Academic Freedom from Ideological Capture

An argument for how the government can save sociology from itself

This is professor Jukka Savolainen’s first guest post at Unsafe Science. He holds a dual appointment with the Department of Sociology and the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He currently serves as the moderator of the sociology community of Heterodox Academy.

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Imagine a situation where the government shuts down a department of sociology claiming it has become a hotbed of Marxist pseudoscience. That scenario looks like something many academics in the United States are worried about. After all, in 2024, Florida removed a course in sociology from the general studies curriculum of its state universities and colleges. This decision, although significant, was limited to just one course. To my knowledge, no department of sociology has been closed down in Florida. However, if that were to happen, it would merely replicate something that already took place in Denmark.

There was something rotten in Denmark

In 1986, the University of Copenhagen closed down both of its sociology departments. This decision was followed by a careful review initiated by the Danish department of education and carried out by an external committee consisting of internationally recognized Nordic sociologists. The committee concluded that the teaching and scholarship practiced in Copenhagen under the name of sociology had deteriorated beyond the point of repair. The department was deemed indifferent to academic excellence and entirely focused on political activism of neo-Marxist persuasion. Instead of putting lipstick on a pig, the committee recommended eliminating the department and rebuilding it later without the baggage produced by the sharp left turn of the 1970’s.

Based on my impression of sociology at the University Copenhagen today, the decision to build a new department from scratch was a good one. Reestablished in the early 1990’s, the department currently enjoys a strong international reputation. It is populated by such world-class professors as Lasse Liebst, who has revitalized research on the bystander effect using video-observational techniques, and Kristian Karlson, the winner of multiple international awards for his innovations in quantitative methodology and the editor of Sociological Science – the only sociological journal with an editorial policy consistent with the principles of open science.

Did the decision by the Danish government violate academic freedom? Of course it did. Was it justified? You bet it was. When a democratic government establishes and funds a university, it carries a legitimate expectation that the institution will advance impartial scholarship and avoid political grandstanding. Hence, when academic departments become ideological echo chambers – prioritizing activism and suppressing free inquiry – the government has a responsibility to intervene. Just like other institutions, higher education is a part of the society it serves. Its autonomy – academic freedom – is contingent on its mission to pursue truth and disseminate knowledge openly and honestly.

Some Freedoms End with Their Abuse

In recent years, education has become a battleground for political debates over government intervention in both K-12 and higher education. Conservative politicians and state legislatures have sought to influence curricula, remove certain books from school libraries, and limit the teaching of controversial subjects. Progressives, in turn, have fiercely resisted such interventions, arguing they violate academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

This debate is somewhat unusual in the sense that, as a rule, political conservatives tend to be less supportive than liberals when it comes to the government interfering in individual freedoms or local affairs. Take law enforcement, for example.

Police departments are trusted with extraordinary powers to maintain public safety. Individual police officers have the authority to make arrests and use lethal force when necessary. However, if they abuse their “freedom to coerce,” government intervention is widely accepted, especially in left-leaning circles. Under the Biden administration, several police departments were placed under direct supervision after civil rights violations. Meanwhile, many conservatives have rejected this top-down approach as heavy-handed and even ideologically motivated.

In support of the conservative point of view, my own research on the treatment of the Minneapolis department by the US Department of Justice demonstrates that the conclusions made by the federal government were based on bad science that, among other things, ignored racial differences in criminal offending.

Why do progressives strongly support heavy-handed government intervention in police misconduct but reject similar efforts to address abuses of academic freedom? The likely answer is that higher education is overwhelmingly dominated by left-liberal perspectives. If your politics align with the status quo, you might believe, as many progressives do, that truth has a liberal bias. But from a conservative perspective, this ideological imbalance invites intervention. Universities, they argue, often abuse their autonomy by fostering ideological conformity, suppressing dissent, and failing to uphold open inquiry.

Progressives and many academics dispute this claim, but they are hardly impartial observers. When an institution validates your worldview, its autonomy is easily seen as sacrosanct. However, taking an impartial view, it’s clear that universities have, in many ways, become purveyors of left-liberal dogma. This is especially evident in sociology – my own discipline – where ideological bias has distorted research, marginalized dissenting scholars, and contributed to a broader crisis of credibility.

The Sunshine State Is Right About Sociology

In 2024, the Florida Board of Governors removed sociology from the general studies curriculum of public colleges and universities. Manny Diaz, Florida’s education commissioner, argued that the discipline had been “hijacked by left-wing activists.” Although harsh, his judgment aligns closely with a well-documented analysis by Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at Notre Dame University. In The Sacred Project of American Sociology, Smith describes the discipline as promoting left-wing “social-change activism” while masquerading as a neutral science.

The American Sociological Association’s (ASA’s) response to the Florida decision highlights this intellectual duplicity. The ASA described sociology as “the scientific study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior,” yet omitted any references to systemic racism, gender inequality, or other intersectional themes that dominate contemporary discourse. Meanwhile, the 2024 ASA conference theme – “Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy” – perfectly illustrates that promoting social justice activism is, in fact, the discipline’s primary goal. In her message to the conference participants, ASA president Joy Misra framed sociology as “a form of liberatory praxis” aimed at “intervening in socio-political struggles.”

Ideological Capture

Sociology’s ideological capture is strikingly clear in its treatment of crime. Given the magnitude of gun violence in urban America, one would expect the causes of violent offending to be a central focus of sociological research. Instead, contemporary sociologists are preoccupied with documenting the harms of policing, imprisonment, and legal forms of crime control.

Studies published in leading journals have claimed, for example, that merely hearing about incidents of police violence reduced citizens’ willingness to call 911 and even harms Black infants in utero. Both of those studies were later discredited - by non-sociologists - due to serious errors in data analysis. These flawed studies reflect a broader trend: sociological inquiry often prioritizes politically convenient narratives over scientific rigor.

Sociologists are eager to punish those who deviate from the narrative. In 2012, Mark Regnerus, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas, published a study showing that children raised by same-sex parents tended to fare worse on social and economic outcomes compared to those raised by heterosexual families. His findings contradicted the sociological consensus that children raised by same-sex parents experience no disadvantages, sparking intense backlash. Critics attacked the study’s methodology, peer-review process, and even suggested that conservative organizations funded it.

Despite an inquiry that cleared Regnerus of scientific misconduct, sociologists remained hostile to his findings, viewing them as a challenge to the “sacred project” of social justice. By contrast, when the sociologist Eric Stewart engaged in large-scale data fabrication to support the narrative of systemic racism, journal editors and research gatekeepers suppressed the information, despite compelling evidence of misconduct.

Sociological research on sex and gender is also pursued with ideological blinders. As Charlotta Stern has argued, research in this area has been monopolized by left-wing feminist perspectives, dogmatically assuming that any observed gender differences must be the result of discrimination or patriarchal socialization. This paradigm leaves no room for considering alternative explanations, such as the possibility that occupational preferences reflect evolved differences between biological men and women.

Similarly, research on racial inequalities operates under the assumption that systemic racism is the predominant cause of disparities. Proposing that other factors, such as culturally transmitted values, might contribute to racial disparities in, say, educational attainment is viewed as controversial in sociology, despite being widely recognized outside the discipline.

Given the problems of ideological bias and the suppression of open inquiry, it is not only justified but necessary for the government to intervene in the state of sociology at our public institutions.

The Danish Model

The Great Viking Siege of Paris, 1836, Jean Victor Schnetz, via Wikimedia. The siege took place in the 9th century. Messing with Vikings was usually a bad idea.

Most American sociologist likely agree that the American society lags behind Denmark in multiple aspects of societal development. We don’t have free healthcare for all, we charge insane amounts of money for college education, and our policies of parental leave are pathetic. I happen to agree with Bernie Sanders and other progressives who think the United States has a lot to learn from Denmark. The state of sociology is no exception. It is time for the United States to follow the example of the Danish government from the 1980’s and address what is obvious to anyone outside of sociology and to many of us on the inside: it is a discipline in disarray in urgent need of reform.

Importantly, such reforms must be guided by academic integrity, not partisan retaliation. Christopher Rufo, the leading conservative critic of higher education, has called for universities to be devoted to “the true, the good, and the beautiful,” promoting open inquiry over partisan activism. This vision, affirmed by organizations such as Heterodox Academy and FIRE, is encouraging. However, some of the conservative reforms, championed by Rufo himself, appear to have veered from these ideals, underscoring the perils of unfettered political intervention. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that, in Florida, even a course in machine learning - a purely technical subject - was flagged as problematic by officials in charge of implementing the letter of the law (SB 266, a 2023 higher ed reform law). Examples from additional states, such as Indiana and Ohio, further suggest that, left to their own devices, legislators may not be the most reliable stewards of higher education.

A Path Forward

Instead of passing partisan measures, reformers should follow the example from Denmark and empower scholars with demonstrated committed to empirical rigor and intellectual diversity. Competitive research grants could boost heterodox perspectives within the social sciences. Independent advisory boards, composed of scholars and administrators from across the ideological spectrum, could assist disciplines like sociology to adhere strictly to the scientific ethos - as it was first formulated in 1942 by Robert K. Merton, an American sociologist!

In short, the goal should not be to dismantle or destroy sociology but to restore it as the science of social life that it purports to be. Take it from me, many academic sociologists support reform. More than 230 of them are members of the Heterodox Academy. The question is whether policymakers will engage constructively or allow political battles to overshadow the opportunity for lasting institutional renewal.

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