Category: academic freedom

Vanderbilt’s Provost Daniel Diermeier discusses the ideological erosion of universities—and the way to fix it

May 6, 2026 • 9:30 am

I’m proffering you a must-watch video, at least if you’re interested in the rise and fall of American academia.

Vanderbilt University, with its emphasis on free speech, academic freedom, and institutional neutrality, is rapidly becoming the University of Chicago of the South—or should I say that The University of Chicago is the Vanderbilt of the North? For Vanderbilt has been transformed since hiring the University of Chicago’s previous Provost, Daniel Diermeier, as its Chancellor (i.e., President).  Diermeier is implementing the Chicago Principles in a big way at Vanderbilt. In fact, he’s doing better than Chicago. For example, when pro-Palestinian protestors illegally occupied a university building in Vanderbilt in 2024, the protestors were removed after 22 hours, with some students arrested and others suspended.

In contrast, when this happened four times at Chicago (i.e., violations of University rules during anti-Israel demonstrations), nothing happened to the students. Some of them, and lik-minded faculty, were arrested after a sit-in in our Admissions Office, but all charges were dropped. Bachelor’s degrees with temporarily withheld here from a few later protestors, but then the degrees were granted soon thereafter. At Chicago, violations of university rules during protests—invariably pro-Palestinian protests—are met with no punishment, which of course simply encourages further rules violations. When inquiring about this laxity, I was told that it would be the worst possible optics if the University police were seen to “lay hands on protestors.”

So here’s a one-hour talk by Chancellor Diermeier at the Heterodox Academy meeting at UC Berkeley (he’s introduced by the UCB Chancellor). The Youtube notes are below.

Centered on the theme “The Value of Viewpoint Diversity: Why It Matters and How to Practice It Well”, this conference offers actionable insights, fosters rich intellectual exchange, and brings together individuals from across the region who are invested in the future of higher education.

Notice that Diermeier speaks without notes, yet the speech is well constructed and logical. Kudos to him. At the beginning he outlines three areas of inquiry, which I’ve put in bold. I’ve also added comments.

Progress

Diermeier argues that there has been progress in free expression of universities: there is now less shouting down of speakers—something he attributes largely to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). To see if he’s right, you can check FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database. So far, there have been 98 deplatformings or attempted deplatformings in 2026, and the year isn’t half over. I’m not sure that this isn’t an increase rather than a decrease over previous years. You can count them if you wish.

Diermeier is also glad that institutional neutrality is spreading rapidly: more than 140 schools, he says, have adopted some kind of position of being institutionally neutral—that is, taking no official position on political, moral, or ideological issues unless they have a direct influence on the stated mission of a university.  I was dubious of this figure, but he’s right. Here’s a chart from an article in Free the Inquiry showing the remarkable rise in U.S. and Canadian universities adopting institutional neutrality. Look at the big jump starting in 2024!

And there’s also been some improvements in the UK as reported by Times Higher Education: click to read (h/t Jez):

Finally, Diermeier states that the intrusive and ideologically extreme versions of DEI are becoming less powerful in universities. Here he’s right, too, though that may disappear after Trump goes. Extreme forms of DEI will certainly return if we get a Democratic President—one of the bad side effects of Democrats, especially “progressive” Democrats, gain power.

Principle is the second area of Diermeier’s talk. His topic is the answer to the question, “What is the purpose of a univesity?”  And here he has no doubts, for the purpose is to produce “pathbreaking research and transformative education”—production of knowledge and conveying this knowledge to society via publications or other scholarly outlets.

He goes on to discuss the importance of free speech and emphasizes that it’s not the same thing as academic freedom, a point I’ve made repeatedly. As a private citizen I am free to espouse creationism as much as I want, but I am not free to teach creationism—or other palpable falsehoods—in my biology classes. You can’t say anything you want as a professor teaching classes.

Diermeier takes up the issue of the meeting: “viewpoint diversity”, which many people think is the real kind of diversity that universities should strive for. But he notes that although viewpoint diversity is a worthy goal if it’s meant to buttressfree speech, he’s not clear about what the term really means. Diermeier notes that viewpoint diversity as a desideratum is really the byproduct of a more important goal: preventing the erosion of scholarly standards by political or ideological principles. If that erosion is taking place, as it is in many areas (science is somewhat of an exception, but, as Luana and I showed, the erosion is even affecting biology), then it enforces a conformity that stifles free speech and academic freedom. Thus, if you prevent that kind of erosion and its chilling effect on speech, viewpoint diversity should automatically inrease.

Diermeier then gives several examples of the kind of symptoms we see when academic fields are afflicted with ideological erosion. The symptoms are “citation justice,” “positionality statements,” and “avoidance of trans issues” (he means the fear of academics to even discuss trans issues).  I’ve never heard a college president be so open in opposing these trends, but he’s right.

Politics is Diermeier’s third topic, and this is where he suggests remedies.  He notes that ideology isn’t pervasive in academia, guessing that about 85% of faculty are committed to doing their academic mission—investigating the areas of interest to them, like me working on speciation in fruit flies. But, he says, the other 15% “have political commitments that they consider essential to who they are as scholars.:” Examples of these people, in my view, are Chicago professors like Alireza Doostdar and Eman Abdelhadi, pro-Palestinian scholars who are always spouting off  or demonstrating against Israel. Abdelhadi is reported as saying this:

Abdelhadi. . . . described the University [of Chicago] as “evil” and “a colonial landlord” in her remarks, which centered on the topic of political organizing in one’s community.

“Why would I organize here? I don’t care about this institution. Like I don’t—like fuck the University of Chicago, it’s evil. Like, you know? It’s a colonial landlord. Like, why would I put any of my political energy into this space,” Abdelhadi said at the conference. “And I kind of had a moment of disdain for people who spent a lot of time doing that.”

“The genocide really collapsed that and made me realize two things,” she continued. “One is that, well, my students need me. So, it was like: ‘Oh, I actually have to organize here to take care of my students, who I do care about.’ But I also realized—and I think this is a painful lesson that a lot of us in the Palestine solidarity movement have been learning—is that we don’t have power.”

Despite her criticisms of the University’s role as a “landlord, a healthcare provider, [and] a police force,” she described UChicago as “a place where [she has] access to thousands of people that [she] could potentially organize” politically.

In other words, damn the scholarship; she is here to ideologically convert “thousands of students.”  This is what Diermeier means by the “other 15%.”  He adds that people with such an agenda are mostly on the Left, and yes, that is also correct.

How do we fix this? In the Q&A session beginning 44 minutes in, this is precisely the question that Abby Thompson of UC Davis asks Diermeier, and his answer isn’t completely satisfying: he says that the faculty must organize and stand together against this kind of ideological erosion.  My response is that that’s way easier said than done.

But I’ve gone on too long, and my summary is no substitute for listening to this engaging talk. It’s the best discussion of the state of American universities that I’ve heard since I started teaching:

The degeneration of the AAUP, an organization that’s now all but useless

June 15, 2025 • 9:35 am

Like the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the once-venerable American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has by and large abandoned its primary values and mission. In the case of the AAUP, celebrating its 110th anniversary this year, that mission was the protection of academic freedom as well as “to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.”

How has this happened? First, in a post in 2025 (see other critiques of mine here), I summarized the ways the AAUP has gone to ground:

The three changes the AAUP has made to this end include these (there are a few other and more minor ones included in the piece):

a.) Abandoned its opposition to academic boycotts

b.) Approved of the use of diversity statements, finding them “compatible with academic freedom”

c.) Averring that institutional neutrality, as embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Report, need not impact academic freedom one way or the other, so one need not adhere to the Kalven principle that the university or parts of it cannot issue ideological, political, or moral statements unless those statements bear directly on the mission of the University.

In a new article, the Chronicle of Higher Education (click headlines below of find it archived here), Matthew Finkin, once head of the committee that criticized academic boycotts and DEI criteria for promotion (“Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure”), explains the 180º turn the AAUP took on these positions. Finkin finds, as the title below shows, that the newer reversed positions are incompatible with the organization’s original mission. As he says:

Recent actions have departed from these standards — and radically. The AAUP, acting through its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, has, first, abandoned its prior position that systematic participation in the boycott of Israeli universities could threaten academic freedom and, second, declared that adherence to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) dictates as a condition of faculty retention can be consistent with academic freedom. These actions reveal a body now driven by considerations other than fidelity to principle. As a result, the deep well of communal respect has been drained dry; the AAUP’s credibility has been destroyed.

Let’s summarize the source of the reversals by topic.

Academic boycotts. 

As recently as 2005, when the British Association of University Teachers called for its members not to engage academically with two Israeli universities, the AAUP opposed this move strongly, issuing this statement:

Since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has been committed to preserving and advancing the free exchange of ideas among academics and irrespective of governmental policies and however unpalatable those policies may be viewed. We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest-possible international movement of scholars and ideas.

A subsequent subcommittee report opposed organized academic boycotts by groups (including both departments and universities), though of course considerations of academic freedom allow individuals to cooperate or collaborate with whomever they want.

Then came October 7, 2023 and the subsequent demonization of Israel by many liberals—liberals who, by and large, make up most university faculties. The AAUP then did that 180 and, in 2024, decided that boycotts of universities (read: Israeli universities) was okay after all.  And it allowed this because, the AAUP proclaimed, banning boycotts actually compromised academic freedom. The striking thing was that the AAUP gave not a single example of how boycotts actually had compromised academic freedom:

There matters stood until the summer of 2024, when Committee A approved a statement that expressly “supersedes” the position adopted nearly two decades before. The new Statement on Academic Boycotts explained its raison d’être: The 2006 position was “controversial, contested, and used to compromise academic freedom. We therefore believe that this position deserves reconsideration and clarification.” Unfortunately, the reasons given for this reconsideration are threadbare, at best. The result is a tangle of inconsistencies and begged questions — without any reference to, let alone inquiry into, the role played by freedom of research and teaching on which the committee’s position rested a generation before.

The assertion that because the 2006 position has been “used to compromise academic freedom” it should be reconsidered could provide a valid reason for revision. But the report makes no mention of any instance, in press accounts or complaints brought to the staff, of any faculty member having been disciplined or threatened with discipline simply for advocating for a boycott. So “compromise” must mean something other than violation or abridgment, but the 2024 statement breathes no hint of what.

The AAUP. whose Committee A chair, Rana Jaleel, is apparently pro-Palestibnian, favoring the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, decided that academic boycotts were fine because opposing them would chill the speech and actions of those who favor boycotts. Note, though, that the AAUP is not a university, and so is not subject to academic neutrality provisions of universities. Further, this argument, as Finkin notes, is nonsensical:

This argument is logically flawed and empirically unsupported. By its logic, were the state to accede to the demands of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and divest university investments in companies that do business in Israel, those faculty members who oppose the boycott and wish to say so would have had their own academic freedom “compromised.” The only way that would not be the case would be to maintain that advocacy for BDS is protected by academic freedom, but advocacy against it is not.

Nor is there any factual basis for the claim that such legislation has actually “been used to compromise” academic freedom in that chilling sense. Illinois law, for example, directs its public-university retirement system to decline to invest in companies that observe the anti-Israel boycott and to divest in those that do. Yet at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the BDS movement shows no sign of abatement.

According to the AAUP’s new argument,  organized academic boycotts or prohibition of them would both infringe on academic freedom. The only rational solution is to impugn organized boycotts (but not individual ones), because such organized movements impinge on scholarly interchange between institutions, which is essential for academic freeedom. The AAUP blew this one.

DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion) statements

Here we’re talking about the use of DEI statements as prerequisites for hiring, promotion, and tenure, something prohibited by the University of Chicago. Although our university favors at least the DI parts of DEI, it also considers ideological statements of this sort to violate our 1970 Shils Report, which bases hiring and promotion on meritocracy. DEI statements are compelled speech, as those who are forced to write them must adhere to the going norms of DEI, norms that sneer at statements like “I have treated and will treat all students the same, regardless of their immutable characteristics like race or religion.” Modern DEI statements are expressly ideological, hewing to “progressive” Leftist politics.

Finkin notes the slipshod way that the AAUP went about giving its imprimatur to DEI statements:

Had Committee A taken up DEI in keeping with its customary process of policy consideration in such a weighty matter, it would have assembled the data on what these policies actually provided, how widespread they were, and how they were being administered; engaged with the arguments on the relationship of DEI to academic freedom in the literature and in the deliberations of faculties, including those that refused to use them; and provided a clear, dispassionate analysis of how DEI stacked up against the 1940 statement’s commitment to freedom of research, teaching, and political engagement. It did nothing of the kind. Instead, it launched an aggressive defense of DEI accompanied by a strident attack on its critics, in all of six paragraphs and three conclusory recommendations. Each bears brief synopsis before the substance of the statement is addressed.

I won’t go through these arguments except to say that they seem to boil down to this:  if DEI statements are approved by a faculty as essential for professional advancement, then opposing them is violating academic freedom. Apparently academic freedom, says the AAUP, is what a faculty consensus says it is.  Finkin points out the problems with this view:

It is worth noting that a number of faculty members subject to the anti-Communist loyalty oath supported it, and a larger number were indifferent. The AAUP did not consider the depth of faculty support for the loyalty oath to have any bearing on its consequences for academic freedom. The reason is that the abridgment of academic freedom is a matter of fact irrespective of the status or motive of those effecting or acquiescing in it. The way Committee A has cast it, a DEI policy identical in every word would or would not abridge academic freedom depending only on the ideological or political proclivities of a majority of a bare quorum of “an appropriate larger group.” Faculty liberties cannot be made to hang by so precarious a thread. It should be enough to say of the right to exercise academic freedom what the Supreme Court said of the right to exercise freedom of thought and speech: It depends on no majority; it hinges on the outcome of no vote.

And, in fact, as I’ve said, required DEI statements, by okaying compelled speech, violate the Constitution and are therefore illegal, at least at public universities that must adhere to the First Amendment. The only reason they’re still compulsory in some public universitie—I believe the University of California is one—is because nobody so far has had the moxie to challenge the statements in courts, for that would require having “standing”, which would endanger all your academic prospects. As Finkin explains:

It seems inevitable that sometime, somewhere, one or more instructors will not be reappointed for no reason other than the failure to satisfy a DEI requirement. It seems equally inevitable that at least one housed in a public university will contest the decision on constitutional grounds; and, in that event, that the AAUP will appear before the court as amicus curiae. In that case, it would be expected that the AAUP will address the court much along this line:

We appear before this court as the repository of a century’s thoughtful engagement with the meaning and significance of academic freedom, to bring our considered judgment, expressed in the Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation, to the court’s attention and to argue in support of it.

To which the only frank response a court could make is: “You are the successor in title, but no longer in principle, spirit, or scrupulous care.”

I’ll finish by noting that the real defender of academic freedom these days, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), is opposed to both academic boycotts and DEI statements.  The AAUP is now an opponent rather than a guarantor of academic freedom, and FIRE is its true successor.

h/t Wayne

More on academic freedom versus free speech: the homily ends

May 22, 2025 • 11:15 am

This is the last (I hope) of three posts on a topic I’m reading about: academic freedom (I have to be on a panel about the topic in June). Part 1 is here and part 2 is here. I won’t reprise what I said in those posts except to summarize their main points:

Post 1: The “clash of ideas” touted by Mill and others as the primary virtue of free speech, assuming that this clash will produce the truth, is in fact ineffective at furnishing us with the truth, for truth is ascertained not by a collision of ideas given equal weight, but from empirical investigation (“science construed broadly”). Nevertheless, free speech is a sine qua non for democracy, whose working reflects popular opinion, and popular opinion is the foundational turtle of democracy.

Post 2: Academic freedom, the right of scholars to study, research, and teach what they want without interference, is essential for finding the truth about anything (“truth” is what exists in the universe). This does involve the clash of ideas mentioned above, but not all ideas are regarded as equal under academic freedom: some have more credibility than others, viz., evolution vs. creationism. Further, unlike the egalitarianism of the public square, academic freedom assumes a meritocracy and also involves scholarly behavior that would seem to (but doesn’t) violate the First Amendment, like compelled speech (a professor, for example, must teach her topic and not some other topic).  Finally, scholarly standards differ from discipline to discipline, and so the notion of “what academic freedom entails” will also differ:  “success” in doing literary criticism, for example, is very different from “success” in molecular biology.  I maintain further, that the notion of “truth” isn’t relevant to much of humanities, for example literary criticism, music, art, or ethics. There is no empirical truth to be found there, but nevertheless the clash of ideas is still essential to dispel error. (“You can’t prove that Spinoza said that.”)

The more I read, the more disagreement I find about what academic freedom really means and how it relates to free speech. Is it covered by the First Amendment? (some say “yes”)—or is it something different? Is academic freedom something possessed by professors, universities, students, or all of the above?  I would answer to the first part “no,” since “freedom of thought” isn’t covered by the First Amendment. But I read last night that the Supreme Court has deemed academic freedom not only a First-Amendment right, but one that applies to all universities, be they public or private. (The First Amendment applies only to public universities, since they’re an arm of the government, though many universities voluntarily adhere to its standards).

As I said, every private school, including Hamline University where a professor was fired for showing an image of Mohammed, has academic freedom for its faculty; the fired Hamline professor was defended by many (including the AAUP) for having her academic freedom violated, and she settled with Hamline. (The President of the College subsequently resigned.

I emphasize that when I say that many areas of the humanities  are incapable of finding truth, that is not to denigrate them or deem them inferior to science (see a list of their areas here). For humanities have their own ambit. Philosophy keeps us thinking straight and prevents us from falling into error, literature puts us into the shoes and minds of other people, and music and art give us beauty. Life without humanities would be dull indeed, and I’ve always said that in general scientists know more about and appreciate the humanities more than humanities people know about and appreciate science.

This leaves one question: what about institutional neutrality—the principle that universities should not make ideological or political pronouncements unless they bear directly on the mission of the university? (This was of course first embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Principle.)  The purpose of this principle is to avoid the chilling of speech that would occur if a university establishes an “official” position that students and faculty would be loath to violate. (Everyone, of course, is free to voice their personal opinion according to the First Amendment: you just can’t do it in the name of the University. And our late President Bob Zimmer said that he was reluctant to give his own personal opinion because it could be taken to represent the University of Chicago’s position.).

By impeding the chilling of speech, Kalven also impedes the chilling of research and teaching. If, for example, a college held the position that sex was not binary, and that there was a spectrum of sex in humans, researchers would be reluctant to either publish, work on, or make that claim. (The President of Spectrum U. would be Agustín Fuentes.)

Thus institutional neutrality is the rope that ties together free speech and academic freedom.  Any university worth its salt—one that wants to foster discourse and consider all ideas on their merits, however offensive—should adhere to the three prongs of Kalven, academic freedom, and free speech. It’s a pity that so few Universities follow all three (only 30 American universities have adopted institutional neutrality; and that’s out of 2,637 four-year colleges!).

And so endeth this homily.

Why academic freedom is more important than free speech in finding the truth

May 21, 2025 • 10:30 am

In my first post of this series of two I maintained that First-Amendment-style freedom of speech, or something close to it, is necessary for the functioning of a democracy. But free speech is also touted not just as a prerequisite for having democracy, but a necessity for producing the “clash of ideas” that will give rise to the truth.  My contention in the first post is that while free speech is politically vital, it cannot by itself lead to finding the truth. For that you need what I call “expanded academic freedom”:  the right of individuals (usually academics or scholars) to think, write, and speak whatever they want. For this second endeavor is, unlike free speech, the one that allows people to look at the universe and see what is empirically true. (As I said earlier, the “truth” in my view, and that of the OED, is “something that conforms to fact or reality”, and knowledge, defined as “justified true belief”, is simply widely accepted truth.)

These are the two linchpins for finding and disseminating truth. Academic freedom guarantees the right to investigate reality and find out what is (provisionally) true, while freedom of speech guarantees the right to promulgate what you’ve found out. They work together to find the truth and (also important) make it publicly visible and publicly acknowledged: that is, they work together to produce knowledge.

I have construed academic freedom broadly and not limited it to academics. However, even on campus, academic freedom, just like freedom of speech, has its limits.  It is not true that I can teach creationism in an evolution class, or rail about Trump in a class about British history.  Academic freedom allows you to stay within the parameters of accepted knowledge and discourse within a field and, if you’re broaching new and heterodox ideas, they must be relevant to the class topic. If you violate this repeatedly, you’re likely to lose your academic job, and can have tenure revoked.

Similarly, academics are free to research anything they want, but that is no guarantee that their research will meet the standards of their field. If I was hired as a geneticist but spend my time studying the behavior of crickets, and not doing a good job of it, then yes, I could be disciplined or let go. You are free to do what you want within the parameters of your job, but that doesn’t guarantee career success.

(I won’t go into the the issue here of whether there is free speech in the classroom, though there clearly isn’t: again, professors can say what they want in class, but will be deep-sixed if it’s not relevant to the subject being taught. And classes also have is compelled speech: students are compelled to answer questions verbally or on exams, and are not free to give any answer they want.)

The separation of free speech and academic freedom is not a clean one. For example, a professor might say something in a didactic capacity that some students might consider harassment, like the professor at Hamline College who got into trouble for showing a picture of Muahmmad as a person, which offended some students. (The prof, who left, was ultimately vindicated.) However, there is a difference between freedom of speech adjudicated by the government, and freedom of thought, research, and teaching that is regulated by a professor’s field of work or department.

While freedom of speech assures professors at public universities of the right to promulgate their ideas, it is academic freedom, not freedom of speech, that allows them the latitude to study what they want and teach not only the gist of a subject, but promote a students’ ability to think.  It is academic freedom—the freedom of inquiry—that has:

  • Made the American university system a huge draw for students and researchers throughout the world (the US has 80% of the world’s top 50 universities).
  •  Led to 71% of all Nobel Prizes awarded having gone to Americans (29% of immigrants to America).  55% of the total are in science.
  • Prompted many revolutionary discoveries, including polio and other vaccines, gene editing technology, MRI, lasers, and GPS. (note that academic freedom obtains in many other countries, where it’s also promoted discoveries, including the structure of DNA and, in part CRISPR editing).
  • Led to the preeminence of American industry in creating scientific innovations, including microchip technology, vaccines for mumps, rubella, chickenpox, pneumonia, meningitis, hepatitis B, and hepatitis A, and various drugs.

While industry doesn’t have “academic freedom” in the sense that universities do, remember that most of the researchers in industry who create these innovations were trained in universities and absorbed their research ethos. But of course companies don’t have freedom of speech in the way that universities do; for example, they have the right to keep the technique behind their discoveries confidential for a time without publishing all the details.

You’ll notice that I have stayed away from humanities fields like literature, art, music, philosophy and law.  Why? Because, in my view, while these fields may produce interpretations or analyses of things like novels and paintings, they do not yield empirical truths. Literature, music, and painting, for example, are not “ways of knowing” but “ways of feeling or thinking”. (I discuss this in Chapter 4 of Faith Versus Fact).

This of course does not mean that such fields are without worth or merit; every reader here knows of my admiration for much of the humanities, particularly literature, art, and philosophy. It is simply that it’s not clear what we mean in such fields by the “pursuit of truth”.  What, for example is the “truth” in a Jackson Pollack painting or in Joyce’s Ulysses?  What is the (empirical) truth in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice? The latter gives us a provocative way to look at and construct morality, but of course there are a gazillion other suggestions about how to do that. Which one is the “true” path to morality?

Granted, fields like sociology and economics do traffic in truth, but truth that can be ascertained only by using the scientific method construed broadly, which I see as confluent with academic freedom.  It is the toolkit of science, which developed under academic freedom, that allows us to reach real truths, and that toolkit includes implements like falsifiability, quantitative methods, pervasive doubt and criticality (a feature of academic freedom itself), replication and quality control, parsimony, collectivity, double-blind testing, and peer review. These are laid out in Chapter 2 of Faith Versus Fact.  And in that book I also define “science construed broadly” as any endeavor that uses some of these tools to ascertain what’s true. So, for example, plumbers, car mechanics, and others who solve empirical problems using a version of the scientific method can be considered practicing “science construed broadly”. Steve Gould realized this in his essay Genesis vs. Geology, recounting his testimony in the creationism trial of McLean v. Arkansas:

As I prepared to leave Little Rock last December, I went to my hotel room to gather my belongings and found a man sitting backward on my commode, pulling it apart with a plumber’s wrench. He explained to me that a leak in the room below had caused part of the ceiling to collapse and he was seeking the source of the water. My commode, located just above, was the obvious candidate, but his hypothesis had failed, for my equipment was working perfectly. The plumber then proceeded to give me a fascinating disquisition on how a professional traces the pathways of water through hotel pipes and walls. The account was perfectly logical and mechanistic: it can come only from here, here, or there, flow this way or that way, and end up there, there, or here. I then asked him what he thought of the trial across the street, and he confessed his staunch creationism, including his firm belief in the miracle of Noah’s flood.As a professional, this man never doubted that water has a physical source and a mechanically constrained path of motion — and that he could use the principles of his trade to identify causes. It would be a poor (and unemployed) plumber indeed who suspected that the laws of engineering had been suspended whenever a puddle and cracked plaster bewildered him. Why should we approach the physical history of our earth any differently?

I see I’ve digressed a bit, so let me summarize. What is this sweating professor trying to say? (And remember, this is simply a first draft of some nascent ideas.) My claim is that freedom of speech does not by itself lead to truth via the much-vaunted “clash of ideas”.  That clash is necessary to find the truth, but not sufficient. Atop it one must place academic freedom: the freedom of scholars to teach, think, and research what they want.

I also claim that much of the humanities, whatever they claims, is not capable of finding truth, since it doesn’t turn on empirical facts but on critical analyses, competing theories, and competing interpretations. That doesn’t make humanities lesser than science—unless scholars in fields like art, music, and literature claim that they are practicing “another way of knowing.” Some disciplines, notably philosophy are good at of pointing out errors of thinking and guiding rational thinking, but again (in my view) do not and cannot find truths about the universe in which we dwell.

Finally, academic freedom is separate but still intertwined with freedom of speech, but they differ in important ways. The practice of academic freedom does not assume that all ideas are equal or all people are equal in merit: academia is hierarchical and meritocratic, while the First Amendment assumes that all views when expressed are equal and nobody gets an extra say because of their merit. Freedom of speech promotes the emergence of competing truths, while academic freedom emphasizes the ascertainment of the “truest” of these competitors.

The difference between scholarship and political activism

March 7, 2025 • 11:20 am

You wouldn’t think that this difference would need to be discussed once again, but yes it does, because distinguishing between the two is one of the missions of new University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, founded with a $100 million (!) gift of an anonymous donor.  This forum hit the ground running, with a number of special events and discussions on free expression, usually related to how it works and should work on college campuses. Its first director, Tom Ginsburg, who teaches International Law and Political Science here, has buttressed his mission by publishing several articles in the most widely-read forum for higher academia, The Chronicle of Higher Education.  

Ginsburg’s piece below, which you can access by clicking on the link, explains why scholarship and not political advocacy is what we want in University classrooms. Moreover, departments and units of the University should not be engaged in making “official” political pronouncements that chill speech (that is a violation of our Kalven Report, now endorsed by 30 universities besides ours.

I’ll give a few quotes below, which echo in more eloquent language positions I’ve held and advanced on this website. I’ve put the quotes under my own bold headings, but words from Ginsburg’s essay are indented:

Why you can’t just teach anything in the classroom (i.e., no complete “free speech” in class):

Academic freedom is centrally dependent on claims of professional expertise. Within a field, academics have freedom of teaching and research. (In the United States, at least, academics are also allowed broad extramural speech.) But academics can be punished for failure to observe disciplinary standards.\

In my own case, I cannot go into my constitutional-law course and instead teach the laws of physics or advertise the latest brand of detergent; the reason this is true is that no legal academic would in good faith recognize those speech acts as within the domain of constitutional law. While I cannot be fired for the way I teach constitutional law, I can be punished for failing to do the job for which I was hired.

This is why you can’t teach creationism (judged by the courts as “not science”) in a science class, even of the Discovery Institute would have it otherwise.  The line between teaching and advocacy, however, can be thin—especially so when you’re teaching politics. It’s all too easy when teaching about the history of the Middle East, for example, to distort what happened to favor the message you want to impart (and of course history has divergent interpretations).

Why “studies’ courses are particularly susceptible to advocacy. (Ginsburg largely exempts black studies, which seems to have reached academic maturity). Not many science courses in college include ideological advocacy; this is found more often in secondary schools.

American society, however, began to doubt such claims of neutrality with the crisis of the 1960s. Many of the academic disciplines created in that period were born under a political star and rejected claims of technocratic neutrality in favor of promoting perspectives that had theretofore been excluded. It is hardly surprising they saw their mission as integrating scholarship with a particular set of definitions of social change.

Unfortunately, these fields also became active agents of social construction and political mobilization, sometimes on an ethnic basis. Scholarly associations of these new interdisciplinary fields do not hide these goals. The Chicana- and Chicano-studies association begins its mission statement by saying it will “advance the interest and needs of the Chicana and Chicano community.” The Association for Asian American Studies mission statement includes as an objective “advocating and representing the interests and welfare of Asian American studies and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.”

Presumably scholars in these fields are evaluated not only by their scholarship but by their advocacy of particular interest groups. We can understand why histories of exclusion encouraged scholars to blur the lines between scholarship and advocacy, but doing so draws on the social capital of the scholarly enterprise for unabashedly political purposes. (Interestingly, Black studies may have done a better job of transforming into a stable scholarly interdiscipline.)

Among older disciplines, anthropology has led the way in insisting that cultural advocacy must be at the heart of scholarship. In a 1999 statement on human rights, the American Anthropological Association pronounced that it had “an ethical duty to protest” when any culture or society denies the right of people and peoples to the “full realization of their humanity.” But in 2020, it refined this commitment to include a cultural relativism, stating that “no one jurisdiction ought to impose its own interpretation of how to recognize and protect these rights on any other jurisdiction.” Reflecting on its own tainted history, the AAA leadership went on to demand “forms of research and engagement that contribute to decolonization and help redress histories of oppression and exploitation.”

When one’s scholarship is designed to include advocacy — what Tarunabh Khaitan has called “scholactivism” — risks are obvious. Advocates may reject or downplay inconvenient results, distorting academic debates. More deeply, they violate the “role morality” — the notion that some roles entail specific ethical commitments — of scholarship, which is the very basis for the social tolerance of academic freedom in the first place. While of course there is always a deep politics of scholarship, for example in the selection of topics for inquiry or methods for approaching them, these biases ought to be examined and minimized in genuine inquiry, not celebrated. This requires a humility about the limits of one’s own perspective.

Academic boycotts. The American Association of University Professors recently removed its opposition to boycotts, clearly so that scholars could boycott Israel. That was a cowardly and heinous move, which impedes academic freedom. Ginsburg says this:

The horrors of the Gaza war have provided a litmus test for whether disciplines are committed to genuine inquiry or instead to “scholactivism.” Several associations have debated or passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire. With the tacit support of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), several scholarly associations have signed on to a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. These include the Association for Asian American Studies, the African Literature Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

While the promoters of the boycott emphasize that it is not to be directed at individual scholars, it has in fact led to hundreds if not thousands of individual-level cancellations of scholarly engagements and collaborations. Such a collective boycott arguably undermines the academic freedom of scholars at both targeted and targeting institutions, who should be free to collaborate with whom they choose. Advocates of academic freedom should oppose this kind of boycott vigorously.

Institutional neutrality. The last part of the essay promotes the kind of institutional neutrality first adopted by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report in 1967, and now held by about 30 schools. It is an essential part of Chicago’s promotion of free speech, because if a department or center

. . .We should, for example, call into question the general practice of scholarly associations making pronouncements by majority rule. The internal progress of science depends on tolerating dissidents and does not proceed by majority rule. Why should things be different when the discipline is speaking as a whole? A small step of self-correction would be to use collective statements only in extreme circumstances, perhaps only with super-majoritarian rather than majoritarian mechanisms.

. . . . In a prescient observation in 2001, Clark Kerr noted that there was a conflict between the traditional view of the university that flowed from the enlightenment, embodied in a vision of seeking truth and objectivity, and a postmodern vision in which all discourse is political, with university resources to be deployed in ways that were liberatory and not repressive. He thought the conflict might further deepen, and noted that “any further politicization of the university will, of course, alienate much of the public at large.”

As we stand at a moment of deep alienation, stepping back from the further politicization of scholarship is an existential step.

This essay originally appeared in Inquisitive.

The postmodern view is wrong, and it’s clearly opposed by Ginsburg. The Chicago Forum is clearly defending the Chicago Principles of Free Speech, but is also a forum for discussing and tweaking those principles. When, for example, do demonstrations on campus abrogate freedom of speech? When does teaching lapse into advocacy? We have continuing discussions about issues like this, and the Forum is also supports a unit on freedom of expression given to first-year students before they start classes.  Actually, our faculty need it as much as do the students!

The AAUP abandons its mission to defend academic freedom

February 19, 2025 • 9:30 am

In less than a year, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has completely abandoned its mission, originally conceived

. . . to advance academic freedom and shared governance, to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.

Academic freedom is generally understood as the freedom of faculty to research and teach what they want, subject to the requirement that they have to teach their subject and not something else (e.g., no creationism in evolution class), nor engage in irrelevant proselytizing.  “Shared governance” is the making of university rules by groups (usually faculty) rather than constituting rules handed down from on high.  At the University of Chicago, both academic freedom and free speech are connected as two of our several “fundamental principles” installed to ensure an atmosphere of free inquiry without intimidation.

As U. Chicago law professor Tom Ginsburg points out in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, however, the  AAUP, however, has taken several positions within the last year that are either inimical or orthogonal to academic freedom. To put it frankly, the AAUP has become authoritarian, adhering to “progressive” politics and abandoning those precepts that it once adopted to further academic freedom. The three changes the AAUP has made to this end include these (there are a few other and more minor ones included in the piece):

a.) Abandoned its opposition to academic boycotts

b.) Approved of the use of diversity statements, finding them “compatible with academic freedom”

c.) Averring that institutional neutrality, as embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Report, need not impact academic freedom one way or the other, so one need not adhere to the Kalven principle that the university or parts of it cannot issue ideological, political, or moral statements unless those statements bear directly on the mission of the University.

This is basically abandoning much of what the AAUP was set up to support: academic freedom. These changes are shameful and reprehensible, and all I can guess is that the AAUP, like much of the academic “progressive left,” has gone woke, which means clamping down on freedom of speech and putting in place more authoritarian policies.

You can read the article by clicking on the headline below or find the piece archived here.)

I have written on two of the AAUP’s backsliding before (on boycotts here and on DEI statements here and here), but Ginsburg provides a handy summary of why the AAUP’s actions contradict its mission. In effect, he takes the organization to the woodshed.  I’ll quote him briefly on the three issues discussed above, with Ginsburg’s words indented:

Approving boycotts. (Everyone but the AAUP admits that its tacit approval of boycotts was intended to rubber-stamp the BDS policy of boycotting Israel, including its academics).

The first salvo came last summer, when the committee issued a statement legitimating academic boycotts, reversing a prior position from 2006 that had declared systemic boycotts to be incompatible with academic freedom because they limit the capacity of scholars to collaborate with whomever they choose. That had been a sensible position. But the new iteration of Committee A suggested that academic boycotts were a “legitimate tactic” and were acceptable against colleges that had themselves violated academic freedom. A bitter debate about Israel is the barely veiled subtext. Whatever the proponents of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement say about it being limited to institutions and not individuals, it has led to hundreds of cancellations of collaborations with and invitations to individual Israeli scholars, both Arab and Jewish, at a time when that country’s democracy is in deep trouble. In other words, the AAUP has endorsed a practice that interferes on the ground with the academic freedom of individual scholars — precisely the outcome the prior committee had foreseen — while claiming to be neutral on the specific issue of Israel.

Okaying diversity statements.

Next, in October, the AAUP blessed diversity statements as compatible with academic freedom. Mandatory diversity statements are in fact orthogonal to academic freedom, as they do not concern research or teaching. Faculty are divided on their use: Some view them as providing mechanisms to enhance racial diversity among the faculty without running afoul of the law, while others see them as devices to ensure ideological homogeneity. There is significant concern about their legality. The AAUP affirmatively defends them: “Meaningful DEI faculty work,” the organization says, “should be evaluated as part of the core faculty duties of teaching, research, and professional service.” It is hard to imagine that any college receiving federal funds will be able to sustain this posture over the next month, much less the next four years. No leader should have to fight for an already controversial enterprise, one essentially unrelated to academic freedom, when the academic enterprise is under existential threat.

I am one of those opposed to diversity statements, as I see them as both compelled speech (a violation of the First Amendment) and as forced adherence to a particular ideology, since DEI has various interpretations that people disagree with.  Mandating their use thus violates both institutional neutrality and free speech, as well as Chicago’s 1972 “Shils Report“, which says that hiring and promotion must be based on criteria of merit: merit in research, merit in teaching, merit in contributing to the intellectual climate of the university, and meritorious service on committees that further the university’s mission or public service that has an intellectual or research component.  At the very least, the AAUP should not have said anything about diversity statements save the second sentence in the paragraph above.  DEI statements should not have been defended as compatible with academic freedom, as that’s a debatable proposition. (See Brian Leiter’s post highlighted at the bottom.)

Allowing violations of institutional neutrality.

Now comes a third statement, this one adopted in January: “On Institutional Neutrality.” Committee A unhelpfully declares that institutional neutrality is “neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.” The main feature of its analysis is a rejection of the policies of the University of Chicago. But the statement contains several mischaracterizations, including a grave misunderstanding of academic freedom itself.

As I’ve written manyt times, institutional neutrality as embodied in Chicago’s Kalven report is essential in buttressing free speech, for “official” statements of the university or its parts that aren’t connected with the university’s mission will have the effect of chilling speech. What student, newly hired faculty, or professor up for tenure would take issue with a political or moral view made “official” because it came from the University or one’s department?  As Ginsburg notes:

The university’s 1970 Shils Report defines academic freedom, which is a function of disciplinary expertise, as “the freedom of the individual to investigate, publish, and teach in accordance with his intellectual convictions.” The AAUP, conversely, conceives of academic freedom as allowing collective units within the university to adopt, by majoritarian vote, policies and statements on external issues, so long as those statements are arrived at in the name of “properly shared governance.” As even Committee A [of the AAUP] acknowledges, this practice has the obvious ability to intimidate junior members of the department. It certainly disincentivizes inquiry on the issues in question. It also invites capacious claims of expertise. Nothing, of course, prevents groups of scholars from signing collective statements on anything. But departments are not bearers of academic-freedom rights. When departmental power is deployed to establish orthodoxies, it inevitably disincentivizes dissent and undermines individual inquiry.

There’s more, but you can read the article at the link above.  The upshot is that the AAUP has been ideologically captured and can no longer be counted on to buttress academic freedom. As Ginsburg concludes (bolding is mine):

The Kalven Report warns us that higher education should not become a “second-rate political force.” But the AAUP itself has become a third-rate defender of academic freedom against a powerful enemy. Rather than focusing on the academic freedom of the individual scholar, Committee A emphasizes collective academic freedom, which it conflates with “shared governance.” It offers us a vision of higher education in which departments promiscuously opine on politics, diversity screening is imposed in hiring and promotion, and unlimited encampments have the warrant of academic freedom. Let’s see how that works out. In our moment of crisis, we need principled leaders able to navigate the storm — and to defend real academic freedom.

Greg Mayer just pointed out to me that over at his website Leiter Reports, U of C law professor Brian Leiter agrees completely with Ginsburg. Two short excerpts from his post of October 10, 2024:

Oh how the mighty have fallen; Committee A of the AAUP used to be a reliable defender of academic freedom, but since its capture by the enemies of academic freedom, it has been going downhill fast.   The latest absurd statement in defense of “diversity statements” reflects pretty clearly the influence of UC Davis law professor Brian Soucek (a member of Committee A), whose mistaken views we have discussed many times before (see especially).   Let me quote the appropriately scathing comments of Professor Tyler Harper (Bates College) from Twitter:

The AAUP statement insisting that mandatory DEI statements are compatible with academic freedom—and not political litmus tests—is ridiculous. DEI is not a neutral framework dropped from the sky, it’s an ideology about which reasonable people—including people of color—disagree.  I have benefited from and support affirmative action, and there are some things that fall under the rubric of DEI that I agree with. But pretending that DEI is not a political perspective or framework—when only people of one political persuasion support DEI—is a flagrant lie.  Evaluating a professor’s teaching with respect to their adherence to a DEI framework is a clear violation of academic freedom. DEI is not some bland affirmation that diversity is important and all people deserve accessible education. It’s a specific set of ideas.

Professor Harper adds:  “Recent events should have made clear that professors, particularly those of us on the left, must defend academic freedom without compromise, even when we disagree with how others use that freedom. When academic freedom is softened, we are always the ones who end up losing.”

. . . DEI is an extramural social goal, just as much as being pro-America in MAGA-land is.  Committee A is dead.  We are fortunate that both FIRE and the Academic Freedom Alliance are actually still defending academic freedom.   I would encourage all readers to resign their membership in the AAUP.  It’s a disgrace.

I hasten to add that I am NOT a member! And had I been, I would have resigned the second the AAUP issued the it’s-okay-to-boycott-Israel statement.

Academic boycotts against Israel spread

July 10, 2024 • 11:30 am

This new article from the Wall Street Journal describes in some detail the way the world is boycotting Israel since October 7, both because it’s defending itself and because it’s a Jewish state.

Such boycotts aren’t new, of course, as the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement has been in swing since about 2001, but the boycotts, and calls for them, have intensified since the war in Gaza.  I’m most concerned with the call for academic boycotts, in which non-Israeli universities swear that they won’t exchange scholars or knowledge with Israeli universities. Such boycotts violate the free exchange of ideas that is the lifeblood of academia. But there are also material boycotts as well: BDS was, I believe, mainly meant to impede the exchange of goods. The academic part began around 2014, and was very quiet—until recently. And that’s what this article documents:

Click below to read the article, though it’s not archived (pdf available with judicious inquiry). I’ll give some quotes (indented):

Some examples of boycotts or calls for them:

When an ethics committee at Ghent University in Belgium recommended terminating all research collaborations with Israeli institutions in late May, Israeli computational biologist Eran Segal didn’t see it coming.

The sciences had seen little impact from global boycott movements, even months into the war, and Segal’s work had nothing to do with the Israeli military effort. The university’s research collaborations, the Ghent committee noted, include research on autism, Alzheimer’s disease, water purification and sustainable agriculture.

. . . Israelis are finding they are no longer welcome at many European universities, including participating in scientific collaborations. Their participation in cultural institutions and defense trade shows is increasingly becoming taboo.

Ghent University is, of course, where my philosopher colleague Maarten Boudry works. He’s vehemently opposed to such boycotts, and has decried them in Belgian and Dutch magazines and newspapers.

Below is an example of Israel being booted out of international meetings, though this one has little to do with academia:

Lidor Madmoni, chief executive of a small Israeli defense startup, prepared for months for a June international weapons show in Paris. The conference, Eurosatory, would be a rare opportunity for his small staff to expand their business, he said. Then came an email informing him that, because of a French court decision, his company was prohibited from attending.

“We have the obligation to block your access to the exhibition starting tomorrow,” the organizers said on the eve of the event, citing court orders that followed a French defense ministry ban issued in response to Israeli military operations in Rafah, the Gaza city where more than one million people had sought refuge.

The French decisions “shocked the entire community” of Israeli defense technology companies, said Noemie Alliel, managing director in Israel for Starburst Aerospace, an international consulting firm that develops and invests in startups in aerospace and defense. Conference organizers said they had appealed to overturn the court decision and told Israeli companies in an email that they were doing all that they could to enable them to attend.

. . . The Israeli defense-exports sector—flourishing before the war, with a record $13 billion in sales in 2023—got wind in March that it could be a target, when Chile barred Israeli companies from taking part in Latin America’s biggest aerospace fair. The French ban followed in June.

Back to academics (my bolding):

When the war began, new boycotts began to trickle in, mainly from humanities and social-science departments, said Netta Barak-Corren, a law professor who heads an antiboycott task force formed during the war at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The boycotts began to widen around two months ago, spreading to the hard sciences and to the university level—“universitywide movements and more importantly decisions to cut all ties with Israeli universities and Israeli academics,” she said.

More than 20 universities in Europe and Canada have adopted such bans, she said.

O Canada!  And from Europe:

An Israeli student who was preparing to study at the University of Helsinki said she was already looking for housing in Finland—until the school told her in May that it had suspended its exchange agreements with Israeli universities.

The University of Helsinki stopped sending students to Israel after Oct. 7 and decided to suspend exchanges in May to express its concern about the conflict, said Minna Koutaniemi, the head of the school’s international exchange services. The university doesn’t intend to restrict its researchers from collaborating with Israelis, she said.

From the U.S. (this “ban” may be rescinded):

Boycotts are gaining traction across the academic spectrum. Cultural Critique, a journal published by the University of Minnesota Press, told an Israeli sociologist in May that his essay was barred from consideration because, they believed, he was affiliated with an Israeli institution.

The journal told the scholar that it follows BDS guidelines, “which include ‘withdrawing support from Israel’s…cultural and academic institutions’.”

Cultural Critique subsequently apologized for excluding the article on the basis of the scholar’s academic affiliation and amended its website to say that submissions would be evaluated “without regard to the identity and affiliation of the author.” It invited the scholar to resubmit.

Authors participate as well:

. . . some creative artists abroad are cutting themselves off from Israel. Since the start of the war, a few dozen authors, most of them American, have refused to have their books translated into Hebrew and sold in Israel, said Efrat Lev, the foreign-rights director at the Deborah Harris Agency in Israel, a literary agency.

One author who had worked with the agency and wrote a young-adult book focusing on queer acceptance refused to publish a second book in Israel, although a contract had already been signed and a translation to Hebrew was under way, said Lev.

“I felt that it was an important book for Israeli kids who are experiencing similar experiences,” she said. “This broke my heart.”

Better to demonize Israel than to help gay Israeli kids!

Academic boycotts seem to me worthless; indeed, they’re counterproductive because they divide a worldwide academic community and impede the dissemination of knowledge.  The University of Chicago issued this statement when Bob Zimmer was President:

On December 22, 2013, the University of Chicago released the following statement on the subject of academic boycotts:

“The University of Chicago has from its founding held as its highest value the free and open pursuit of inquiry. Faculty and students must be free to pursue their research and education around the world and to form collaborations both inside and outside of the academy, encouraging engagement with the widest spectrum of views. For this reason, we oppose boycotts of academic institutions or scholars in any region of the world, and oppose recent actions by academic societies to boycott Israeli institutions.”

It’s not rocket science!  But people, including academics who should know better, are hell-bent on punishing Israel and, of course, those uppity Jews who defended themselves against Hamas.  As Dorian Abbot also pointed out, such boycotts violate the Mertonian Academic Norms:

You can see those norms here, which were given by sociologist Thomas Merton as “the four norms of good scientific research. . . . These norms are communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.”  The one Dorian refers to is the second:

  • “universalism: scientific validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants.”

Ergo the status of “being Israeli” has no bearing on whether science should be exchanged or impeded.  Academic boycotts are, to use the argot, stupid.