The Latest in the Politics of Academic Freedom
Now the Department of Justice is weeding out political wrongthink in higher ed?
I’m here to give you my periodical update on higher-ed academic freedom news, and it’s hard to know where to start.
Let’s go north. According to CBC News, Quebec’s Higher Education Minister “says she intervened at Dawson College, asking the institution to avoid speaking about sensitive topics during a French-language course about Palestinian culture.” She said she did so because “the context was truly explosive" and “We really had tensions on campus.”
The teachers’ union, Québec Solidaire, the Liberal Party, and the Parti Québécois have decried the move as a violation of academic freedom. HxA’s Director of Policy Joe Cohn notes, “Academic freedom issues aren't exclusive to the U.S., and bans on ideas in the classroom are ill-advised and inconsistent with the principles of academic freedom wherever they are found.”
Below the border, American University leaders are trying to figure out what the Trump Administration’s various directives and memos will really mean in terms of cuts, risks, and changes.
A new “Dear Colleague” letter from the (still extant) Department of Education warns strongly that “Discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is illegal and morally reprehensible,” and instructs university personnel to abandon any “embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination [which] have emanated throughout every facet of academia.”
Writing for Reason, Emma Camp observes, “the DEI-related provisions could also create confusion and possibly cause some colleges to suppress academic freedom in the name of eliminating DEI.” In his weekly column for the Chronicle of Higher Education, editor Len Gutkin suspects some college leaders are making deep cuts into anything that looks like DEI because they figure “they may as well get ahead of the curve.”
Gutkin notes DEI “is profoundly unpopular,” including with faculty who identify as Democrat: “DEI policies blithely imposed by administrators over the last decade had sown vexing division within the faculty ranks.”
Cases like that of HxA member Scott Gerber don’t help. As our friends at FIRE report, following the law professor’s “vocal opposition to his school’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, Ohio Northern University [ONU] ordered campus police to yank him out of class and march him to the dean, who demanded Gerber’s immediate resignation. A judge decried the school’s apparent ‘callous disregard for due process,’ but because Gerber had the courage to fight back in court, ONU took things even further — filing a federal lawsuit to shut him up.”
ONU has claimed, among other things, that Gerber failed to adhere to rules of “collegiality.” A prior Free the Inquiry post explained that, back in 1999, the American Association of University Professors’s (AAUP) Committee A warned about “[t]he very real potential for a distinct criterion of ‘collegiality’ to cast a pall of stale uniformity” and that “collegiality” could end up “in direct tension with the value of faculty diversity in all its contemporary manifestations.” HxA staff argued in that post that today’s AAUP ought to see DEI as the new “collegiality”...and now Gerber finds himself entangled in both webs, with FIRE defending him.
For its part, the AAUP has recently retrenched on DEI, leading University of Chicago law professor Tom Ginsburg to ask in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, “Can academic freedom survive the AAUP?”
Ginsburg writes, “Instead of rising to meet the challenge [posed by current politics], the organization nominally committed to defending us has chosen to double down on some of the very policies that have attracted so much hostility to higher education. In so doing, the venerable American Association of University Professors — founded over a century ago to defend academic freedom — is putting us all at grave risk.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s Executive Order declaring that there are only two sexes and attempting to ban “gender ideology” is causing major disruption and uncertainty in research. Texas A&M’s Division of Research has advised principal investigators (PIs), academic deans, and research deans to comply because “DOJ is seeking award information on or related to surveys, forms or other data collection tools that ask about ‘gender’ or ‘gender identity.’”
I’m not sure we’ve ever before seen the Department of Justice change ongoing projects midstream to weed out political wrongthink in higher ed research.
With respect to already ongoing research, the Texas A&M research administration instructs researchers to “pause administration and change the question(s) to comply” with the executive order. Besides making a mess of ongoing work and longitudinal research, these directives from the White House make it impossible to study entire populations.
HxA Research Assistant Erin Shaw, who is tracking Institutional Statement Neutrality for our constituents, finds that “Many university leaders have recently issued statements to their communities on recent executive orders, usually something along the lines of ‘we are monitoring the situation closely and working with our offices of research administration,’” which aligns with HxA’s recommended policy that allows for exceptions where mission is directly impacted by politics.
But Erin noted the news Monday that Purdue President Mung Chiang told that school’s University Senate that “he and the Board of Trustees would continue the time-honored tradition that they ‘do not make public comments on behalf of the entire institution on any social political topic, including court proceedings and state legislations” out of concern for “individual freedom of expression.” While Chiang is free to take this approach, institutional neutrality does not demand that university leadership avoid advocating on governmental proposals that have direct impacts on the functioning of their institutions.
Purdue is a public university in Indiana, where the Republican legislature has recently instituted heavier regulation on public institutions of higher ed, and Indiana is not an outlier. GOP state legislatures are moving around the country on DEI, tenure, antisemitism, and more.
In case you missed it, check out this week’s legislative analysis from HxA Director of Policy Joe Cohn and Policy Analyst Raheem Williams looking at attempts in Texas and Kansas to abolish tenure, efforts in Iowa and Wyoming to ban DEI, and moves in Nebraska and Maryland to combat antisemitism. Also take a look at HxA Director of Research Alex Arnold’s post on why “the current political climate makes it imperative to defend tenure against those who would weaken or eliminate it.”
Interested in tenure? Yesterday afternoon we hosted a Heterodox Conversation on the subject. Here’s a clip from the event recording, showing Ellen Schrecker, American historian and member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, explaining that, in America, “The tenure system has all but collapsed.”
The event also featured Mike Shires, chief of staff and professor of economics and public policy at the University of Austin, and was moderated by HxA President John Tomasi.
Three more items of note and one request:
On the subject of cognitive bias in the social sciences–a perpetual matter of concern for those in favor of viewpoint diversity, as HxA is—an interesting preprint is now available. It argues, “Our species offers a substantially varied distribution of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral repertoires, but researchers have sampled topics and questions from a small part of this distribution, leaving out a variety of cognitive processes, emotions, and behaviors that remain understudied.” Find the preprint here.
The AAUP’s Academe blog has published HxA President John Tomasi’s response to criticisms of his Inauguration Day letter. Tomasi notes therein, “Heterodox Academy has never and will never defer to any president, administration, lawmaker, or political party on issues of open inquiry or anything else.”
And Quilette has published an abridged version of HxA Board member Jonathan Rauch’s keynote at the January “Censorship in STEM” conference. Says Rauch, “I would urge that those of us seeking to address the crisis on America’s campuses resist the tendency toward nihilism—the temptation to simply rant about how awful and corrupt academia has become, or to conclude that we need to just (metaphorically) burn it all down.”
He continues, “There remain immense reservoirs of integrity in our academic environments. And we must strive to remember that, even in their current form, these environments still constitute the crown jewel of the entire intellectual system produced by our species. They are worth saving—and they can be saved.”
That brings me to the request. Rauch’s presentation and article refer to data from 2018 showing the skewed Republican-to Democrat ratio among faculty. This kind of R-vs-D data is often reproduced on social media in a way that completely obscures faculty who don’t identify as either. If you know of recent or updated substantive data sets of faculty identification by party affiliation that includes faculty who don’t identify as D or R, we’d be interested in that. You can send that and any other communications to editor@heterodoxacademy.org. Thank you.
Image by Shutterstock
Note: This post was amended on 2/21/25 to clarify that the Texas A&M advice seems to refer to DOJ-funded research.