The Weekly: A chilly spring for free expression on campus.

How academic freedom for faculty is being contested (this week).

After vague signage policies led to backlash at Boston University last month for the removal of a pride flag hanging visibly on a faculty office window, the president announced on Monday that the university will be “pausing” their “long standing, routine university policy” of removing outward-facing signs. As well-intentioned as this might be, such vague policies, inconsistent implementation, and pausing that appears viewpoint-contingent only contribute to chilled expression.

But expression policies aren’t the only thing chilling speech on campuses right now. Across the U.S. there are a variety of state-mandated and other institutional policies that are threatening academic freedom protections for faculty and their comfort in speaking freely.

In Salon this week, an op-ed by Tracy Kuo Lin, an associate professor of health economics and chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom at the University of California, San Francisco, explains that in the era of intense academic freedom policy changes, the felt experiences of are not always positive:

There’s a profound chilling effect when faculty are no longer protected for speech the university deems troublesome, and academic freedom is merely a consideration they can raise while going through a burdensome and stressful disciplinary process.

Tenure, a fundamental job protection for academics that affords freedom in research and teaching, is also being increasingly threatened in states across the country, including most recently in Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Tennessee state legislatures, none of which has “garnered any public faculty support.” Weaker or eliminated tenure not only chills speech, but also disincentivizes faculty’s pursuit of open inquiry.

HxA member Deepa Das Acevedo, a legal anthropologist, associate professor of law at Emory University, and an expert in tenure law, explains in Inside Higher Ed that even the job protections that do remain aren’t protecting faculty expression because many universities seem to be adopting a “fire first” practice that she argues will deeply harm university’s core knowledge mission.

Firing faculty in violation of their legal rights is expensive because, after all, litigation is not cheap — and neither are settlements. But it is also bad crisis management because it is shortsighted. Universities that are known to adopt a “fire first” policy are likely to lose some employees who decamp for safer, if not greener, pastures, and they are guaranteed to lose the goodwill of employees who stay. That goodwill is what keeps faculty in place, recruiting the best students and colleagues, and fulfilling the academic mission.

Across the northern border in Canada, William J. McNally, a professor of Finance at Wilfrid Laurier University and HxA chapter co-chair at the university, argues that mundane university practices like faculty orientation can also chill expression among dissenting faculty. At his university, faculty are required to take an “anti-racism 101” course as part of their on-boarding experience. McNally says this practice not only “chills dissent by presenting a single interpretive lens as authoritative and morally compulsory,” but also is inconsistent with a university’s mission.

A university is a collegium of scholars, with academic authority resting in the faculty, whose role is to safeguard academic judgment from external pressures — ideological, political, or economic. Collegial governance works only if faculty remain autonomous thinkers — free to dissent without pressure to conform to prescribed doctrines. A faculty onboarding course incorporating only one ideological lens is inconsistent with the collegial model, as it threatens intellectual independence.

All of this matters because dissent and viewpoint diversity are essential for universities to be what they are supposed to be: institutions where truth-seeking and knowledge generation occur for the greater good of our society. Without actual and experienced academic freedom, we run into ideological homogeneity in the academy. HxA member Jesse Smith, a sociologist and assistant professor at Ohio State University, explained this issue in Quillette earlier this week, worth quoting at length.

Academics and politics ought to be fundamentally separate activities, the former oriented toward open pursuit of truth and the latter toward the enactment of substantive social policies. Political affiliation should thus be irrelevant to academic activity, with any explicit consideration of (current or prospective) faculty’s politics operating as a kind of contaminant. Existing political skew strongly indicates an academic environment already contaminated. Yet intentionally seeking more political balance would, by definition, represent still further contamination. This is something of a catch-22.

The liberal-to-conservative skew is not the actual problem. It is a measurable proxy for the problem, or rather a set of problems. First, it suggests censoriousness of various kinds in higher education at odds with ideals of open inquiry. Second, it creates a fertile environment for explicit progressive activism among faculty. Third, it suggests a narrowing of academic activity, both in teaching and scholarship, in which important lines of inquiry are neglected while those pursued are insufficiently scrutinised, thereby creating orthodoxies and blind spots. As a result, the intellectual environment is degraded. This becomes clear enough in critiques of higher education, which may start by highlighting political skew but quickly move on to its larger implications.

You can’t have genuine inquiry if dissenting voices are systematically absent and face risk of retribution from peers or political actors when they do speak, teach, or conduct their research. What we face now is an ideological narrowing of the university that has accelerated over the past 15 years, along with weakened protections that are the bedrock for faculty free inquiry.

Of course, these limits of these protections are still actively debated, especially when it comes to classroom teaching. But we see an increasing trend of universities codifying academic freedom protections to make these boundaries explicit. Following on the heels of UNC, the Yale College Council Senate and Graduate & Professional Student Senate have each passed a joint resolution in support of faculty groups’ demands for more explicit academic freedom protections, aligned with the AAUP definition.

Perhaps the biggest contestation over academic freedom right now, however, is with the proposed overhaul of accreditation coming out of the White House this week. Accreditation reform has been underway for years now, with HxA writing back in 2024 how changes to the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC), which accredits universities in California and Hawai’i, weakened academic freedom protections, for example, by stripping language about due-process for faculty (see for example what Das Acevedo said above).

But there is another dimension to the accreditation debates: the extent to which ideological conformity has played a role in accreditation. As Erin B. Shaw of HxA has previously pointed out, accreditation has carried broad DEI requirements, which can inadvertently create ideological conformity on campus. The proposed new regulations require institutions to adopt “viewpoint and ideological neutrality in policy implementation,” and that institutions provide “support for and appropriate prioritization of intellectual diversity amongst faculty.” While we support these in principle, details of implementation requirements and enforcement of regulations of course make all the difference between ideas and the reality on the ground.

It’s imperative that we continue to push back against the politicization of viewpoint diversity as a concept given how essential it is for open inquiry to flourish on campus. You can help stand up for the principles of open inquiry on campus if you work in higher ed by taking just a few minutes to become a member. How reform plays out over the coming years depends on who shows up and how. Join us.