial topics can’t be explored on a college campus, where can they? Censorship not only limits and suffocates ideas and perspectives, but it is also a complete contradiction of liberal art education and critical thinking. Our campus provides a safe place to have these conversations with faculty who are trained to facilitate such discussions.

Elizabeth Mauch,

President of Bethany College