Academics & Free Speech

David Smith & Adam Kissel:

So how can elected officials intervene in higher education without compromising academic freedom? Individual academic freedom is an inviolable feature of institutions of higher education because their core purpose includes exposing students to a wide range of competing ideas. This is necessary to develop their critical-thinking skills so that they become citizens who can make up their own minds about disinformation and the truth. When the First Amendment and academic freedom protections for scholars at public universities conflict with the democratic principle of majority rule, free speech and academic freedom win.

Constraints on what a scholar can express are clearly off limits. Also off limits should be any restriction on the ability of scholars to raise external support for their academic endeavors. Provided that the university is satisfied that the external funding leaves the academic freedom of participating faculty uncompromised, external funding can enable minority viewpoints to be heard in environments with strong faculty bias against them.