It’s getting kinda crowded in the ivory tower’s foyer.

The ever-widening political context of “back to school.”

A few Halloweens back, an anti-sugar neighbor of mine ran an experiment on local children. She gave them the choice between conventional holiday candy and office supplies. What would the kids go for – the Tootsie Rolls or the little boxes of paper clips? The Mars bars or the pencil sharpeners? 

Turns out half the kids picked office supplies. Now, every time school starts back up in the fall, I think about this and wonder: Who wouldn’t pick fresh office supplies? 

Jolly Ranchers are great, but I just love me that perfect pairing of a fresh Moleskin and a new bold-tip Pilot G2 pen in blue. That combo of wide-open possibilities, the intellectual ideal to which we’re drawn when we seek to live in academia!

Of course, school doesn’t really restart with a blank slate for researchers, educators, and students. At Heterodox Academy (HxA), where I’m now serving as Managing Editor, we’ve been passing around reasons for concern.

In case you missed it, HxA’s new Director of Policy Joe Cohn recently noted that, “In a misguided attempt to protect students from anti-Semitism on their campuses, the Florida Board of Governors recently ordered all of its institutions to screen the content of their courses for antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias.” 

Yowza. This represents an extraordinary move and, as Joe notes, raises constitutional concerns. It also ignores better ways to get at the problems worrying the Board of Governors.

Zooming out to look at the whole country, HxA Segal Center Center for Academic Pluralism Senior Researcher Nate Tenhundfeld crunched the data on full-time faculty job ads and found that, when mapped, requirements for DEI statements from applicants produce a geography remarkably similar to recent electoral college counts. 

“This is obviously not to suggest any sort of causal relationship,” Nate observes. “But it does serve to highlight that there is a significant source of shared variance between the politics of a state and the interest in obtaining DEI-related statements from faculty applicants.”

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed, outgoing HxA Segal Center Postdoctoral Fellow Adam Gjesdal just sent a wake-up call to student protestors seeking divestment from Israel, explaining that “anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) laws are in effect in most states. Those laws prohibit organizations boycotting Israel from doing any business with the state government.” 

Adam reasons, “Activist energies may be better directed away from college presidents and administrators and toward elected public officials.”

Regardless, there’s no doubt the context of “back to school” keeps getting bigger. As demonstrated in a startling Washington Post investigative report published today, even foreign governments may be attempting to control thought and speech in America in ways that could bleed into campus life. 

Using sophisticated techniques and gumshoe research, WaPo journalists found that “Chinese diplomats and pro-China diaspora groups based in the United States organized demonstrations in San Francisco that harassed and silenced protesters opposed to Beijing’s policies, including through violence.” 

As critics of the Chinese government attempted to speak out, allies of the Chinese Communist Party brutally assaulted and otherwise attempted to silence them.

While this happened on American streets and not campuses, there can be no doubt that this kind of wider political context shapes how members of academic communities – including students and faculty who are Chinese or have family in China – think about what is safe to research, think, write, and say.

The good news is that, as the fall semester starts, more and more American university and college leaders are apparently feeling the need to promise institutional statement neutrality – i.e., to promise that institutional leadership will not issue position statements on contested social issues unless they directly concern the institution’s academic mission.

Amherst College’s President Michael Elliott kicked off the year with a “commitment to free expression and open inquiry,” insisting his college is a place “where we learn together in a spirit of mutual respect, and where we support the right of others to disagree with us.”

As many of his peers are doing, Elliott drew the limit at violent actions and harassment (“including antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate”) and behavior like “shouting down speakers,” saying college members have an “obligation to listen to divergent opinions and criticism,” naming as a shared goal “advanc[ing] collective knowledge.”

The University of Colorado Boulder also issued a statement on neutrality, as did the interim president and interim provost of Cornell. The LA Times reported that UC Berkeley’s Chancellor Rich Lyons “would move Berkeley toward ‘institutional neutrality.’” We’ll be watching. 

Princeton University took to social media to share President Christopher Eisgruber’s statement that his job “is to ensure that people on this campus…have the freedom to say what they think” but also “to encourage you to engage with, and to learn from, others who think differently than you.”

What’s significant in many of these statements is not only overt acknowledgements that “free expression” activities won’t be tolerated if they involve actively keeping others from teaching, learning, and researching, but also articulation of the fact that we don’t advance if we don’t really listen to alternative perspectives and care about actual knowledge production.

Along those lines, HxA Director of Research Alex Arnold explained this past week why “free speech ain’t enough” – that “free speech, while necessary, remains insufficient to the cause of higher ed.” Word.

Thanks for reading what has been the first of my weekly columns for Free the Inquiry. Feel free to send me your feedback on and ideas for future editions.

Until next week, a shout-out to our fantastic allies at HxLibraries as they bring us an honest retrospective on four years of working to “uphold intellectual freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of access to information of one’s choosing, and privacy.”

I say we give these folks all the candy. I’ll even share my G2 Pilot pens.