Academic Freedom Does Not — and Must Not — Grant this Authority

Universities are right to resist the Trump administration's intrusion AND they built the opening it is driving through.

Photo by Lucas on Unsplash

Every semester, biology professors across the country and around the world teach the theory of evolution. And no advocate for Intelligent Design — the idea that some features of living organisms are too complex to have arisen through undirected processes and must instead reflect the work of an intelligent cause — could force an instructor to give that view a place in the course. That much is broadly accepted. But the reason it holds is widely misunderstood, and the misunderstanding drives a great deal of today’s conflict over academic freedom — including the standoff between the universities and the Trump administration, where each side sees the other’s offense and not its own.

Why can the instructor refuse? One might think it is because evolution is beyond question — settled in a way that puts the alternative out of bounds. But that cannot be the reason, because evolution is not closed in that sense; no empirical claim is. Even if the entire scientific community accepts evolution as fact, consensus is not closure. A claim that everyone accepts is still a claim; the number of people who hold an inference does not convert it into a fact. If it did, truth would be determined by a head count, and it is not. The real reason is narrower: academic freedom gives him control over what he teaches. And controlling what he teaches is not the same as closing the question he teaches about.

Since its 1940 formulation, academic freedom has been grounded in what the American Association of University Professors called the common good’s dependence on “the free search for truth and its free exposition.” Its purpose is to protect scholars from being punished or controlled by power — fired, defunded, sanctioned — for the conclusions they reach in their research, teaching, or external utterances. It is a shield between the scholar and entities with power: deans, trustees, the legislature, the state. But notice what the principle is for. It protects the search. And there is no searching for what has already been found — no free inquiry into a question one has declared closed. The freedom exists to keep questions open, which is precisely why it cannot be the thing that closes them.

That means that while academic freedom protects the biology instructor from having to capitulate when it comes to course material, it does not license him to treat a student who believes in Intelligent Design as ignorant or wrong, nor to mark down that student’s grade — provided the student has otherwise engaged the material seriously. Put simply, the biology instructor cannot deny evolution’s inferential status and claim academic freedom as his shield.

Consider what would follow if this weren’t the case. The principle of academic freedom is content-neutral; it protects every scholar alike, whatever they conclude. Suppose — and this is admittedly far-fetched, since vanishingly few biologists hold any such view — an instructor who genuinely held that Intelligent Design were correct. If academic freedom gave the biology professor authority to declare evolution settled, it would, by the same logic, give the identical authority to an instructor who believes in Intelligent Design. This symmetry says nothing about whether evolution and Intelligent Design are equally likely to be true. It only assumes that both claims come with a non-zero amount of uncertainty. Because any uncertainty at all means the question is not closed, regardless of how even or uneven the evidence is.

Now that we understand the limits of academic freedom, consider a different and harder example: a sociology instructor who teaches that opposing affirmative action is racist. The equation of a contested policy position with bigotry is a familiar feature of academic and public life, and far closer than the biology case to the conflicts now reaching the news. Is this statement protected by academic freedom?

On the one hand, the idea that a verdict about people (in this case, that those who oppose affirmative action are racist) would be protected seems theoretically plausible. Surely scholars are permitted to reach moral conclusions. A historian may teach that chattel slavery was a moral catastrophe; an ethicist may teach that torture is wrong. Academic freedom would seem to rightly protect both.

What protects these conclusions is not that they are correct, but that they rest on values — and values are understood, by everyone, to vary from person to person. No one mistakes “torture is wrong” for a finding about the world. It is plainly a moral judgment, and a moral judgment does not present itself as settled; its grounding in values is right there on the surface.

This is why academic freedom would equally protect an instructor who took the opposite view — that torture is sometimes justified, even right. That some would find the conclusion monstrous changes nothing about his protected right to defend it. The protection holds for the same reason it holds for the instructor who condemns torture: in neither case is anyone pretending the matter is settled. Academic freedom covers the moral position, precisely because a moral position never claims to be closed.

At first glance, the claim that opposition to affirmative action is racist can sound like a moral verdict of the same kind as “torture is wrong.” It is not. A moral verdict evaluates — it says a thing is wrong, or unjust, and asks you to share the judgment. “Torture is wrong” makes no claim about the world that could be checked, and its grounding in values is on the surface. “Racist” also evaluates — but it goes one step further. The label asserts that the position in question does damage along racial lines.

That extra step — the factual assertion buried in the label — is where the trouble lives, and it is worth drawing out slowly. To call opposition to affirmative action racist is to issue a verdict of bigotry, and a verdict of bigotry is justified only if there is no non-racist explanation for opposing affirmative action — because you cannot be a bigot for landing on one side of a question where a reasonable person could land on either. On values grounds alone, the verdict has nothing to stand on. A person might oppose affirmative action out of the conviction that the fair way to allocate resources is to treat everyone the same, regardless of race. No verdict of bigotry can be built on a value that a non-bigot could weigh differently.

So if the charge is to survive at all, its ground must lie elsewhere. By looking at what the verdict already assumes, we can see that the load-bearing claim is there. It is the assumption that the disparities affirmative action addresses — the underrepresentation it exists to correct — are themselves the product of racism. If equal treatment leaves those disparities standing, and the disparities are racism’s doing, then treating everyone the same perpetuates racism — and supporting equal treatment means supporting that harm, regardless of intention or values.

With that claim in hand, opposing affirmative action becomes complicity in racism. Without it, equal treatment is simply a competing principle of fairness. But look at what the ground is. The whole bigotry verdict now rests on an empirical claim: that racial disparities are caused by racism. And, like any causal inference, the claim is laden with uncertainty and rival explanations. In short, the bigotry verdict can stand only by treating as settled a contested claim about why racial inequality exists, precisely what academic freedom does not protect.

It may be tempting to think the charge levied in classrooms is often softer than “racist” — that dissent is treated not as malice but as ignorance, a failure to understand how racism works. But this softer charge rests on the very same unprotected closure. To call the dissenter uninformed is to presuppose there is a settled answer he has failed to reach — which is exactly the move in question. To diagnose disagreement as ignorance is to predict that knowledge converges on the approved conclusion — that the only reason to dissent is missing information. Supply the information, and if the person still disagrees, the ignorance explanation is spent. Only one possibility remains: they understood and refused anyway. Ignorance is not the milder cousin of the bigotry charge. It is the on-ramp.

The solution is not to forbid teaching that inequality is the result of racism or that evolution is undirected by a higher power. Academic freedom protects the instructor’s ability to teach the inference, argue it, press it as hard as she likes. The remedy is only to teach it as what it is: an inference about the world, not a settled fact — and to mark that status rather than bury it. The instructor need not pretend to neutrality she does not feel or give equal time to every objection. She need only be honest about the kind of claim she is making. A causal claim about why inequality exists is an inference and saying so takes nothing from how strongly she holds it. What she may not do is present the inference as closed or treat the student who recognizes it as an inference as having erred.

This brings us to the present moment, when academics invoke academic freedom against the Trump administration’s pressure on universities. On the central point they are right. The administration is reaching into the classroom and telling instructors what they may and may not teach — which is precisely the coercion academic freedom exists to prevent. It is the opening example playing out: only instead of a student attempting to force Intelligent Design into the course, it is the state forcing its own content in, and contested content out. When the academy says this violates academic freedom, it is correct.

What the academy fails to see is that the coercion did not arrive in a vacuum. For years, the academy closed questions it had no authority to close and waved away — as ignorant or bigoted — the people who said so. Many of those people are now in power, and they have seized on the visible effects of that closure as their justification: the universities, they say, abandoned open inquiry long ago, so why should open inquiry shield them now? Whatever the motives behind it, the accusation is not false — and its truth is the academy’s own doing. By using the shield of academic freedom to justify treating contested questions as closed, the academy built the opening the state is now driving through.

Why does this matter, if the state is still in the wrong? It matters because of what follows for the academy that wants the intrusion to stop. The state’s pressure draws its force from a real grievance — that the universities closed questions they had no business closing. As long as that grievance stands, the coercion has a justification to point to, and resistance in the name of academic freedom rings hollow, because the academy is invoking a principle it spent years misusing. The way to take the justification away is not to deny the closure more loudly. It is to end it — and ending it has to begin with admitting it was there.

Academic freedom grants no one the authority to close a question — not the state reaching in from outside, and not the scholar quietly closing it from within. The academy is right to resist the first. It will only have the standing to do so when it stops doing the second. And that begins not with a louder defense, but with an admission: that the closure was real, that it was ours, and that academic freedom never authorized it in the first place.