Hostility to Free Thought Now Rampant at Our Universities

I t’s no secret that free inquiry is under assault in America’s colleges and universities, as campus leaders and professional associations revel in issuing all manner of right-think declarations. Through it all, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has done invaluable work manning the ramparts of free thought. Last week, FIRE released its annual list of the ten worst colleges for free speech. This year’s edition includes the University of Tennessee, New York University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Duquesne University.

Even as many campuses across the land were shuttered by the pandemic, plenty of institutions still found creative ways to stymie inconvenient or unapproved thought. New York University, for instance, threatened to terminate any physicians on the faculty who spoke to the media about coronavirus without the prior approval of campus mandarins. The University of Illinois at Chicago investigated a scholar who, while teaching about employer-based racial discrimination, avoided the use of racial slurs by carefully redacting them on the exam. (Including the words — albeit in censored form — was “deeply offensive,” said the school’s dean.) Syracuse University earned FIRE’s “Lifetime Censorship Award” for its repeated assaults on free thought; this year, the university suspended a professor who referenced the “Wuhan Flu or Chinese Communist Party Virus” for his “racism and xenophobia.”

These incidents don’t represent one-off mistakes by overzealous officials. Rather, they reflect a broader, more troubling pattern. A 2021 FIRE study of 478 higher-education institutions found that 86 percent have policies that prohibit whole categories of constitutionally protected speech. Justifiably troubled by this state of affairs, some have proposed public policies that would link student aid to campus support for free speech. While the impulse is laudable, such measures would give public officials extraordinary power over higher education. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how that could quickly go awry.

An alternative approach notes that many of these institutions, including the largest and most influential, are not just teaching institutions — they are, first and foremost, research institutions. They rely heavily on federal funds to underwrite their research and subsidize their operations. The National Science Foundation reports that Washington spends about $44 billion annually on research and development at higher-education institutions, representing roughly 60 percent of all university research funding.

Research funds are provided to universities with the clear expectation that these institutions will operate as bastions of free and unfettered inquiry. If institutions cannot or will not provide the assurance that they will operate accordingly, it’s difficult to reason why taxpayers should continue to devote billions to their research activities.

Recall that federal support for research was born in the years after World War II, when Washington began using the nation’s universities as subcontractors — farming out big-dollar research in medicine, defense, energy, and more. Universities conducted the work, used the dollars to fund faculty and students, and collected overhead at hefty rates.

From the beginning, this deal presumed that university-based researchers should have the independence to ask the questions they deemed important and go wherever the evidence led. In 1941, President Roosevelt appointed Raytheon co-founder and MIT engineer Vannevar Bush to lead the new Office of Scientific Research and Development, which would help spearhead the push for federally funded university research by awarding over $1 million to 50 universities. In a 1945 report to the White House, Bush wrote:

As long as . . . scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems. . . . Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown. Freedom of inquiry must be preserved under any plan for Government support of science.

Bush was concerned, sensibly enough, about federal authorities impeding academic inquiry. The possibility that many universities would one day act as censors perhaps never occurred to him. Yet that is what has come to pass.

Today, billions in federal research funds flow to universities that don’t even make a pretense of protecting free inquiry. Of the ten institutions that FIRE just flagged as being egregiously hostile to free inquiry, seven secured taxpayer-funded research dollars with a combined value of more than $1 billion.

Taxpayers fund university research because universities are supposed to be places where scholars can pursue hard truths — forums in which responsible researchers can pursue the kind of rigorous, open-minded inquiry that is fundamental to scientific progress and the public good. Serious scholarship cannot thrive where researchers fear that the wrong topic, point of view, terminology, or conclusion will run afoul of university strictures or prevailing sentiments. That’s a recipe for politicized, unreliable research.

Safeguarding free inquiry is especially important given the lack of intellectual diversity that exists today on so many campuses. As a team of social psychologists led by José Duarte explained in 2015, political uniformity “can undermine the validity of social psychological science” by, for example, embedding “liberal values into research questions” and “steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics.” Such phenomena raise questions about the reliability of federally funded research produced at institutions that fail to safeguard free expression for those on both sides of the political aisle.

Given these stakes, public officials should insist that taxpayer funds should only support scholarship at universities that can demonstrate a steadfast commitment to free inquiry. This wouldn’t create a sweeping new expanse of federal power — it would simply ensure that colleges abide by the compact they have developed with Uncle Sam. Indeed, universities that collect federal research funds already provide a host of assurances, on everything from campus safety to hiring practices. Asking for an assurance that research funds will be used to fund independent, credible research seems like a pretty reasonable addition.

In March 2019, President Trump issued an executive order stating that universities could lose federal research funds if they didn’t protect free inquiry. That order was a step in the right direction, in principle, even if it was deployed clumsily and ineffectively.

A better executive order would detail clear and fair enforcement procedures, charge colleges with policing themselves, and then empower federal grant-making agencies to act if colleges fail to do so. After all, it’s only sensible to ask that campuses that collect federal research funds commit to unfettered free inquiry. A Biden administration that’s promised to honor and advance science should leap at this opportunity to show that it’s walking the walk.

Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. RJ Martin is the program manager of education at AEI.