Remind me never to get on Tom Ricks's bad side

In my earlier post I suggested that academic freedom in the Professional Military Educational system is inherently different that academic freedom in civilian academia. I wanted to take the opportunity to elaborate on that.

Everyone agrees that academic freedom is important for the further development of knowledge. The development of knowledge is a key mission for civilian academia, perhaps even the paramount one. Hence academic freedom is a crucial value.

The development of knowledge is not a key mission for the U.S. Department of Defense. I believe it could accurately be called a subsidiary mission at best.

Organizations are willing to bear greater costs to promote their crucial values than they are to promote subsidiary values. This is not a critique of the U.S. Department of Defense, but simply a characteristic of all organizations. It means that organizational support for academic freedom within the Department of Defense will always be less than it is in civilian academia.

There are other important differences between academic freedom in a DoD setting and a civilian academic setting. Much of the analysis done within DoD is about the organization itself--its structure, policies, leadership, etc. Most of the analysis done in civilian academia deals with organizations, policies, and people outside the academic organization itself. This means that as a general rule, critical analysis done under the policy of academic freedom within DoD strikes more directly at DoD itself than does critical analysis undertaken in a university. Very few academics build their careers through critical analysis of academia, particularly their own institution. But that's exactly what DoD academics do.

It is also true that most of the leadership in DoD, whether uniformed military or senior civilians, have not spent all or most of their careers in an environment where the value of academic freedom is inculcated. They understand "strategic communications" to promote the messages and interests of the organization, but may not be as comfortable with public criticism of their organization from inside it. Given that, there is an amazing depth of tolerance for self criticism from DoD's senior leaders. I have long been amazed that the U.S. Army pays me to, with some frequency, tell it that I think it's wrong. That Army and DoD leaders can understand, tolerate, and value something that they may not have deep personal experience with says much about their sagacity.

But what does all this mean? Most importantly it means that academic freedom in a DoD setting is (and must be) more fragile than in civilian academia. This places special responsibility on those in DoD who make use of academic freedom (i.e. the students and faculty in the Professional Military Educational System). Frankly, they must understand that there are limits to the costs their organization will bear to sustain academic freedom. But this fragility also places responsibilities on the consumers of the information or knowledge generated by DoD under the policy of academic freedom. Like Blanche Dubois, we in PME rely on the kindness of strangers to help us make the point that our opinions and positions are strictly our own, and do not reflect official organizational positions. We also rely on them to not make our statements and written words appear more critical than we intended. We have a fairly good idea of how much criticism DoD and national political leaders will tolerate from people who are "part of the team. But we need others outside DoD to allow us to stay within these bounds.

As I mentioned earlier, academic freedom within DoD is both fragile and important. I am certain that it is valued more than in any other defense establishment anywhere around the world, today or in the past. Again, this is a sign of the wisdom of our defense leaders. But distorting or abusing DoD's academic freedom can pose a challenge to it. It is incumbent on both those of us within DoD the outsider consumers of the information or knowledge we create to remain aware of this.