It was a scene they all pretend we’m not repeating. A tenured professor of political theory—call her Dr. A—waited for a zoom call to load. The email subject line was polite, almost corporate: “A pre-circulated draft for your consideration.” The committee of her own faculty peers had one request, two actually: 1) cut the seminar text on campus speech codes because it “openly sympathized” with a controversial public figure’s book; 2) withdraw the op-ed she’d written about foreign policy before the chair had to sign it. Nothing was forbidden. Nothing was explicit. A pen hovered near a signature of a document that had already been internalized.

Academic freedom didn’t die in the dark corridors of a campus admissions scandal. It is being suffocated—slowly, politely, and often without a single raised voice—by committees, boards, accreditation agencies, and a culture of preemptive fear. We’re cracking under the pressure, and the pressure is not entirely coming from the state. It’s coming from ourselves.

A Ritual of Self-Censorship

Walk into any faculty lounge today and you will hear the same confession, whispered like a state secret: certain topics are simply not worth the risk anymore. Faculty members adjust syllabi before publishing them. Dissertation students avoid certain hot-button methodologies. Official academic discussion of race, foreign affairs, and electoral politics has become a minefield of carefully calibrated euphemisms.

This is the intellectual equivalent of parking on a hill with your tires turned toward the curb—an insurance routine designed for the rare event of a landslide. Only here, the routine itself guarantees the hill erodes. The self-censorship is not merely caused by external threat; it constitutes the threat. One could once safely publish and let departmental gossip settle the score. Not anymore. Now the Google alert to the president’s office often beats the open peer review to its result.

Here’s the kicker. Most of us are hiding from no one in particular. We are hiding from a hypothetical future scandal, one crafted in advance under the discipline of the public institutional image. The professor’s autonomy, it turns out, was never just about guarding the specific words spoken. It is about the freedom to become wrong—and then revise, unobserved, without a press cycle.

Free Speech Is Not the Same as Academic Freedom (and It Matters)

There is a dangerous conflation at the heart of the public discourse. Commentary on student protest, so-called “safe spaces,” and campus debates often sidesteps the real central clash—what a university is. Speech has a bill of rights attached to it. Academic freedom, by contrast, is a living contract between the scholar and the university that employs them.

The American Association of University Professors’ foundational 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure was built on a precise, if unofficial, bargain. In exchange for searching for truth and communicating their findings without fear of political retaliation, the scholar pledges to remain humble before the facts: to avoid repeated, misleading deception, to proceed with the professional standards of their discipline.

In other words, the freedom to teach comes with a quality-control clause. But today, that clause is routinely invoked as a blunt instrument. University administrators may use “scholarship quality” as a Trojan horse to override a gay historian’s dissertation on identity in the 1960s, or a foreign policy hawk’s controversial reading of international law. Or they may invoke “pedagogical standards” when a donor threatens to pull the naming gift. Free speech protections offer the public square. Academic freedom offers the academic sanctuary. The sanctuary is being demolished, brick by brick, by those who confuse the call for scholarship with the noise of partisan politics.

The Curious Case of the University of North Carolina

We should turn here to a real-world example that exposed the loopholes we prefer not to see. In 2021, the University of North Carolina’s Board of Trustees voted to delay a tenure vote for journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her appointment to the Hussman School of Journalism and Media was already signed, approved, and funded. Then an anonymous donor allegedly threatened financial consequences. The board—not her faculty peers, but the board—cried “procedural concerns,” which conveniently rose to public visibility. Hannah-Jones eventually chose not to accept the position. She stated plainly that she believed the trustees’ push was politically motivated.

The reaction on campus was telling. Many faculty members circulated petitions at the time, and they did receive support from a handful of these administrators. But the board also received enormous public pressure where some fundraising alumni invoked the non-academic political quality of her journalism as reason enough to exclude her from the faculty.

In the end, UNC survived the public relations disaster without changing its internal governance. Nothing legal had occurred. Yet the incident did harm; it sent an unmistakable signal to every mildly controversial scholar in the system: your fate is less likely to be decided by your published books than by the winds in the boardroom and the political preferences of wealthy donors. The old logic used to be that tenure protected scholars from ideological purges. But when tenure decisions itself are scrutinized and influenced by outsiders, the protection collapses before the new hire even begins his or her first semester.

Tenure Is Not Privilege—It’s a Defensive Bulwark

Nobody likes to defend tenure these days. Politicians attack it as an “iron rice bowl” for dead weight. Provosts view it as a financial straitjacket that limits budget flexibility. Its most privileged beneficiaries treat it as a jealously guarded perk, failing to defend the very principle that makes their careers possible.

Yet here is the uncomfortable psychological fact: if you remove the assurance of employment, the sine qua non of unrestricted inquiry dissolves. The entire structure of academic review rests on the idea that scholars will be judged by their interpretive communities—other scholars—rather than by the vague and shifting criterion of institutional reputation.

The problem is that universities are currently adopting the logic of nonprofit corporate management. Administrators are obsessed with institutional “reputation” and national rankings, and as a result they behave less like communities of scholars and more like hedge funds with lecture halls on the side. Between institutional desires for sustained public relations, donor satisfaction, and legislative approval, the university’s interest aligns less with truth-seeking and more with keeping everything pleasantly untroubled.

Tenure doesn’t protect the scholar from professional incompetence. It only protects the scholar from administrative displeasure. When a presiding dean believes they have the authority to pick which textbook from a temp faculty member’s syllabus might create news, academic freedom becomes a decorative statement in the strategic plan.

The Legislature’s Hammer

State governments also shoulder the burden of the current assault. The 2023 Florida bills that decimated tenure and delegitimized research centers were well publicized. But the slow, legalized dismantling of academic inquiry happens quietly nationwide. Bills responding to every culture-war outlier—demanding mandatory certainties on climate, Israel, and gender identity—have been proliferated in state houses across the country. That is why a whole body of academic literature is marked as verboten rather than debated.

To pick another example: after the Florida education authorities demanded the ending of certain ideologically grounded majors and the post-tenure review of resistant faculty, dozens of professors left the state’s public universities. Under pressure, universities in Florida announced clawbacks of funding toward research units that did not align with the governor’s office.

This legislative takeover is disastrous not because academics are inherently progressive or a threatened species, but because it shortcuts the entire deliberative process of scholarly certification. The question of whether a particular ethnography carries scholarly merit should not interest the state. That question is settled by pedagogy and peers, not by legislative sanction.

If you put that principle into context, the fundamental friction behind the assault on scholarship is the drive by various interest groups to define what could be taught and funded. But when free inquiry is organized by the state, you are not going to get truth, only propaganda.

The Donor’s Long Arm

Free inquiry on campus today also suffers because trustees, presidents, and marketing departments court public opinion as if the campus enrollment depended on instantly digestible outcome. Every scandal is managed by a communications office, and university leadership teams respond to the donor’s implicit threat—if you displease my preferred politics, the development team’s annual trip to this source dries up. Even where no explicit threatening call is made, the anticipation is enough. A prominent professor’s piece on foreign policy, a colleague’s lecture on race and policing, may be crushed by the sheer anticipation of the chancellor’s office making a poorly timed public comments about “taking account of diverse views.”

The simple intellectual fact of a man with a rich point of view—one that offends the majorities—should never be held to ransom by millionaire trustees. But philanthropy in the United States now flows to specific missions, not simply universities with broad missions.

Before we shrug it off as an acceptable byproduct of free-market philanthropy, compare it to a parallel phenomenon: the first time a genuine scientist on a campus is instructed to rewrite research conclusions to satisfy an agricultural or chemical corporation donating funds, everyone turns a reasonable eye to the blatant conflict. But when donors fund symposia on, say, Middle East policy, universities agree to hand over the agenda. We are all paying for bait at this point.

Why My Generation of Academics Has Lost the Plot

The first thing one should recognize is that university environment today is not the same as it was in the golden 1960s. The embattled university system has been severely weakened by non-tenure-track employment. Between 1975 and 2020, the proportion of college faculty on contingent appointments rose from just under a quarter to nearly 70 percent, if you count graduate employees. When a temporary instructor lacks job security, they’ll predictably lean toward safe textbook selections that omit several contentious issues. That was the first threshold toward self-eliminating research. This growing precariat, the ones who now teach most introductory courses, are not going to rally publicly to defend free inquiry—some cannot imagine themselves suffering the luxury.

The academy’s public stance has also become dangerously tied to ideological conformity. All the “cancellations” that make headlines arise when someone working in a field whose scholarly conclusions have been politicized challenges a specific dogmatic agreement.

But Free Inquiry Doubt Itself

Yet perhaps I should pause before laying all tragedies at the footsteps of conservatives and donors. A peculiar blindness has emerged on the liberal left, which claims to love academic freedom but actually loves only the freedom to agree. The recent wave of campus protests on the Middle East brought this tension to the surface. Several professors at elite universities were suspended for assigning readings about a controversial conflict because those readings were deemed, by students, to be offensive.

For what it’s worth, the history of academic freedom is filled with academics who decried themselves as oppressed at the hands of the students they taught. Flannery O’Connor famously complained about MFA students who produced stories that she found empty or badly shaped; she did not demand they be censored though. But there is a fine line between pedagogy, which is inherently hierarchical and subjective, and bullying. When a class asks a professor not to present certain points, it is no longer a matter of pedagogy in a community—it becomes a lecture of power. Whatever one’s political affiliation is, the rule under the “shared governance” doctrine should be straightforward: students choose their courses, but they do not dictate the curriculum.

The result is the absurdity of professors trying to figure out what the administration might fear most as they plot out of classroom discussions. That’s not what scholarship looks like. It looks like work in a closed system.

The Missing Restoration

There has been no shortage of summits, commissions, and white papers on how to promote “viewpoint diversity.” But these initiatives usually dabble around the edges—mandating an ethics class on data privacy, creating “civil discourse” centers that publish mission statements—while leaving the core economic and political structures unchallenged.

We could do several straightforward things.

First, universities should establish baseline protections for research autonomy that include the right to publish outside the university’s press office. The institutional review of public statements should be strictly limited to circumstances where speech takes place on university time or directly involves internal administrative matters.

Second, hiring and promotion should be relentlessly disciplinal. A scholar’s fitness should be judged solely by their peers at other institutions, not by their own board of trustees, the state legislature, or marketing department. The existence of donor funding at a center should be openly recorded and tied to a clear governance limit—no conditionality in the form of personnel decisions.

Third, universities should remove themselves from the direct adjudication of all contentious, off-campus speech. If a professor takes an unpopular stance in his book, the university should declare institutional neutrality that even then helps reinforce academic freedom. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has established resources documenting the spread of academic freedom and campus speech policies, and one of these recurrent recommendations suggests a sharp separation between institutional expression and individual expression. Let us consider this core point: a President should denounce no professor’s scholarship—even a false one. The university can explain why it judges the scholar to be intellectually sound without being made to agree with their private actions.

Fourth, tenure must be decentralized. Remove the annual post-tenure reviews that make tenure more like rolling contracts, with vague criteria for politically overloaded “productivity.” Tenure should only be revoked on the basis of “professional incompetence,” criminal behavior, or conduct that substantively disrupts the mission of the university—not ideological friction.

Fifth, we need to stop pretending transparency around university administrators is enough. Transparent proceedings do not mean freedom if the judge is predisposed to be scared.

Restoring the Original Vocation

The central promise of the research university—the one we advertise on the first page of the brochure that parents read with hope—is that students will be pushed to think for themselves in a space safe from demagoguery and political pressure. But our students are reading the same climate we are. They have learned this game. They know they are expected to assent to the prevailing doctrine to get a good grade in their discipline, or to stay out of departmental debates. On the bright side, the attempt by state governments and donors to control universities has created a valuable dialogue that we now have about whose job academic research really serves.

A Joke We Tell Ourselves

Meanwhile, the old academic joke still gets a chuckle over faculty meeting coffee: “How can you tell the university is progressive? It shifted further left when you filled out the diversity form.” Or perhaps the other one—what’s the difference between the administration and the faculty senate? The administration actually believes that the senate has power. Both really reveal the frustration that no one is exactly in charge of the university these days.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Not surprisingly, free inquiry is not dying. It is being pulled apart by a combination of self-censorship, institutional cowardice, legal and political micromanagement, and philanthropic tendencies. It is being fired upon from both flanks of our political spectrum, and even though both sides claim to be its savior, both routinely use institutional weaponry to punish dissent on topics considered “one’s own.” The state wants to use the university to train compliant workers; the donor wants to use the academy to legitimize their political opinions; the activist student body wants the academy to consecrate their identity politics.

Who, then, speaks for free inquiry? Only those who maintain their own freedom at the expense of their own comfort. We have a cultural sickness that confuses the right to be comfortable with the right to learn. At some point, we have recast risk-free education as true education.

The Way Out Is Intellectual Courage

Universities used to be places where ideas had consequences, not more insulated from them. But the concept of “institutional neutrality” did not mean that everyone in the institution silenced themselves for social harmony. It meant those in power refused to use the weight of their office to end a debate that should continue in classrooms and journals forever.

We should stop pretending that external assaults on higher education are only happening to those we dislike. A campus ranked in the back pocket of the right awaits its counterpart at the far left’s flagship institution. The issue sits closer: What will we do when a professor publishes an unpopular reading of a particular sacred text, or refuses to include settlement that he considers outside the discipline on the syllabus?

Seek dispassionate scholarship while allowing every person in a seminar room to respond with argumentation and evidence. Encourage the freedom to submit controversial claims to the severe scrutiny of one’s colleagues. Trust professors; fire boards that overrule departments. Above all, do not use the undeniable existence of bad scholarly work as a reason to build a regulatory framework from the chancellor’s office.

Conclusion

The current threat to academic freedom is not any single speech act that crosses the line into hate speech, nor is it a lone chancellor overstepping in a heated opinion piece. It is the slow, daily assumption that freedom of inquiry is a privilege granted by the institution.

We must remember that it is a privilege granted by the very nature of academic life, a concept so old that if a university abandons it, it loses its right to call itself a university. Calls to university presidents in the next decade are likely to be less about funding and more about what kind of body they lead. The board’s self-control in times of donor anger is far more consequential than all the well-crafted open letters on “courageous speech” they will ever publish. And whether free inquiry can survive our own insecurity and desperation for approval?

Let’s hope education outlasts our impulse to manage it.