What's the point of academic freedom?

Re-evaluating a sacred ideal

This post by Hrishikesh Joshi, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, originally appeared on his recently-launched Substack, Desert Philosophy. He and I were among the many collaborators on a paper on scientists censoring science. He writes on political philosophy, the ethics of higher ed, and epistemology. He is author of Why It’s OK to Speak Your Mind (2021).

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1. Academic Freedom, What

The AAUP defines academic freedom in the following way:

Academic freedom is the freedom of a teacher or researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss the issues in their academic field, and to teach and publish findings without interference from administrators, boards of trustees, political figures, donors, or other entities.

But why have academic freedom in the first place?

Notice how unique academic freedom is compared to the norms of other professions. When you hire a plumber or accountant, they have some leeway in determining how best the job is to be done. But they don’t have anything like “academic freedom”—they are hired to do specific tasks, and if they don’t do those tasks, you will seek someone else to do the job. Even those in occupations which deal with ideas can be let go if their employers don’t find their work satisfactory—journalists, editors, TV hosts, and so on.

Academics then, especially after tenure, enjoy an important privilege not shared by others in society. They are shielded from dismissal by those who pay their bills, as brought out in the quote above—donors, trustees, and politicians representing the public, for example. But great privileges call for great justification. What could the justification be?

2. Academic Freedom, Why

The AAUP explains, in its 1940 statement:

Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.

Academic freedom is essential to these purposes and applies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth.

This is an eminently plausible idea. For truth to be uncovered and disseminated, scholars must be free to follow the argument where it leads. The Galileos of the world must be free to defend their heterodox hypotheses. Only then can inquiry make genuine progress.

And only in the context of an ethos of free inquiry can we trust the outputs of scholarship. If academics are constantly afraid of what repercussions their work might have for their livelihoods, this will discourage them from conducting a “free search for truth.” Rather, they will be incentivized to appease the powers that be, regardless of whether these powers are right.

John Stuart Mill writes in On Liberty, Chapter 2 that

In respect to all persons but those whose pecuniary circumstances make them independent of the good will of other people, opinion, on this subject, is as efficacious as law; men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread.

His point here is that merely formal, legal protections of free speech (such as the First Amendment in the U.S.) are insufficient to create a genuine ethos of free expression. If saying X can get you fired or ineligible for employment, that’s going to affect what you end up being genuinely free to say—unless you are independently wealthy.

Here is Bertrand Russell, making a similar point a few decades after Mill:

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.

3. How things can go awry

But is academic freedom sufficient to ensure freedom of inquiry, of the kind Mill and Russell defend? Here’s a stark illustration of how things can go awry.

Thought Experiment: Suppose that higher education is controlled by a guild of Priests who believe in the One True Religion. When it comes to hiring new members of the faculty, the Priests look out for signs of heresy. If they detect any, they will refuse to hire the said person. The same goes for admissions into graduate programs, articles for peer review, and grant allocations. Of course, once a person has tenure, they may follow the argument where it leads, though even then, they will be penalized in terms of securing grants or getting their work published, cited, or assigned in classes.

Here, you have formal protections for academic freedom—no interference from donors or politicians, etc.—but can thought be genuinely free in such an environment?

Presumably not. First off, many heretics will self-select out of the profession—for, they will have to pursue only lines of inquiry consistent with the One True Religion. This will grate against their sense of integrity. Second, younger scholars will be incentivized to form beliefs in line with the One True Religion. Otherwise, there will be no place for them in higher education. This thought experiment thus illustrates how a “free search for truth” can be absent even in the presence of formal academic freedom protections.

4. Ideological Homogeneity and Free Inquiry

Ideological homogeneity can undermine free inquiry due to:

• Biases in hiring

• Biases in peer review

• Censorship by other scholars

• Self-censorship

• Students not exposed to a variety of arguments

Academic freedom, insofar as it only protects the academy from external pressures, does little by itself to prevent these dynamics.

Now the example above, involving the Priests and their One True Religion, is hypothetical. But a broad range of data suggest that modern higher education exhibits similar patterns. First off, the academy is politically homogenous—especially in fields tasked with investigating social and political questions.

The figure below shows for example, that sociology, history, and anthropology are much more lopsided compared to engineering or the physical sciences. (Data are from Mitchell Langbert’s 2018 study of elite liberal arts college faculty.)

What is more, the academy has gotten more lopsided over time. Hiring bias is likely the culprit here.

(Source: Nathan Honeycutt)

The evidence for hiring bias is multifaceted. For example:

• According to J.C. Phillips’s study of law school hiring from 2001-2010, conservative/libertarian applicants ended up in departments ranked 12-13 spots below their equally credentialed left/liberal peers.

• Many academics explicitly state that they would discriminate against conservative/libertarian applicants.

• Affective polarization in general leads to discrimination against out-party members. Iyengar and Westwood (2015) document this in the case of awarding scholarships to graduating high school seniors.

In summarizing the data on self-admission, Magness and Waugh (2022) conclude:

Many psychology faculty openly admit to hiring discrimination against nonleftist faculty applicants (Inbar and Lammers 2012), and (Peters et al. 2020) find similar discriminatory practices in philosophy…Because these data come from self-admission, it is likely that they also understate the severity of political discrimination in these fields, including that arising from unadmitted or subconscious biases.

In addition, a recent survey conducted by FIRE finds that a significant portion of law faculty think a conservative faculty hire would be a “poor fit” in their schools:

What about censorship by other scholars? By now, we are familiar with many cases of disinvited speakers, disruptions of talks, and the like. But these phenomena are symptoms of something deeper. In an atmosphere of ideological homogeneity, in-group dynamics can make it easy for the majority to silence dissenters by a variety of means. Censorious pressures from other scholars can affect peer review, grant applications, and much more.

Free inquiry is severely compromised in a setting of ideological homogeneity, because:

• Fruitful research programs that cut against the dominant ideology are discouraged.

• The pressure to yield ideologically friendly scholarship degrades the quality of the work—a likely culprit behind the replication crisis in the social sciences.

• Students who have reservations about the dominant ideology self-select out of certain disciplines.

A paper very much reading in this vein is Justin McBrayer’s “The Epistemic Benefits of Ideological Diversity.” McBrayer explains that groups have significant advantages over individuals in conducting inquiry because they are better at:

(a) identifying a representative sample of important questions,

(b) developing a wider range of potential answers, and

(c) evaluating the evidence for and against each option.

But each of these advantages is undercut by ideological homogeneity. As a result, scholarly output becomes unreliable.

5. Self-Censorship

Besides explicit censorious pressures, students and scholars alike are prone to self-censorship in the presence of ideological pressures. This too degrades the outputs of the scholarly enterprise.

Glenn Loury, in his classic paper on self-censorship and public discourse explains:

The notion of objective research—on the employment effects of the minimum wage, say, or the influence of maternal employment on child development can have no meaning if, when the results are reported, other “scientists” are mainly concerned to pose the ad hominem query: “Just what kind of economist, sociologist, and so on would say this?” Not only will investigators be induced to censor themselves, the very way in which research is evaluated and in which consensus about “the facts” is formed will be altered. If when a study yields unpopular conclusions it is subjected to greater scrutiny, and more effort is expended toward its refutation, an obvious bias to “find what the community is looking for” will have been introduced. Thus the very way in which knowledge of the world around us is constituted can be influenced by the phenomenon of strategic expression.

In addition to scholars themselves, there is evidence that students, especially those on the conservative end of the political spectrum, feel pressures to self-censor in their classes.

6. Where does this leave higher education?

Recall the rationale for academic freedom in the first place: “the free search for truth and its free exposition.”

But as it stands, the academy seems to do a poor job of this, especially on matters that are salient to social and political issues. If donors, trustees, and politicians respond by cutting funding to the humanities and social sciences, vetoing appointments, or funding alternative centers (as opposed to traditional departments), faculty can no longer legitimately resist these moves on the basis of academic freedom. That’s because the whole point of academic freedom—granted to institutions of higher education as a whole—was to promote free inquiry. If free inquiry is no longer on the table because of the extreme ideological skew of the academy, then external interventions may be called for.

This is especially so because the public funds higher education in a variety of ways, including:

• Student loan subsidies,

• Direct funding to public universities, and

• Grants through the NSF, NEH, NIH, and so on.

Without public funding, many universities’ budgets would be in severe shortfall, and most would have to shutter. But this means that universities have a duty to be good stewards of public resources. There is a deep and underexplored principal-agent problem here.

Consider some other cases. A board hires a CEO to represent the interests of the shareholders. If the CEO is doing a poor job, she is rightly replaced. Or imagine that you hire a lawyer to represent your case. If you find out that he is not working to represent your interests at all, then it makes sense for you to hire another one.

Likewise, if the public is not to withdraw funds from the academy, while affording faculty the privilege of academic freedom, then an element of trust is necessary. And trust is only merited in the presence of trustworthiness. To the extent that faculty use public funding to promote their own sectarian viewpoints and enforce ideological conformity, then it would seem that trust is no longer merited. And if that is so, the very ideal of “academic freedom” must be rethought.

Ideally, there would be a self-correction. Given the threats of ideological homogeneity on free inquiry, departments can take active measures to hire scholars with diverse viewpoints. This is not “affirmative action for conservatives,” as some allege, given the well-documented biases in hiring—simply avoiding the bias would go a long way to correcting the imbalance.

But unfortunately, many within the academy remain unconvinced that there is a problem in the first place. This leaves the public in a tough situation. If the privilege of academic freedom granted to the universities no longer serves its original purpose, then external interventions become legitimate. Academic freedom itself must be rethought from the ground up.

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