Right now, we are seeing unprecedented and overt infringements on academic freedom nationwide and around the world. 

In Florida the state government is telling scholars they cannot teach certain topics and must remove them from courses or else face reprisals. A recent report from PEN America describes educational gag order laws about race, gender, and sexuality, and the United States Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee widely documented infringements on free speech on college campuses.

The 859,825 of us who work as faculty in higher education care a great deal about academic freedom because it enables us to follow the facts wherever they may lead. It allows young adults in our classes the freedom to learn challenging ideas that demand engagement and sometimes involve disagreement and debate. Academic freedom enables understanding and trust in science. 

But those of us who work in higher education have not made a strong case for why academic freedom matters to the public that we ultimately serve. Academic freedom enables innovation and consequentially permeates many areas of our everyday lives that we never think twice about – but should. 

Those who feel the effects of academic freedom most acutely are not a small group of educators, but the roughly 340 million members of the general public.

For instance, new details about a particularly horrible set of atrocities during the Holocaust, or the melting of the Greenland ice sheet that your child learned about in a middle school classroom, were each discovered by university-based humanities and climate scientists. 

Technology that improved the catalytic converter your mechanic replaced last week emerged from a university engineering lab. 

University economists’ discoveries fed into how we understand pricing and risk in financial markets, and why we know that most of the increase in family income in the past century has come from more women participating in the workforce. Sociologists have further shown why the gender pay gap between men and women has narrowed, though stubbornly remains. 

If we stop for a moment to think about our everyday lives, we can start to see many such impacts that came from scholars who had the freedom not just to pursue an answer, but to try to get that answer right.

Ultimately, those who feel the effects of academic freedom most acutely are not a small group of educators, but the roughly 340 million members of the general public. Because academic freedom benefits us all, it also affects our national economy and is bound up with our very system of representative democracy. 

What Academic Freedom Means

Academic freedom has become codified into a set of normative job protections for university faculty that let us research and teach ideas in our realm of expertise without fear of interference. These guidelines let us pursue long-term investigations that require many years to bear fruit, as well as let us pursue challenging ideas that may buck whatever the status quo is in our given fields. 

All faculty, at least on paper, work under the same promises that academic freedom provides. Yet in practice, that promise may go further for some than for others. 

For example, I am a professor who studies social organization, and my range of inquiry spans the human condition and the whole of society. My published research describes everything from how we evaluate institutional quality; to how friends, family, and coworkers may shape our eating habits; to how youths’ puberty timing can affect their friendship choices and health behaviors. 

Academic freedom has become a highly polarized topic, especially in recent years. Shouldn’t it be a non-partisan issue that we want our next generation of workers to thrive? 

Other scholars don’t always have that same broad latitude in their work. More limited ranges of inquiry means when certain topics are restricted, scholars are affected differently. Re-tooling and starting over in another area at a minimum costs the precious resource of time, and it may mean giving up one’s passion and deeply-held commitments entirely.

There is broad consensus in higher education that academic freedom is not absolute — one must stay within one’s area of expertise, and it applies only to our jobs. Its protections cease at the boundary of my work life; as a private citizen I rely on the same free speech protections as anyone else.

Even if not technically violating academic freedom norms, there can be more subtle infringements — what I think of as “broken promises” — such as a junior professor being told by their department chair, dean, or provost that “maybe you shouldn’t work on that topic”; or, “that idea will never get funded”; or, “you’ve got to get more grant dollars if you want to be promoted here.” Sometimes academic self-censorship and silencing of important voices comes from within the academy itself.

While whisper networks of faculty often relate these informal broken promises, research also attests to gendered and racialized differences in workload equity in academic workplaces, which can play into the freedoms scholars have to pursue their ideas. This is often the case for faculty who find themselves in a demographic or intellectual minority of their field. Being discriminated against for how one exists or what one believes doesn’t end on the school playground, it just transforms into something new. 

Is it the same kind of affront to academic freedom if a scholar who happens to be a member of a demographically minoritized group cannot pursue a rigorously-designed study on structural racism, or a conservative faculty member in largely left-leaning academia cannot pursue a rigorously-designed study on how culture plays into family dissolution? 

Both overt attacks on academic freedom from outside academia and less obvious challenges from within can interact to damage how new knowledge is discovered and then disseminated.

It is an unsettled, and timely, question whether the massive federal cuts to the national scientific enterprise constitute a breach of academic freedom. Were all of those scientists’ freedoms trampled on because they were working on an idea the federal government did not favor? Not every idea or topic area is always, or by definition can be, a priority for government funding given limited public resources. 

Yet the outcome looks like a systemic dismantling of the scientific apparatus that has existed since the postwar mid-20th century. The landscape looks like it would have if many of the academic freedoms that those scientists had previously enjoyed for a large part of their careers were surgically excised. The end result is largely the same.

The ultimate point is that both overt attacks on academic freedom from outside academia and less obvious challenges from within can interact to damage how new knowledge is discovered and then disseminated. 

How Can You Help Academic Freedom Thrive? 

Academic freedom has become a highly polarized topic, especially in recent years. Shouldn’t it be a non-partisan issue that we want our next generation of workers to thrive? 

When young adults enter the workforce prepared to be critical thinkers, to be able to talk to and get along with people who are different from them in some way, our national economy benefits. Allowing scientists and educators to be the truth-seekers they trained to be in an unencumbered way only bolsters America’s place on the global stage. 

If you have a college-age family member, encourage them to seek out courses or programs on their campus where professors are encouraging them to learn how to engage in dialogue across difference (the Think Again program at the University of Virginia, the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative at Davidson College, and my own institution’s Intergroup Dialogue program are examples). 

If you’re an alum of a college or university, ask your school’s alumni association what it’s doing to stand up for academic freedom. 

If you work at a university, you can work through shared governance bodies to encourage your administration to ensure that the academic freedoms promised on paper have teeth for everyone, not just for some. 

And we the people can also lobby our state governments to build academic freedom protections into more durable legal precedent, rather than just relying on the protections as a set of guidelines that may be ignored if political winds shift in one direction or another at the federal level. California, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York each provide different examples of state constitutional protections. 

For the rest of us, the next time you’re thanking a mechanic, your middle schooler, or a financial advisor for teaching you something new that affects your everyday life, remember that you also have academic freedom to thank.