The Winter 2021/22 issue of the Claremont Review of Books is out now, featuring contributions from, among others . . . me. My essay, “What Academic Freedom Is For,” is on conservatism and academic freedom. It is an attempt to chart the Right’s changing attitude toward the concept of academic freedom, from God and Man at Yale (which was subtitled The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, just to give you a sense of William F. Buckley’s thinking on the matter in that book) to now.
While free inquiry is an indispensable aspect of liberal education, my essay argues that a value-neutral, open-ended “academic freedom” is neither conservative, in the traditional understanding of the word, nor conducive to the pursuit of truth. The modern Right has styled itself as the foremost champion of academic freedom. But the idea actually began as a left-wing concept, originating with early progressive intellectuals like John Dewey. Some of the mid-century Right’s most trenchant thinkers, on the other hand — from Buckley to Russell Kirk to Willmoore Kendall — evinced skepticism. In God and Man at Yale, Buckley “hasten[ed] to dissociate” himself “from the school of thought” that held that “teachers ought to be ‘at all times neutral.’” He maintained that “where values are concerned, effective teaching is difficult and stilted, if not impossible, in the context of neutrality.”
There is a much richer “conservative” vision of academic freedom, which I explore in the piece. But it’s different from the value-neutral, liberal conception — a distinction that has been largely forgotten by much of today’s Right. “A long rearguard action has reduced conservatives in the academy to defending the achievements of the past era’s progressives,” I write. “But academia cannot be recovered by embracing the initial cause of its degradation. . . . The American university’s decline did not begin with our departure from liberal academic freedom; it began with our embrace of it.”
Authentic free inquiry must be understood as the liberty to pursue truth rather than the license to teach lies. Conservatives desperately need to reconnect with this understanding of a university education, rather than accepting the left-liberal framework that sees the examined life as an apprenticeship in directionless skepticism. Academic freedom has a purpose — that of “proclaiming the meaning of truth, that fundamental value without which freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished,” in the words of Pope John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae (which was a disquisition on the nature and purpose of a “Catholic University”).
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Kyle Smith is also featured in the latest CRB. Kyle’s essay, “This Is the Business We’ve Chosen,” is a characteristically superb review of a recent book about the making of The Godfather.