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With their wealth, exclusivity and global clout, American universities are an easy target for populist resentment. For Americans frustrated by inequality and cultural alienation, there may be a certain satisfaction in seeing these elite institutions humbled.
But the Trump administration’s coercive offensive against institutions like Harvard and Columbia, which clearly isn’t about antisemitism, isn’t really about elitism or populism either. It's about something deeper. It throws into question ordered liberties that are deeply rooted in America’s history and traditions.
If that point’s hard to explain, part of the blame lies with us academics. We’ve spent too long defending academic freedom on the basis of professional norms, free speech jurisprudence and administrative due process.
Some of these defenses might win in court, but none are winning in the court of public opinion. Whether academic freedom survives in the coming years won’t be decided by the Administrative Procedure Act or even the First Amendment. It’ll depend on whether ordinary Americans can say that academic freedom is their freedom, too. The question, in other words, is whether or not the idea of academic freedom has legitimacy.
Today, academic freedom’s legitimacy is fraying. Rising tuition, student debt, concerns over free speech, allegations of political bias, administrative bloat, billion-dollar endowments and doubts about the real-world value of degrees have made many Americans question what universities are for and who they really serve.
Legitimizing academic freedom under these conditions will be an uphill battle.
The traditional account looks to 19th-century Germany, where academic freedom was grounded in principles like Lernfreiheit, Lehrfreiheit and Wissenschaftsfreiheit. There’s real value in that lineage. But it’s not the whole story. And taken alone, it risks sounding abstract, even alien, to contemporary ears.
In response to Trump’s attacks, others have tried to defend academic freedom in instrumental terms, linking it to national security, aggregate wealth or public health. But that ultimately reduces academic freedom to a mere tool of government, an indirect means to the end of what raison d’état thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes called the salus populi, the safety, health, wealth or welfare of the people.
Academic freedom, by contrast, serves the common good. That extends beyond immediate matters such as safety and health to include all the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. The common good can only be discovered and known on the basis of patient, ongoing and pluralistic inquiry. Whereas public health and safety can be maintained through states of emergency, the common good requires liberty: It depends on the free search for truth and its free exposition.
In just the same way that the common good isn’t reducible to public safety, health and wealth, real academic freedom isn't reducible to state interests, either. Instead, it has to be based on what limits the state, particularly when the state in question has become authoritarian or worse.
No, the way forward isn’t to go back to Humboldt. Nor is to redefine academic freedom in terms of state power. It’s to reckon with an old and often ignored paradox: The freedoms the university cherishes are historically borrowed from the very forces—church and state—it has so often stood against.
At first, this idea may seem strange. But consider the practice of tenure, often described as the foundation of academic freedom. Why do federal judges receive life tenure? Not as a personal benefit, but to insulate the impartial administration of justice from political pressure, wealthy interests and the shifting will of the majority.
Like judges, scholars are tasked with pursuing the truth without fear or favor. Tenure is what allows them to do so. Professors in Indiana, Texas, North Dakota, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida need tenure not as a personal reward, but as a shield that protects their ability to speak truthfully, especially when their conclusions are controversial, unwelcome or politically inconvenient.
This analogy runs deep in the American tradition of academic freedom. The founding text of American academic freedom, the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, explicitly compares academic tenure to judicial tenure.
Before that, Thomas Jefferson, when founding the University of Virginia, enticed new professors in 1817 and 1818 by promising them permanent tenure of office. In the process, he used the formula for judicial independence derived from the Glorious Revolution.
For Jefferson, professorial tenure wasn’t a job perk for elites. It was a concept analogous to judicial tenure. It was a matter of public concern. It was the institutional design required by what he famously called “the illimitable freedom of the human mind.” Red-state lawmakers who value American history and traditions would therefore be right to value academic tenure, too.
Academic freedom’s connection to religious liberty runs just as deep. According to America’s two most eminent historians of academic freedom, Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger, “academic freedom first appeared in the guise of religious liberty for professors.”
It’s not hard to understand why. Early American colleges were sectarian battlegrounds. Professors had to conform to strict theological lines. Gradually, though, religious conflicts on campuses gave rise to a set of new norms: freedom of conscience, religious tolerance, epistemic humility, and the belief that truth-seeking requires departures from dogma, not reinforcement of it, and independence from the persecution of heresy, not better enforcement of it. This shift came from a simple insight: Even the most convinced religious believer is fallible. Mistakes aren’t moral failures, but part of honest, trial-and-error inquiry.
From the moral condemnation of error to its normalization and institutionalization—this shift, Hofstadter and Metzger argue, laid the groundwork for academic freedom. It’s the nonsecular origin for today’s secular idea that scholars and professors have a right to pursue ideas, follow evidence and speak freely without fear, especially when facing sharp moral denunciation from powerful majorities.
What is the reason liberal democracies don’t force religious believers to accept doctrines their consciences reject? One of the best answers comes from John Locke, who pointed out that “it is absurd that things should be enjoined by laws which are not in men’s power to perform. And to believe this or that to be true does not depend upon our will.” Law cannot demand things of people that people have no power to do, and believing something to be true isn’t something we have power over.
Jefferson, building on Locke, maintained that civil rights must not hinge on religious belief. In his 1779 A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, he argued that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics and geometry.” Punishing someone for their faith, he reasoned, is as irrational as punishing them for their scientific conclusions. Just as scholarly inquiry must be free from government interference, Jefferson reasons, so too must religious belief.
Note the order of Jefferson’s logic. He moves from the general case of scholarly freedom to the specific case of religious freedom. His premise is that both involve involuntary beliefs that can’t justly be punished. This sequence may seem surprising, but Jefferson wrote before Darwin, so he saw no sharp divide between religious and scientific truth-seeking. In his 1781 Notes on the State of Virginia, therefore, his defense of “free enquiry” blended examples from both domains, moving fluidly from the persecution of early Christians by the Romans to the modern science of Galileo, Descartes and Newton.
Though we now live in a post-Darwinian age, Jefferson’s insights into law’s limits remain instructive. Writing in 1967, Hannah Arendt reworked his point for a secular age. The rational truths of science and philosophy, she noted, as well as the factual truths of history, assert themselves over and against the truth-seeker’s own desire and will. The chemist can’t completely rewrite the periodic table, the geologist can’t wish away the fossil record, the philosopher can’t twist the rules of logic, and the historian can’t invent or erase facts. The scholar encounters truth as a peremptory, non-negotiable and undebatable force—as a form of unfreedom.
This, Arendt insightfully observed, is why tyrants hate truth. Truth’s compelling and imperative quality presents the tyrant with a coercive force that’s stronger and more durable than their own appetite, whim and will. Tyrants hate scholars for the same reason: The scholar, who is the embodiment of truth’s compelling and imperative quality, is an intolerable reminder to tyrants that some things are forever beyond their coercive commands.
That’s why, even today, the case for academic freedom looks a lot like the case for religious liberty. Religious faith and scholarly judgment obviously aren’t identical in all respects. The salient point is that both revolve around forms of inner necessity that lie beyond personal preference. Just as religious believers can’t will themselves to believe what their conscience rejects, scholars can’t will themselves to affirm what their training and evidence contradict. Scholars, like believers, don’t select their conclusions for their own convenience. They’re compelled to affirm what they cannot in good faith contradict.
This unfreedom, paradoxically, is the beating heart of scholars’ academic freedom. The less scholars are able to change their conclusions, the more protection they need from legislators and administrators who would punish them for saying what they know they need to say. As the AAUP also put it in 1915: “There must be in the mind of the teacher no mental reservation.”
To coerce someone into saying what they know isn’t true isn’t just a violation of liberty. It’s absurd. It violates the basic integrity of the intellect. It never lasts. What the mind cannot deny and the will cannot alter must never be subject to force.
This counterintuitive line of reasoning, which is very much the path not taken by today’s courts, suggests that free inquiry has an original and fixed public meaning that constrains government interference with the conduct—the exercise—of evidence-based truth-seeking.
It also underscores the need to broaden the defense of academic freedom beyond just free speech. The core activity that academic freedom protects—disciplined, evidence-based truth-seeking that lives or dies on the basis of the true-false distinction—doesn’t align very well with the First Amendment’s free speech clause, which is only indirectly connected to truth-seeking and which also protects many forms of intentional falsehoods. Trying to squeeze academic freedom, which originated in the 13th-century universitas, into modern free speech doctrine, which emerged in the early 20th century, is often like trying to fit a round peg in a square hole.
It makes more sense to say that just as judicial independence grounds the strongest arguments for professorial tenure, religious liberty forms the most compelling basis for safeguarding the activity of free inquiry.
Unlike Wissenschaftsfreiheit and Lehrfreiheit, two concepts that are not well understood even by most academics, these two forms of ordered liberty are well understood by many members of the public. Integrating them into our justifications of academic freedom leads to a fresh argument about academic freedom’s place and function in American civic life. That argument looks like this:
A judge’s duty is to justice, not politics, and people of faith can’t be told what to believe. In just the same way, the scholar pursues the truth wherever it may lead. We don’t always agree with what judges decide, we don’t embrace every religious tradition, and we’re not on board with everything university professors say. But that’s not a glitch in liberal democracy; it’s the point of liberal democracy. In the same way that public funding and tax exemptions for religious groups don’t grant the government authority over religious doctrine, and taxpayer funding of federal courts doesn’t give the executive or legislative branches authority to dictate or interfere with judicial rulings, tax exemptions and grants don’t empower government interference in university truth-seeking. We support the freedoms of church, court and university not because we endorse every utterance that comes from these institutions, but because we recognize the value of independent institutions themselves—because we understand that some institutions can serve the common good only if they’re shielded from the changing whims of sometimes tyrannical majority opinion. We do this with courts. We do it with places of worship. And we should do it with universities too. Members of the public who agree that judicial independence is key to their independence, and that religious liberty is a part of their liberty, may well then agree that academic freedom is their freedom too.
These are the arguments that need to be made by those who care about academic freedom and who are tasked with its defense. They clarify that academic freedom is neither the privilege of an elite guild nor an expression of raison d’état. It’s one among many forms of counter-majoritarianism that a democratic republic needs to preserve the common good while guarding against mob rule and autocratic assaults on vulnerable minorities. A cousin of religious liberty and judicial independence, academic freedom is deeply rooted in the structure and purpose of the U.S. Constitution. Its theoretical integrity depends not on its purity—the claim that academics are so exceptionally special and unique that they deserve workplace protections and privileges unavailable to all other people and professions—but on an immunological logic that allows the university to internalize just enough of church and state to keep their full force at bay.
Trump’s attacks on universities challenge academics to rise to the occasion. If university presidents, trustees and administrators cave in to governmental coercion and convert private and public institutions of higher learning alike into just another state agency, it will fall to scholars to explain the freedoms we need to the public whose common good we serve. As we do, we might note that what the federal government is doing to institutions of higher learning, it’s also doing to courts and places of worship. The defense of academic freedom that fully understands itself can no longer be a defense of academic freedom alone.
