Cracking: Why Free Inquiry on Campus Needs a Deathbed Reprieve

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0400

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.

Free-Inquiry on Rational America

Cracking: Why Free Inquiry on Campus Needs a Deathbed Reprieve