It is no secret that American universities are in the fight of a lifetime. With billions of dollars in federal support on the line, their ability to fund their research activities is clearly at stake. But for the biggest targets, such as Harvard, their pockets are unfathomably deep. While cuts may be painful, no financial threat is likely to be existential. What is harder to know is whether universities can come out of their current predicament with their souls intact.
The groundwork for this situation has been in the making for more than a decade. While the destruction is a bipartisan phenomenon, early warning signs appeared in “cancel culture”, the left’s version of campus censoriousness. More recently, the right’s version has been even more brazen, as seen in boorish attempts by the Trump administration and some state governors to control what is taught in university classrooms.
The response from universities is similarly dispiriting. Universities have not articulated what they are fighting for, and are not even particularly clear how much they are willing to fight against. Feckless administrators, along with faculty who have lost their intellectual curiosity, have left the university a punching bag for competing factions: angry students, entitled donors and opportunistic politicians. Large settlement payments by Ivy League colleges may be an expedient way to restore federal funding, but hardly demonstrate much backbone or conviction about academic integrity. Worse, monitoring agreements, such as the one Columbia has agreed to, raise troubling questions about the extent to which schools are willing to compromise academic freedom in exchange for turning the money spouts back on.
When universities are heard the loudest in response to controversies swirling around them, it is through the blandest of AI-generated, crisis-communication-consultant-approved, focus group-workshopped statements. These statements please nobody. Even worse, they are antithetical to what a university does, which is to provide open spaces to test and to contest deep, complex, unresolved disagreements. In an era of quick takes and easy outrage, this is a void both harder and more important to fill than ever.
Meanwhile, Americans report plummeting levels of trust in the ivory tower. The political scientist Greg Conti has termed the result the rise of the “sectarian university”. Universities will not die: Harvard, with its nearly $50bn endowment, is not meaningfully imperiled by criticism from Congress, the public or even Trump. But the perception of these institutions as out of touch means “their authority will grow more brittle and their appeal more sectarian.” Sectarian universities will be like molecular gastronomy, isolated to rarified elite circles. The result is the loss of one of America’s great inventions: the research university, dedicated to the production of knowledge that can be used by all.
What is to be done? Universities need to reclaim their core value – academic freedom – and to adopt a stance of institutional neutrality in order to regain public trust and credibility. This does not mean cracking down on speech or protest. On the contrary, individual faculty or students should be able to be as active as they want to be. But the university itself – the administration tasked with creating a scholarly and educational oasis – must concern itself exclusively with providing an environment where research and learning can flourish.
Universities are now swinging back and forth in their suppression of speech, all in response to pressure from the government. In an example of an unimaginable overcorrection, since 2020 more than 1,000 US students have been punished for pro-Palestinian speech. Safetyism, once the province of the left that rejected certain forms of speech as violence, has now been co-opted by the right, fueling crackdowns on pro-Palestinian activism and a growing range of expression. To be clear, speech that veers toward intimidation has no place in the university. But this requires administrators to take a coherent position on where to draw such lines, and then vigorously defend free speech in instances where harassment and intimidation are not at play.
If there is any hope of returning universities to their traditional role of spaces where political speech is protected, neutrality must reign – not opportunistic and selective defense of some speech over others.
As longtime defenders of free speech used to recognize, if you do not protect all speech – not just speech you happen to agree with – it is only a matter of time before you risk a challenge to your own freedom to speak out.
At its heart, a university is a gamble on what happens when an institution shows an uncompromising commitment to free speech. Academic freedom is not just another rule in a policy manual. It is perhaps the constitutive feature of the modern American university, which is envied the world over. Yet few universities have come to a full-throated defense of that value. Few administrators seem to publicly espouse it; faculty openly question it; and the public hardly has reason to believe in it if universities themselves do not. For the university to save its soul, attitudes will have to change.
Whither academic freedom?
Consider two key trends of recent years. First, Americans’ trust in universities has plummeted – from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2023. Second, Americans, especially those on college campuses, feel less free to speak their minds than ever before. According to a poll conducted in 2022, whose findings are consistent with other surveys, only a third of Americans believed we all enjoyed complete freedom of speech in the United States, and some 84% said there was a “serious” problem of people being afraid to speak out in their everyday lives. In polling, students and faculty consistently say that they self-censor frequently. So much for healthy debate of the issues, a hallmark of what university life used to be.
How are these two trends linked? The university has become suspect because it seems partisan. Many critics argue that research coming out of many universities is not the result of a marketplace of ideas, but rather a sales product corrupted by political bias. Whether or not that accusation is fair, it is the result of a collapse of the core institutional design feature of a university; academic freedom.
Academic freedom’s modern history can be traced to the beginning of the 20th century, the result of a fraught debate at Stanford over the populist writings of Edward Ross, an economics professor. The university’s benefactor, Jane Stanford, urged the professor be fired, presumably because his support of free silver was a challenge to the wealth and power held by her and other monopolists. A handful of professors resigned in the wake of the controversy. Not long after, several of the dissidents founded the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which remains to this day a lead defender – albeit with a mixed record in recent years – of faculty autonomy and free speech on campus.
The AAUP’s 1915 declaration of principles on academic freedom and tenure acknowledged that most 20th-century universities defended researchers’ freedom of inquiry, but that a number of incidents had undermined professors’ freedom to express political opinions freely. That ability, the AAUP reasoned, was essential because faculty must “not be in a position of dependence upon the favor of any social class”. That independence was essential, the thinking went, to protect the credibility of their research.
Today’s campus climate hardly lives up to that ideal. In some cases, academic freedom and tenure protections have been directly assaulted. Part of it is more subtle: as schools take on more positions on social and political issues, faculty and students feel less free to express themselves.
The direct assaults come from both within and without. Universities themselves have undermined tenure, and treated non-tenured faculty with complete disregard for academic freedom. In Minnesota, an art history professor was dismissed from Hamline University after showing a painting of the prophet Muhammad in class. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Stanford faculty senate censured a Hoover senior fellow for his opinions shared while advising Trump. More recently, the fraught debates over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have seen Muhlenberg College, University of Illinois, Columbia Law School, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges push out faculty – including several tenured professors – for expressing pro-Palestinian views.
Such “sanction attempts” were rare in 2000 (four), but are now commonplace: 145 in 2022, according to academic freedom watchdog Fire. Most such attempts resulted in actual sanction – including 225 terminations, 60 of which involved tenure.
The attacks from outside have intensified, too. Alongside Trump’s existential attacks, which seek to condition billions of dollars in university funding on schools restricting pro-Palestinian speech, legislation such as Florida’s Stop Woke Act directly seeks to control what can and cannot be discussed in Florida classrooms. At least 10 states have moved forward with legislation that would weaken or eliminate tenure in state schools.
But we believe that a more insidious form of suppression of academic freedom comes from the self-silencing of professors across America. Although hard to measure, a survey last year found that nearly all – 91% – of faculty agree that academic freedom is under threat in higher education, with respondents expressing particular hesitance to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and issues relating to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Institutional attitudes play a key role here. First, there is the adoption of official policies, such as the use of DEI statements in faculty hiring. Although this policy has ebbed in recent years – especially since the Trump administration’s assault on diversity, equity and inclusion programs – many universities in recent years began to subject all applicants to a faculty position to review by a separate “DEI committee”. Anyone who did not pass muster with the committee was not forwarded to the department for consideration. Conformity to a political agenda was more important than the quality of one’s research and teaching.
Second, many faculty share the perception that universities no longer have their back. A few years ago, some students at our university began organizing against a faculty member who had allegedly not policed the use of a racial epithet, used in the context of a direct quote from a published judicial decision, by a student during office hours. The incident raised many important questions about free speech in the classroom. These conversations were worthwhile. What was surprising and alarming, however, was how unwilling law school administrators were to defend the faculty member. Indeed, the administration mainly undermined the faculty member, and one senior administrator remarked that it was not the job of the administration to look after the needs of the faculty. This disdain was a telling indicator of the current culture, one that was confirmed when university presidents testifying on antisemitism before Congress seemed all too willing to throw their faculty under the bus.
The university should be more than a real estate operation
The key principle that can save universities is “institutional neutrality”. This idea is often attributed to a 1967 document called the Kalven report, written by a committee at the University of Chicago charged with reviewing the school’s role in social and political issues. The university itself, the report announced, must be neutral on those matters. Individuals within the university were free to be loud critics of society. In fact, their criticism was essential, and only made possible because of the university’s unique commitment to an institutional design of utter neutrality and openness. There was no room, the report emphasized, for the university as an entity to engage in “collective action”. That would undermine the space the university needed to make for all voices of dissent.
Though the principle emerged during the fraught decade of the 1960s, it is equally appropriate for today. The essential gambit of a university is that almost everything is worth the cost of preserving room for difference. In rare instances, that space may be where a Galileo is born; more commonly, it may help the majority to refine its arguments by working through counter arguments; and in all cases, it creates the kind of atmosphere that is conducive to novel and thorough thought.
Part of why universities may have a hard time advocating for themselves is that their core purpose is somewhat unique. Unlike businesses that can maximize efficiency, or activist groups that have a particular cause, a university’s core value is structural, not substantive. A university, at its best, is just a place carefully set up to allow other things to happen within. Beyond that, it does not have a role, a goal, a purpose, an identity, an agenda. It is not “for” anything – except academic inquiry and excellence – or “against” anything.
Neutrality may play a role elsewhere, but it is not the essence. In the for-profit sphere, recent years have seen extensive debate about whether businesses should take political stances. These parallel debates may be important. But they are not existential. They are over whether political activism is bad for business, because it alienates customers, or makes a particular company a better or less good place to work, or over how much impact businesses can have on social policy. But the debates are ultimately ancillary. We do not wonder if Nike is meaningfully still Nike if it talks more or less about social justice. Nike is, in the end, a clothing manufacturer. The university is different. A university that cannot create the kind of space where ideas can thrive is just an expensive real estate deal with a tax break.
When the presidents of Penn, Harvard and MIT were famously questioned by a House panel on antisemitism on campus, part of what made their appearance so unfortunate was that they seemed to stand for nothing in particular. They did not, as the Chicago principles (a more modern followup to the Kalven report), articulate the idea that a university could not censor even the most “offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed” views. But what they did – neither giving in nor standing up for anything in particular, and showing little intellectual sophistication – made it impossible for anyone to like.
When Stanford students noisily protested a conservative judge who spoke on campus a few years ago, the dean of the law school showed what a commitment to neutrality entailed. She did not comment on the substance of the students’ protest or the speaker’s talk, but focused only on the disruption to campus free speech. How she did so is just as telling. In a 10-page, citation laden memorandum that cited key caselaw, she educated students about the history and nature of free speech. Her response was written as an academic to other academically inclined members of her community, rather than a focus-grouped PR message.
Neutrality can be hard to advocate for. In 2011, a Harvard dean had the idea to ask freshmen to sign a “kindness” pledge – the first required pledge of any kind in the college’s history. Thankfully, a former dean led vigorous opposition to kill the measure, arguing in an essay that “the right to be annoying is precious, as is the right to think unkind thoughts”. As he pointed out, he was entirely in favor of kindness. The problem he was pointing to was that a pledge – no matter how innocuous sounding – could undermine the very nature of a university. (Did kindness mean a student should not point out an intellectual error in someone else’s reasoning? Was having an unkind thought a violation of the code?) Meaningful neutrality means administrators should not impose even the most innocuous-sounding pledge on students. This is why we see it as a constitutive value – one that is especially hard to grasp on the outside, and that therefore requires vigorous defenders from within.
The university is a gamble on the importance of this kind of space. The gamble is backed up by some pretty radical institutional design features – tenure, for example. The idea of tenure is that great ideas need a special climate and are worth the cost. For every 100 clunkers of a paper, or academics who check out and just use it as job security, someone writes a paper or makes a discovery that makes up for those losses. We like to think the gamble is a good one. Certainly tech and creative companies have thought so at times; some of what they did to encourage employee freedom – although they have pulled back on it – was a gamble on certain types of atmosphere, while expensive to maintain, and produced worthwhile results. Whether or not the gamble is a good one, it is really the only premise behind a university.
Universities are not great at being activists, as the last decade has shown. When they try, they infuriate their opponents and do little to please the constituencies they are trying to placate. Institutional neutrality is a return to their core strength.
Restoring healthy debate
Trump’s attack on research funds is an attempt to dictate what is taught and by whom it is taught. Some think Harvard had it coming. Whatever fault universities bear in their current predicament, it does not make Trump’s solutions right. While many think (as we do) that diversity in thought is the soul of a university, having the government dictate education policy takes a page out of Mao’s Little Red Book. This has to be thoroughly rejected.
But the problem is that universities gave credibility to conservative complaints about free speech. This has left them an easy target for their traditional defenders: donors and alumni. Meanwhile, schools that start adopting institutional neutrality now – almost 150, according to one count, have adopted it since 7 October 2023 – run the risk of looking compromised, like they adopted it as a convenient response to an inconvenient moment, or to suppress particular types of speech they do not like, rather than out of a deep commitment to a core feature of institutional design.
Unfortunately, in a campus where groupthink is common, it is not just controversial ideas that will suffer – it is creativity. Faculty bear their share of responsibility for this.
At elite institutions, liberal ideological dominance is more pronounced than at community colleges and professional schools. More than 80% of faculty at Harvard identify as liberal, including almost 40% as “very liberal”, whereas less than 1.5% choose the moniker conservative. And only 9% of incoming students at Harvard describe themselves as conservative. The issue is not just that the faculty has sorted that way but also that many on the faculty want it sorted that way. Forty percent would bar anyone who worked in the Trump administration from holding a faculty appointment. A third oppose hiring conservative professors to increase ideological diversity, suggesting a low regard for pluralism in faculty research.
Academic departments have the right to hire whomever they choose – that’s academic freedom – but such lopsided ideological commitments risk both rendering the university irrelevant and depriving universities of the spirited debate needed for intellectual growth. A few years ago, a group of faculty on our campuses at Rutgers University started a reading group, engaging with texts that had become canonical or had a widespread influence on law, legal thought and public policy. Texts came from a wide range of fields, including history, philosophy and political science. The group was remarkably successful, but when it was suggested we read the philosopher Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a classic defense of libertarianism, several colleagues said they disagreed with Nozick’s policies and had no interest in engaging with the book. Had they read it? No, but they knew what it said. We have received similar pushback about inviting faculty with conservative perspectives, such as originalist constitutional thinkers, to our faculty workshops. Again, the excuse from several colleagues tends to be that they already know what they thought and know they disagree, so why bother? Such responses are perplexing to us because neither of us is an originalist – which is precisely why we would want to hear from one.
This “pushback” does not resemble censorship or anything like it. Nobody threatened us or denied our right to invite such speakers, nor would they have – our colleagues are not like that. They were perfectly content to let us read Nozick. Rather, it was the utter indifference to competing viewpoints that surprised us. To be fair to our colleagues, many did show up when we had an originalist speaker come and engaged in substantive and thoughtful questioning. But too many of us approach diverging viewpoints with the attitude of a child being forced to try broccoli.
We believe there is more thirst for debate than it may appear. When we published some early articles during the pandemic that questioned school closures – a view that is of course now widespread, but was controversial at the time – we received emails from colleagues at other schools expressing surprise and gratitude that we were “brave” enough to do so. Given our own tenure protections, we were surprised anyone would think this was “brave”. Yet the reaction was telling about the climate that academics live in today. Interestingly, we got very little direct pushback from other academics, which speaks to a different form of avoidance in today’s academic culture. The pushback we heard about was nearly always behind our backs, in the form of criticism delivered to others, such as editors and deans.
Save the university’s soul
How did we get here? Part of the blame, perhaps more than a little, lies with the elite class, one inhabited by university professors. In our recent book, The Weaponization of Expertise, we identify three dimensions of a flawed elite mindset that are as pervasive as they are corrosive. The first is condescension: because of a misguided faith in meritocracy, elites see their country plagued by the scourge of ignorance and the failure of common folk to trust their intellectual betters. Second is technocratic paternalism, a mindset that presumes our most important fights are over facts. Elites wrongly believe that if we can agree on the facts, agreement on policy will follow. The third mindset is intellectual tyranny. Elites see doubt and dissent as the result of faulty processes, if not outright corruption. This view paves the way for an intellectual culture that brooks no dissent and assumes one’s non-intellectual or non-elite opponents engage in bad faith. Each of these three views is interrelated, stemming from the same valorization of credentials and merit – and each is equally corrosive.
Maintaining institutional neutrality does not discourage faculty or students from making moral judgments. Rather, neutrality and free speech yield communities that will produce useful knowledge and train informed citizens. The alternative yields too many people unequipped and afraid to grapple with complex and dissenting ideas, making the university look like a political actor with little authority.
The alternative is, as happened at our university, a president who issued three insipid statements on the conflict in Israel within two weeks. These platitude-laden pronouncements bore little resemblance to the traditional fare of a university, which is slow, steady and research-intensive. These aspired to public relations rather than thoughtful scholarship. Of course, they did not work. As should have been no surprise, none of the statements satisfied anyone on any side. Instead, with each new statement, more demands arose for the president issue yet more statements.
By contrast, we think the old-fashioned conception of universities as neutral and open spaces for free inquiry understands the institutional strengths and limitations of a university. Universities are not very good at politics. They are good at allowing competing ideas, including terrible ones, to be thoroughly hashed out. They are good at equipping students with the skills to question and debate difficult ideas by providing an environment that encourages questions and debate. That is the soul of the university, and the only one worth fighting for.
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Jacob Hale Russell is professor of law at Rutgers University. Dennis Patterson is board of governors professor of law and philosophy at Rutgers University and professor of legal philosophy at Surrey Law School in Guildford, England. They are the co-authors of The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism (MIT Press, 2025).