Professors Are Demanding Their Academic Freedom (And That’s A Good Thing For The Rest Of Us)

As Jonathan Rauch noted recently in Persuasion, there’s been a new “flowering of activism” on college campuses. Importantly, Rauch is not talking about campus agitators who put faculty on watchlists and invite incendiary speakers to provoke protest. Rauch is talking about the adults in the room, professors organizing to protect open inquiry and academic freedom. The Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), chaired by Princeton University professor Keith Whittington, is one such green sprout.

“The Academic Freedom Alliance is designed to come to the assistance of faculty in situations where they find themselves in the midst of controversies over something they’ve said,” Whittington told my colleague Bradley Jackson in a recent interview. “In universities, we have a very particular reason to care about free speech, which is that we think free speech is essential to the advancement of truth.”

This uptick of bottom-up, professor-led coordination to protect academic values is promising. AFA’s membership, which spans the country and the ideological spectrum, has adopted an approach akin to NATO’s motto, “An attack on one is an attack on all.”

My organization, the Institute for Humane Studies, has partnered with many of these same professors in workshops and seminars that explore the “Big Questions” that are shaping the course of the 21st century. Questions like, “Can we have both political liberty and social cohesion?” And, “What are the social and economic arrangements that lead to widespread human flourishing?” Progress on the Big Questions requires contestation. It requires a shared commitment to the open exchange of ideas as a core academic value. Unless scholars are willing to speak up on behalf of that commitment, a spiral of silence sets in and the expectation of robust intellectual openness wanes. When that happens, the very idea of the university begins to disappear.

This is why these emergent efforts are so important.  Right now, a University of Virginia medical student is suing the school after he was disciplined for expressing skepticism about the term “microaggressions.” University of San Diego law professor Thomas Smith is under investigation for anti-Chinese bigotry over his blog post arguing Covid-19 escaped from a Wuhan lab. Smith’s conclusion may be wrong, and his point was made in language that drove at least this reader to Urban Dictionary. But Smith’s colleagues were right when they said in a letter to the San Diego Law School administration, “an academic institution committed to free inquiry cannot allow misplaced accusations of bigotry to become an all-purpose tool for silencing critical comment.”

At stake here are two crucial, interrelated matters. First is what the scientist and social philosopher Michael Polanyi called “the republic of science”— the principles, norms and practices that govern intellectual discovery. Scholars expose their best efforts to the scrutiny of their peers. They build off one another, and through the exercise of critical reason, course correct one another. The open contest of ideas is the system by which the academy drives intellectual progress, which in turn, drives human progress. That system depends on a culture of openness, where dissenting views can be voiced and heard in good faith. As Whittington notes in his book Speak Freely, “the modern university is one of the great achievements of American civilization” because scholars “expect their ideas to be vigorously debated, to be investigated with both skepticism and care.”

If fear of being disciplined or “canceled” prevents scholars from saying what they believe to be true, higher education will no longer serve the truth-seeking enterprise.  

The second matter at stake is even more important: A healthy academic culture is perhaps the best laboratory we have to learn how to live together in a tolerant, peaceful and pluralistic society. And apparently, we can use all the help we can get. The New York Times recently published partisan segregation maps that illustrate how politically divided we are, not just rural vs. urban and coastal vs. heartland, but neighborhood by neighborhood. David French’s latest book Divided We Fall argues that Americans have become so intolerant of each other’s views, and so entrenched at illiberal extremes, that secession is a realistic possibility.

A university at its best is a place where we build the civic muscles a pluralistic society requires. It’s a place where we learn how to address disagreement through discourse and persuasion, not power plays and intimidation. It’s here that we learn that we can have very different points of view and still live, work, study, play and govern together. It’s a place where we learn that challenge and dissent do not end friendships, they forge them. A university campus is not the only place one can acquire the muscles of pluralism, but it is the only one I know of that has this ethos built into its DNA.

Of course, this is a moment when we find that many colleges and universities are not at their best. Illiberal forces of intimidation are coming from within and without, from the ideological left and right. Incidents of students shouting down an invited speaker are well known. More troubling, university administrators frequently fail to uphold what is arguably the defining value of the modern university: a commitment to the open exchange of ideas. And even more ominously, some state legislatures are seeking to deploy intimidation tactics of their own, ironically in an effort to combat cancel culture.

If we lose the academic values of the open university, society not only loses all the benefits of intellectual progress, but we also lose one of our best examples for how to live together with people different from ourselves. Fixing the problem will take many hands. Students, administrators, governing boards and elected officials all have a part to play in recommitting to the values that define the open university. But in this effort, there is no more important constituency than scholars themselves.

Godspeed, AFA.