Defusing Academic Freedom

April 22, 2025

By Oliver Traldi

Through a decade of political innovations, shifting alliances, and emerging coalitions within American conservatism, few stances have remained as consistent as the right’s antipathy to the censoriousness and ideological uniformity of higher education. At the heart of that stance is what seems to me to be a characteristic fusionist mantra: an amalgamation of Aristotelian instincts about functions, purposes, and natures with the utilitarian argument for free speech in John Stuart Mill’s classical liberalism. The mantra goes like this: A good university is a university that serves its purpose. The purpose of a university is to produce knowledge, or perhaps to find and speak the truth. The policies that best support the mission of knowledge production are policies of academic freedom. Therefore, a university ought to have policies of academic freedom.

Yale Law professor Keith Whittington is a representative proponent of this view. In the Houston Law Review he writes that he “t[akes] it as a given that the central mission of a modern, American university is to preserve, advance, and disseminate knowledge. Given that starting point,” he writes, “I think it follows that academic freedom is an important good that needs to be preserved if the university is to function properly.” Colleges’ recent official statements on institutional neutrality have made similar mention of such a mission, and, in my personal experience, talk about “the purpose of the university” has been constant in the recent meetings of organizations concerned with academic freedom and viewpoint diversity. Taking a cue from a talk by Jonathan Haidt, this purpose is sometimes called “the truth telos.”

This purpose-based argument gets at least some of its appeal from the accurate feeling that, for quite a few years now, many people employed in institutions of higher education have explicitly thought of their jobs as revolving around a different sort of mission—either a political one or a therapeutic one. Whittington, for instance, writes: “Academics need the freedom to test ideas if the goal is to push the boundaries of human understanding, but such freedoms are expendable, or even counterproductive, if that is not the priority. If the highest priority of the university is instead to reaffirm the status quo, to advance a particular political agenda, or make students happy, then professors who pursue discomforting ideas are not just superfluous but threatening. Academic freedom becomes irksome to the new institutional mission.”

So this perspective combines a sensible diagnosis of contemporary cultural currents with a powerful conservative philosophical approach. This is why it strikes me as a shame that it is wrong in virtually every possible way. It’s not wrong in virtue of rare counterexamples, obscure principles, or speculative extensions, either; it’s wrong about the very heart and essence of academic freedom, about major functions and everyday tasks of academics, and about the sorts of activities everyone agrees fall under the scope of academic freedom protections.

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Mill’s arguments in On Liberty were aimed against censorship. The best defense against bad speech is good speech. Even falsehoods can improve our arguments or give us a piece of the truth we might have been ignoring. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. That sort of thing. Academic freedom, however, does not only protect against censorship. In fact, in some cases it protects the power to censor. This power is evident in situations like peer review, tenure decisions, and curricular choices, as well as in cases of retraction, fraud, and failures of replication.

The power of peer review is the power to prevent articles from being published or talks from being given. If Mill’s argument is to be believed, such prevention is always, in the long run, to the detriment of the search for truth. However, academic freedom protects my use of this power, rather than undermining it. What’s more, it’s not clear that Millian concerns are particularly common in the exercise of academic freedom. Academics usually try to assess the plausibility and importance of a target paper itself, not the long-run effects on truth discovery or knowledge production that its publication might have. It’s true that an academic might be more likely to let through to publication a paper they find implausible if they think that there’s something interesting or nonobvious about that refutation itself. But this is a far cry from Mill’s absolutism. It raises quite naturally one of the common responses made by those who are somewhat more tentative about academic freedom: time, space, money, attention, and other resources are limited, and ideas which perhaps in principle ought not to be censored might in fact be poor uses of those resources. As a peer reviewer I’ve never once recommended that a paper or book be published without revision. There is a clear difficulty in squaring this fussiness with freewheeling Millianism. And that’s without considering that academic freedom also protects peer reviewers when their concerns are completely different.

Curricular choices are similar. I can choose not to teach some text, argument, or point of view for any reason I find appropriate, including my near-certainty—for Mill, a censorious certainty— that the perspective in question is wrong. In a philosophy of religion unit in an introduction to philosophy class, I would spend plenty of time on skeptical arguments based around the existence of evil and questions about divine justice. Religious believers teaching such a class might focus on different arguments. In classes on racism, arguments in favor of racism are unlikely to be raised. This shutting out of perspectives is an exercise, not a violation, of academic freedom, because that freedom covers our judgments about what’s important when it comes to some topic, and our ability to organize academic functions around that sense of what’s important.

Cases of scientific fraud are also hard to accommodate within the Millian framework. According to Mill, even bad ideas and false claims serve the eventual goal of truth by prompting rebuttals, leading us to find new reasons for believing the truth and preventing us from complacently falling into the recitation of so-called dead dogmas. But we take the circulation of fraudulent data to be straightforwardly bad, so that fraudulent claims must be retracted, removed from journals, and so on. Our instincts might be better than Mill’s in this regard: It’s hard to see how adding a bunch of fraudulent claims to scientific output could really serve the truth telos. Here, academic freedom protects not the fraud but its retraction.

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One way of thinking about the tension these core functions bring out is to notice that “preserve, advance, and disseminate knowledge” is, in fact, three purposes, not one. And these purposes cut against each other. Taking on the mission of disseminating knowledge, for instance, means offering a sort of imprimatur to statements and publications under your control. But this imprimatur itself cuts against the mission of advancing knowledge, at least understood from the Millian perspective: to stamp some word as final means precisely to shoo others away from a debate, to tell them that they can rely on the work done thus far and that there are better things to do. More generally, focusing on the search for truth elides the question of what to do when we find it.

Another way of thinking about these kinds of tensions is to consider two different kinds of choices. Mill seems to be talking about the choice between speech and no speech. His arguments seem to be aimed at the idea that, in the long term, speech is always better than no speech. It’s hard to imagine that he really established something that universal, but even if he did, the problem for academics is often more about choosing between one kind of speech and another. Thus, what seemingly censorious academics need to be convinced of is not the disvalue of censorship nor the absolute value of challenging consensus, but the value of challenging consensus as opposed to, say, working through the downstream consequences of consensus— say, applying some ideology to a specific case. This is the kind of decision scenario academics are more frequently faced with, and academic freedom alone does not determine what choice should be made.

A third way of thinking about these tensions is to recognize that an epistemic-systemic approach to some goal, like the Millian “marketplace of ideas” approach to finding the truth, require a kind of double consciousness. An individual who accepts such an approach simultaneously trusts the system regardless of how they act and acts in a way that forms a necessary part of the system. The epistemic-systemic approach to democracy, which dates to Condorcet if not before, only works if we retain our independent judgment about which option to vote for. Hayek’s epistemic-systemic approach to the price mechanism only works if we retain our independent judgment about what prices are worth paying. The “no-trade theorem” of economics dramatizes this double vision. When it comes to the marketplace of ideas, we take a hands-off approach precisely because we trust enough people to have their hands, so to speak, on. Academic freedom protects academics’ hands-on choices in this sense, and it also protects our power to judge when we have all, collectively, contributed enough to the collective mechanism that it has in fact found its answer. This is clearest in subjects not usually thought of as controversial, like mathematics. Rehashing straightforward or well-known results and reviewing wild claims about solutions to open problems are not how most mathematicians want to spend their time.

In sum, though, what these tensions establish is that policies of academic freedom are not simply policies of anti-censorship. Therefore, they cannot be justified on the basis of anti-censorship considerations alone.

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Three other aspects of the purpose of the university argument seem troubling. The first has to do with purpose-based arguments as a matter of form: It’s not clear how we can bridge the gap from a claim about what the university’s purpose is to a claim about how the university ought to be run. We might think that there are plenty of cases in which it’s better if some object or institution’s purpose is served only partially, or not at all. A good bomb is a bomb that explodes, but that doesn’t make it good for a bomb to explode. The contemporary American university is plagued by challenges from both inside and out about its value and the value of its mission. In arguing for academic freedom or any other status quo policy when it comes to the university, it is a political necessity not only to say something about the purpose of the university but to say something about why that purpose is valuable simpliciter.

The second has to do with determining what a university’s purpose is: It’s not clear how we’re supposed to do that, and any simple answer just makes the question about why “purpose” matters more pressing. People sometimes suggest, for instance, that we can read a university’s mission off of its mission statement. This seems sensible, but it generates the conclusion that as long as universities make their explicit preference for, say, social justice or student therapy over knowledge production, our grounds for academic freedom are not also grounds to criticize them for that choice. But that doesn’t make much sense. Whatever the right justification is for some universities to have policies of academic freedom really seems like it should also generate reasons to criticize the universities that don’t have those policies. A change away from truth and knowledge in institutional language does not rectify the error; it merely makes it official.

The third has to do with the substance of the claim about the purpose of the university: It’s not clear that the purpose of the university really does always have a lot to do with the truth, even when it comes to classes and student work. At a Heterodox Academy conference last summer, I spoke to a professor who told me about a theater department facing obstacles in putting on a show which had slurs in its script. Professors have similarly been censured for reading slurs aloud from classic texts—mentioning them, that is, without using them. It’s not really plausible that saying slurs helps us find the truth. But it seems again to be a core function of academic freedom that it protects an English professor, for example, who wants to teach a text, slurs and all.

More broadly, things with purposes are always finding new purposes. The flat side of a knife whose purpose is to cut can find a new mission: crushing garlic. A pencil whose purpose is to write can find a new mission: retrieving something that’s fallen under the couch. For all these reasons, purpose talk is, overall, not morally satisfying in general. It’s not a good basis for evaluative arguments about academic freedom.

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One other kind of problem about applying Mill to the university points, I think, in the direction of the real nature of academic freedom. Mill’s arguments explain why nobody should be censored. But academic freedom is a guild privilege; it protects the few who have already run the gauntlet—more of a mitten these days, really—of academic advancement, the academic job market, maybe in some cases the tenure track. Academic freedom protects a professor’s invitation to a controversial speaker, not the controversial speaker themselves. This is part of why so many academic controversies are about protests and shutdowns of invited speakers: It’s less obvious what answers academic freedom alone gives about such cases.

In the reverse case, though, of academics speaking outside the academy, academic freedom classically applies: Universities violate academic freedom when they come after academics for, for instance, politically charged tweets, as happened to Ilya Shapiro when Georgetown disciplined him following his comments on the potential nomination of now-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme court. It is hard for the purpose-based argument to make sense of this sort of thing because it is hard to see why the university’s purpose should govern what happens outside the university. But if academic freedom protects academics precisely in virtue of their status as academics, it’s easy to see why the protection extends extramurally. Speaking our mind is what we do. And it’s part of the protection that we be allowed to do what we do without being told off or disciplined for it.

The availability of this new perspective on academic freedom is not a surprise; it represents the kind of approach to the university that might characterize the “New Right,” itself a kind of fusion of a wild new elitism and a sensitivity to labor and material concerns. I think it does a better job of capturing both the actual and the desirable practice of academic freedom than the argument from the purpose of the university does—but I remain Millian enough to think that challenging the calcified conservative consensus on academic freedom is a worthwhile project in its own right.

I mentioned at the outset that the fusionist perspective on academic freedom seems to represent a real conservative consensus. Even within this consensus, though, lies a set of divides now hotly debated at the Great Books programs and civics centers cropping up across the country. Many of these take a familiar form: Should we extend to political opponents the rights, privileges, and respect they so ostentatiously withheld from us? Is it shooting ourselves in the foot to hold true to principles like viewpoint diversity and academic freedom, trampled upon by a whole generation—at least—of scholars and administrators? Or on the other hand is it precisely the opposite: that abandoning those principles would self-destructively play into the paws of the still-rabid DEI brigade, who mock the whole idea of political principle as a milquetoast defense mechanism for nail-biting moderates insufficiently committed to the woke revolution? These are ultimately strategic questions, however, which leave untouched the intellectual backbone of the conservative perspective on higher education.

Other kinds of new cases do seem to have something to do with that perspective, though. When conservatives call their new universities, colleges, schools, institutes, and programs “mission-driven,” a question is quickly raised as to what conservatives administering these formations should do with scholars and students who aren’t in line with the mission. Snatching graduate students off the streets on account of articles they’ve written doesn’t seem licensed by Mill’s approach, either. For better or for worse, I don’t think the new perspective on academic freedom I offer here gives more leeway to conservatives flush with the novelty of the power to do such things.

Rather than licensing an intoxicating mirror image of progressive academic activism, a new focus on academic protections should be based specifically on competence and excellence. What this focus can galvanize is a public conversation on just what intellectual excellence consists in, what sorts of pursuits exemplify it, and what value it has for broader society. Only by undergirding our commitment to academic freedom with serious answers to such questions can we justify the uniqueness of the privileges it involves.

Oliver Traldi is a philosopher at the University of Tulsa Honors College. His first book, Political Beliefs, was published by Routledge in 2024.