The Proper Limits of Academic Freedom: Lessons from the Unrest at Columbia University

by David Pan

Columbia University president Nemat Shafik’s recent testimony to Congress indicates an important shift in our conception of academic freedom. While affirming the legal principle of free speech, she clearly accepted limits on academic freedom by stating that calls for genocide have no place at the university. Since at least one issue would disqualify someone from participating in Columbia’s educational project, she opens up the question of the limits of academic freedom and the duty of a university to enforce such limits through decisions on hiring and dismissal of faculty as well as suspension of students. While the American Association of University Professors seeks to criticize such restrictions on academic freedom, its 1940 statement on academic freedom stipulates that “[i]nstitutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole.” The congressional hearings have demonstrated that the common good may require restrictions on academic freedom, and such restrictions indeed are already part of the way universities see their mission.

If a university were to hire a virologist who begins to do research on how to develop a virus that could wipe out humanity, there would be no question that the university would be able to prohibit such research, if necessary through suspension or dismissal. The principle here is that the goals of research and teaching can and should be set by the university and its sponsors, even if differences of opinion about the best ways to achieve such goals should be permitted and often encouraged in order to arrive at the most effective methods.

While the principle of free speech protects virtually all speech from legal prosecution, academic freedom does not offer the same blanket protections, because it not only involves protecting speech but also includes providing resources to faculty to do their work. In supporting faculty teaching and research in this way, a university is making a decision about the kind of work that it seeks to support. Consequently, the difference between free speech and academic freedom depends upon the distinction between neutrality and objectivity. The university cannot be neutral in the resources it expends to promote its mission and goals. Consequently, academic freedom does not oblige universities to be neutral regarding whom it hires and admits.

Implicit in the mission of a university is the goal of promoting rather than destroying human life and flourishing. In the United States, universities also have the goal of promoting liberal democratic institutions, and they might have additional goals, such as supporting the values of a particular religious denomination. Thus, rather than being neutral, colleges and universities have specific goals that will affect their desire to employ certain faculty or accept certain students into their community. Generally, such goals are not set by the administrators, faculty, or students, but by the sponsors of the university, including voters, alumni, and parents as mediated through institutions such as state governments, boards of trustees, donors, and the educational marketplace.

Once goals have been established, objectivity has to do with a lack of bias in looking at the results of research for attaining such goals. Here, academic freedom would involve the protection of unpopular views concerning the way to achieve the broader goals of the university. Nevertheless, if the purpose of academic freedom is to maintain objectivity through the protection of all viewpoints, it does not include the protection of those who seek to undermine the very goals of the university. Consequently, value-oriented decisions about what fields of study to support and which research questions to pursue cannot be left up to faculty as a part of their academic freedom. Rather, the sponsors of the university establish such priorities by laying out guidelines and then appointing administrators to implement them. These administrators influence the work of universities through their allocation of resources to specific departments and in their influence over hiring decisions.

The problems that we are facing today at U.S. universities are the result of decisions made by administrators who have been influenced by faculty to promote certain fields of study and perspectives in academia to the detriment of other ones. The current anti-Israel protests are the result of the way these decisions have shaped research and teaching in the humanities and social sciences in the last several decades.

The issues at stake go to the core of the university’s mission, as they are about the fundamental values that shape teaching and research. As I have laid out elsewhere, there is a moral asymmetry in the widening war between Israel and Iran. While Israel has been making substantive efforts to protect Palestinian civilians in its military actions, both Iran and Hamas target Israeli civilians and terrorize their own peoples to maintain their power. By taking Israeli hostages and using Palestinians as human shields, Hamas displays a stunning disregard for civilians while forcing Israel to choose between its own security and the well-being of Palestinians. Relieved of such choices because they are willing to murder and endanger anyone to achieve their goals, Hamas and Iran enjoy a “moral inferiority” that allows them to take actions without regard to human consequences. Perversely, they have been able to paint Israel as the morally compromised party precisely because Israel has been taking such moral decisions so seriously.

Never since World War II has there been a clearer set of moral choices in terms of who is defending human rights and global peace. As previous Telos-Paul Piccone Institute speakers have pointed out, Israel maintains liberal democratic and human rights norms, while Hamas and their tactics have direct connections to Nazi antisemitism. Hamas’s hostage taking and terrorism borrow directly from Nazi methods of terrorizing both their own people and those in areas that they conquered. The fact that so many students and faculty are supporting Hamas rather than Israel points to fundamental problems at our colleges and universities that need to be addressed immediately but will also require long-term commitments for changing the goals of teaching and research.

An indication of what needs to be done comes from recent comments from the U.S.-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:

On March 25, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest student group hosted an event called “Resistance 101” on campus. It featured leaders of the PFLP-affiliated Samidoun, Within Our Lifetime and other extremist organizations. At the event, former PFLP official Khaled Barakat referred to his “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad [and] the PFLP in Gaza,” saying that particularly after Oct. 7, “when they see students organizing outside Palestine, they really feel that they are being backed as a resistance and they’re being supported.” On March 30 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Mr. Barakat said “the vast majority” of young Americans and Canadians now “support armed resistance” because of “the introduction of colonialism, racism, and slavery studies into history curricula.”¹

In crediting the scholarly focus on colonialism, racism, and slavery with establishing the attitudes leading to the student protests in favor of Hamas, Barakat is pointing to the missteps of our university deans and presidents. Rather than taking the lead to create university communities that focus on and promote liberal democratic values, they have for the most part left up to the faculty the decisions about which fields to support in hiring, the job descriptions for new positions, and the scholars to hire. Such resource decisions, since they flow from the mission and goals of a university, cannot be left up to faculty, but must be established by the sponsors of the university, who appoint the administrators to carry out their decisions. In fact, though, these decisions have been by and large made by faculty members themselves. This may not have been a problem in a previous era, when there was a mix of political perspectives amongst faculty and their views broadly aligned with the goals of the university. But starting in the 1970s, well-meaning faculty chose to hire in left-leaning professors to promote diversity of thought.

[T]he decisions about which fields to support in hiring, the job descriptions for new positions, and the scholars to hire . . . , since they flow from the mission and goals of a university, cannot be left up to faculty, but must be established by the sponsors of the university, who appoint the administrators to carry out their decisions.

As these left-leaning professors began to dominate departments, however, they themselves have chosen not to promote such viewpoint diversity and have tended to hire scholars who agree with their own perspectives, leading to the virtual disappearance of socially and politically conservative professors at most universities, particularly amongst humanities and social science faculty. As a replacement for viewpoint diversity, professors and administrators focus today on racial diversity, which has in practice meant affirmative action policies that favor certain races, with the implicit expectation that racial minority candidates would also support the same affirmative action policies. These policies were, however, themselves based on an identity-politics framework that in practice rejects the liberal notion of individual achievement and equal opportunity while promoting judgments about people purely on the basis of their race or ethnicity, precisely the problem we are seeing in the rise of campus antisemitism.

The end result has been a shifting of both teaching and research to a narrow set of topics that revolve around colonialism, racism, slavery, and also gender. (Significantly, Barakat did not mention this final topic, where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is not so aligned with American campus leftists.) Meanwhile, military and political history has virtually disappeared from college campuses, leaving a dearth of knowledge of events such as U.S. political history, World War II, or the rise of Nazism. Instead, students are taught a curriculum that focuses on the failings of American culture and politics without a proper understanding of its successes. Nor do they gain a proper knowledge of political divisions and the precise ideological differences that separated, for instance, Nazis, communists, social democrats, and Christian democrats in the early twentieth century. Such distinctions are crucial for evaluating conflicts such as the one between Hamas and Israel today and for understanding the principles at stake.

What is to be done? The people of the United States need to reassert their right to determine the mission and goals of university teaching and research. Through their elected representatives, their donations, and their choices about where to send their children for their education, Americans will need to demand that our schools at all levels begin to orient education around the support of liberal democratic values. More concretely, this would require a reorientation of curriculum around a canon of texts that form the basis of our understanding of liberal democracy as well as a return to political and military history. The current push to teach all of the world’s cultures as part of general education needs to be reversed because knowledge is not about filling in all the blanks in our minds with everything the world has to offer—an obviously impossible and in fact senseless task, as I have argued previously. Rather, we need to reassert the idea that our nation has a particular tradition, history, and set of values, around which our educational mission should be oriented, and we should no longer separate ethnic minority culture from American culture in our departmental and disciplinary structures. These changes would promote the return of real debate on college campuses, in which we would have scholars with different perspectives working on the same, narrower range of topics, thus ending the monoculture of our campuses in which only left-wing viewpoints are represented and terrorist organizations can be celebrated.

All these changes will require a new set of administrators willing to change the composition of our faculty so as to orient universities around these goals. This will require the closing of certain departments and the dismissal of a portion of the current faculty, not in order to prohibit certain views but rather to reallocate resources toward the proper goals of the university as determined by its sponsors. Tenure is designed to protect faculty from being dismissed for holding unpopular positions, and we should continue to honor such protections of academic freedom. But the idea of academic freedom does not protect faculty from dismissal when their teaching and research do not align with the university’s mission. Tenure also does not protect faculty from dismissal when the university needs to reallocate resources to new tasks. There is of course a fine line between censuring certain views and recognizing the responsibility to base hiring and dismissal on the pursuit of clear goals. It is, however, the responsibility of administrators to make these difficult decisions in order to protect the university’s mission.

Implementing such changes will be contentious and wrenching for higher education, but the alternative will be a further deterioration of our universities and of our liberal democracy as a whole.

Topics: Israel Initiative

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David Pan is the Editor of Telos.

1. Steven Stalinsky, “Who’s behind the Anti-Israel Protests,” Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2024.