Fight University Censorship & Enable Truth-Seeking

The censorious mob strikes again. Recent weeks have seen universities assault the right of scholars to speak freely. Amy Wax, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Ilya Shapiro, of Georgetown Law, are the latest victims of a crazed zeal to purge the scholarly community of heterodoxy. We are right to be incensed at the silencing of scholars, provocative though they sometimes are. Yet a hyper-fixation on combating university censorship risks obscuring the bigger picture — and with it, bigger challenges. Our cries should be stronger than “Don’t silence so-and-so!” and “Tenure protects such-and-such!” We must call on universities to actively promote a culture of free inquiry and protect an educational vision that prioritizes the pursuit of knowledge over partisan activism. Unless we do, the battle for academic freedom is a lost cause.

To be cradles of knowledge, universities must respect an array of norms that are as indispensable to truth-seeking as oxygen is to life. In addition to honoring the elementary non-censorship rule and avoiding tyrannical double standards, universities should strive to root out institutional biases that suggest limitations on the scope of acceptable inquiry. When universities meet this challenge, they promise a culture where dissent is enthusiastically embraced. When they don’t, academic cultures atrophy.

MM

About the Author

Myles McKnight

Myles McKnight graduated from Princeton in 2023 and is an incoming 1L at Harvard Law School.

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The censorious mob strikes again. Recent weeks have seen universities assault the right of scholars to speak freely. Amy Wax, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Ilya Shapiro, of Georgetown Law, are the latest victims of a crazed zeal to purge the scholarly community of heterodoxy. We are right to be incensed at the silencing of scholars, provocative though they sometimes are. Yet a hyper-fixation on combating university censorship risks obscuring the bigger picture — and with it, bigger challenges. Our cries should be stronger than “Don’t silence so-and-so!” and “Tenure protects such-and-such!” We must call on universities to actively promote a culture of free inquiry and protect an educational vision that prioritizes the pursuit of knowledge over partisan activism. Unless we do, the battle for academic freedom is a lost cause.

To be cradles of knowledge, universities must respect an array of norms that are as indispensable to truth-seeking as oxygen is to life. In addition to honoring the elementary non-censorship rule and avoiding tyrannical double standards, universities should strive to root out institutional biases that suggest limitations on the scope of acceptable inquiry. When universities meet this challenge, they promise a culture where dissent is enthusiastically embraced. When they don’t, academic cultures atrophy.