Suddenly, it seems everyone in the academy today — left, right and center — is an advocate of academic freedom. Whether on the right, as an appeal against “cancellation,” or on the left, in response to the demonization of DEI, appeals to free expression are suddenly much in vogue.
Given that the invocation of academic freedom becomes fashionable only when academics feel that their views are under threat, we might conclude that such appeals are ultimately cynical. For conservatives, yesterday’s complaints against the silencing by “wokeness” appear increasingly replaced by calls for forced conversion of elite institutions to a certain worldview. For institutions like Harvard — which only recently was amenable to “cancel culture” — academic freedom is suddenly viewed as a shield against the interferences of the federal government. Both actors seem, in fact, to be less interested in principled commitment to academic freedom than protecting or advancing their preferred perspectives.
Some will insist that the position of greatest intellectual probity would be an unswerving commitment to academic freedom, no matter the view being expressed. Such a position echoes the famous stance attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” However, not only do I think this stance is mistaken — for we do not and ought not to tolerate every perspective, such as those who defend the proposition that chattel slavery is a positive good — but I think it’s further untenable that any human institution can be organized on such a supposedly neutral and nonjudgmental basis. In the final estimation, it’s impossible to escape substantive commitments or obligations. Even the supposedly neutral and liberal commitment to free speech and academic freedom itself contains foundational sets of beliefs requiring preliminary agreement.
Today’s varying invocations of “academic freedom” merely obscure the true reality of the situation — one that informs not only all academic institutions, but all human communities: There is no such thing as a pure domain of “academic freedom” or “free speech” or “free expression.” As human beings, we always contest the boundaries of freedom within any of our human communities. We would have more honest and productive debates not by assuming supposedly principled neutral stances, but by being frank about the substantive nature of our actual commitments. This kind of honesty is especially necessary at academic institutions today.
In defense of this more challenging but realistic condition, I will explore three propositions: First, there is no such thing as pure “academic freedom.” Second, those who claim it exists almost always seek to place the substantive premises of liberalism beyond the realm of debate. Third, there is a form of academic freedom, but that freedom is always bounded and contested. There is no easy fix to the complex reality of human institutions, which always erect boundaries around domains in which contestation is acceptable, and stances that are deemed out of bounds.
The liberal roots of free speech
Theories of free speech, and their near twin, academic freedom, are the fruit of efforts by early modern liberal thinkers such as John Milton, John Locke and John Stuart Mill to overturn an older tradition that, in their view, oppressed a great many forms of speech, expression and worship. Arguments for untrammeled free speech and toleration of a wide variety of viewpoints, even religious beliefs, became the founding hallmarks of liberal philosophy.
This foundational narrative has been dominant for several centuries at least, but has been powerfully challenged over that time, including one notable challenge more than 30 years ago in 1994, when the leftist scholar and public intellectual Stanley Fish published an essay titled “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing Too.” As a prominent scholar of John Milton, Fish was well aware of the ways that classical defenses of free speech characteristically acknowledged the outer limits of any regime of tolerance, and were often quite frank in acknowledging the exceptions to the rule of toleration — and hence, of supposedly free speech. In the case of Milton, Fish wrote, “Not far from the end of ‘Areopagitica,’ and after having celebrated the virtues of toleration and unregulated publication in passages that find their way into every discussion of free speech and the First Amendment, John Milton catches himself up short and says, of course I didn’t mean Catholics — them we exterminate.” In Milton’s words:
“I mean not tolerated popery and open superstition, which as it extirpates all religious and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate. … That also which is impious or evil against faith or manners, no law can possibly permit that intends not to unlaw itself.”
IT IS PERFECTLY COMPREHENSIBLE TO STATE THAT ALL SPEECH AND EXPRESSION OUGHT TO BE TOLERATED; BUT AS AN APPLIED AND PRACTICAL MATTER, THIS “PURE” POSITION IS SIMPLY NEVER THE CASE.
A near-identical limitation is found in John Locke’s foundational work “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” in which the free exercise of religion is delimited not only by forbidding Catholicism, but atheism as well — in the latter case, because atheists cannot be trusted to be honest in the swearing of oaths. And John Stuart Mill set some significant limitations to free speech and expression, infamously arguing that “barbarians” who were still dominated by the “despotism of custom” should be placed for a time under despotism of their more progressive masters. Mill’s limitation was eventually adopted by Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” which called for the suppression of speech and expression by conservatives — a text that became the playbook of campus progressives who run today’s campuses.
Fish rightly notes that all defenses of free speech either explicitly or implicitly contain an internal limitation based on “acceptable tolerance levels.” As a philosophical matter, it is perfectly comprehensible to state that all speech and expression ought to be tolerated; but as an applied and practical matter, this “pure” position is simply never the case. Indeed, Fish astutely argues that we should view free speech not as a potentially limitless domain of expression that might require a few limits placed upon it — such as harm — but that the limiting features are themselves the defining condition of the effectual arena of free speech. How we will define “harm” will already contain substantive commitments, as we have seen in recent years in the way harm was defined, especially in the form of “microaggressions” and “safe spaces” in respect to identity.
A community always demarcates the exception to free expression not as a regrettable limit, but as the defining feature of the community itself — that which makes shared speech possible. Outside that limit, restrictions must be informally or authoritatively enforced in the name of defending the very purpose and existence of the community itself. As Fish notes, “When the pinch comes (and sooner or later it will always come) and the institution (be it church, or state, or university) is confronted by behavior subversive of its core rationale, it will respond by declaring ‘of course we mean not tolerated ____, that we extirpate __,’ not because an exception to a general freedom has suddenly and contradictorily been announced, but because the freedom has never been general and has always been understood against the backdrop of an originary exclusion that gives it meaning.”
The same is doubly or triply true of academic institutions, which in every instance have been established on comparable bases of deep underlying commitments, and therefore, shared exclusions. As Fish writes, “Could it be the purpose of such places to encourage free expression? If the answer were ‘yes,’ it would be hard to say that there would be any need for classes, or examinations, or libraries, since freedom of expression requires nothing but a soapbox or an open telephone line. The very fact of the university’s machinery — of the events, rituals, and procedures that fill its calendar — argues for some other, more substantive purpose. In relation to that purpose (which will be realized differently in different kinds of institutions), the flourishing of free expression will in almost all circumstances be an obvious good; but in some circumstances, freedom of expression may pose a threat to that purpose, and at that point it may be necessary to discipline or regulate speech, lest to paraphrase (John) Milton, the institution sacrifice itself to one of its accidental features.” That is, academic freedom is “accidental” or secondary to the primary function of the institution in which such freedom occurs, and is defined and delimited, even if always provisionally and never fully explicit.
Early critics and campus debates
This basic feature of “academic freedom” as resting on a foundation of exclusion has been known, if not always frankly acknowledged, for some time — at least as far back as the various critics of the three Johns: Milton, Locke and Mill. We can get a good idea of the intentions of the more contemporary architects of academic freedom by revisiting at least some of its history — the debates that once raged over the topic, and the claims that eventually carried the day and became institutionalized on college campuses through the American Association of University Professors and later internal governance and external accreditation agencies.
NEARLY ALL OF TODAY’S COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES HAVE BECOME MONOLITHIC BASTIONS OF PROGRESSIVE LIBERALISM THAT NO LONGER PRIZE ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN RESPECT TO CERTAIN ANTI-PROGRESSIVE VIEWPOINTS.
Unsurprisingly, the substantive and transformative commitments of liberal forms of “academic freedom” were once obvious, especially to the religious, particularly Catholic conservatives such as in the mid-20th century. Among the more prescient of Catholic university and college leaders who became vociferous critics of the doctrine of academic freedom included the presidents of Georgetown, Fairfield University and the leadership of the National Jesuit Educational Association, which may surprise some, given the contemporary progressiveness of Jesuit institutions. These earlier figures suspected that demands for the governing principle of academic freedom, driven especially by academics and officials at elite secular universities, were part of a general effort to secularize educational institutions and, more broadly, American society. In 1941, Edward Rooney, S.J., who was the national secretary of the Jesuit Educational Association, wrote in response to the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, that the liberal form of academic freedom was anathema to the self-understanding of Catholic and Christian institutions of higher education.
Rooney presciently argued that the liberal reformers sought to transform the institutional nature of educational institutions, secular and religious alike. Arguing that the only limitation allowed by “naturalistic educators” would be professional standards, he concluded that “truth itself, absolute truth, will put no limitations to teaching, to research or to publication — because there is no absolute truth (in the naturalist philosophy). Truth, like all else, is evolving. … An absolute norm of morality will put no restraint on conclusions, theoretical or practical, since there is no absolute standard of morality. The norm of morality is utilitarian and hedonistic. … Such, I think, will be the attitude toward academic freedom of a large majority of American educators. Their attitude and their interpretation of any statement on academic freedom is the outcome of their fundamental philosophy of life and education.” Rooney was under no illusion of the nature of the change being demanded not only of secular, but ultimately religious institutions.
On this point, Rooney cited “The Humanist Manifesto” — published in 1933 — as evidence for the “dogma” that was ultimately sought by progressive educational reformers, including John Dewey, one of the signatories of the manifesto, and later one of the architects of the AAUP statement. The 13th “dogma” of the manifesto is noteworthy:
“Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life. The intelligent evaluation, transformation, control and direction of such associations and institutions with a view to the enhancement of human life, is the purpose and program of humanism. Certainly, religious institutions, their ritualistic forms, ecclesiastical methods and communal activities, must be reconstructed as rapidly as experience will allow, in order to function effectively in the modern world.”
Evident to many observers — religious and secular alike — was that calls for academic freedom were equated by many of its proponents as a main means of lessening and even eliminating religious and religiously informed moral dimensions in the universities. Among the most influential and prominent defenses of academic freedom was published by Robert MacIver, a professor at Columbia University and director of the “American Academic Freedom Project.” In his 1955 book, “Academic Freedom in Our Time,” he wrote that academic freedom required the elimination of religious influence within secular institutions, and made it clear that any institution that retained religious affiliation was engaging in self-marginalization from what should be prevailing academic norms:
“Those who advocate that the university should take a definitely religious stand are in their proselyting zeal committing themselves to the total perversion of the function of the university. They would revert to the intellectual confusion of earlier times, when a superimposed prior ‘truth’ retarded the advance of knowledge and thus tended to imprison the inquiring mind. To make the university the center for the propagation of any creed, of any system of values that divides group from group, is to destroy the special quality and the unique mission of the university as a center for the free pursuit of knowledge wherever it may lead.”
According to MacIver, the institutionalization of “academic freedom” as the dominant principle of academic inquiry required replacing established religious truths with an open search for new knowledge, “wherever it might lead.” Left unstated is what would become the status of those new “truths” at institutions founded under this new ethos. But the basic ethos of a liberal ideal of a “humanism” that aimed at the “fulfillment of human life” could be expected to become a new form of campus orthodoxy. In an echo to Mill’s defense of liberty in the name of overturning “the despotism of custom” and liberating “experiments in living,” it turned out that a seemingly neutral principle of academic inquiry already contained within it a set of substantive commitments that we now see fully manifest in most educational institutions today. And, having discovered the new “knowledge” and even “truth” that supports a humanistic pursuit of the “fulfillment of human life” in largely material and hedonistic terms, that new “truth” itself becomes the limiting factor of further “academic freedom.”
A modern conservative defense
Fast-forwarding 70 years, we witness today a rising chorus of traditional and religious voices making vociferous arguments for the institutional protection of academic freedom. Particularly striking are current defenses of academic freedom that have been prominently articulated by one of America’s most visible, articulate and influential conservative Catholic thinkers, professor Robert George of Princeton University. In April 2020, he published a brief statement on academic freedom on the webpage of the conservative and ecumenical religious publication, First Things, that stated:
“At campuses across the country, traditional ideals of freedom of expression and the right to dissent have been deeply compromised or even abandoned as college and university faculties and administrators have capitulated to demands for language and even thought policing. Academic freedom, once understood to be vitally necessary to the truth-seeking mission of institutions of higher learning, has been pushed to the back of the bus.”
Clearly, much had changed in the conservative religious world over the course of 75 years. Institutions that were once “conservative” had become overwhelmingly liberal, even radically progressive, and now their denizens were shrinking the range of “academic freedom” in the name of “academic justice” — attempting to rid the academy, and the wider world, of injustices of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, colonialism, toxic masculinity and so forth. People of a more traditional, often religious, view were increasingly denounced, silenced, canceled, fired and forced into the state of self-censorship. Having achieved the kind of progressive institution that academic freedom’s defenders had set out to achieve, they were now explicit about the strict limitations of “tolerance levels” — just as Milton, Locke and Mill predicted would happen when their articulations of “free speech” were publicized.
IN THE SERVICE OF TRUTH, WE SHOULD BE FRANK ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE VISION OF OUR SOCIETY AND THE POLITICAL ORDER THAT WE ARE ACTUALLY SEEKING TO DEFEND, CHALLENGE, ADVANCE — AND, YES, IN SOME CASES, TO DEFEAT.
The irony is rich, but — as our brief encounter with traditionalist Catholic concerns about the consequences of academic freedom foretold — not unexpected. For there is more than coincidence linking the mid-20th century embrace of liberal forms of “academic freedom” and the fact that nearly all of today’s colleges and universities have become monolithic bastions of progressive liberalism that no longer prize academic freedom in respect to certain anti-progressive viewpoints. Nor should we be surprised that today’s would-be intellectual heirs of the midcentury Jesuits find themselves taking up liberal arguments for “academic freedom” and “viewpoint diversity.”
The limits of campus openness
This is not to say that there is no such thing as academic freedom — but rather, that all forms and expressions of that freedom are necessarily limited by the context in which that freedom is exercised. Today’s advocates for academic freedom such as Robert George are correct in arguing that universities should be institutions in which a variety of views are entertained. They should not be echo chambers. However, his argument neglects the actual ways that humans interact, satisfied to make claims (like so many others) on the plain of abstract philosophy. He states that students should feel free and welcome to make any argument that they wish in their classes, in their dormitories, over a meal in the dining hall. The same should go for faculty. But any sensible student and every faculty member who cares not only about her employment contract, but her academic reputation and professional stature, knows that such a condition of “pure” openness never exists — nor should any of us want it to exist.
Universities are a unique kind of community. Its members are chosen: faculty, staff and administrators are all hired, and students are admitted. The community — the collegium — that is shaped by those selections is defined by the substantive commitments that constitute the bounded arena in which academic freedom is engaged. Whether we acknowledge this fact or not, we don’t permit every individual and every viewpoint into these communities. In the case of some Christian religious institutions, efforts to select faculty, administration and staff based upon a reading and discussion of faith statements aspire to shape a community of inquiry in light of the shared truths of the Bible and Christian faith. More broadly, what we as a civilization have come to regard as abhorrent claims — such as defenses of chattel slavery or arguments for the inherent inferiority of certain races or religious believers — are largely weeded out through the long process of undergraduate education, admission to graduate school, scholarly training, the heavily patrolled processes of hiring, tenuring, promotion and academic recognition.
Lines are always being drawn, but for the most part they are not entirely visible and they are ever-shifting. Still, every community has its lines, whether implicit or explicit. In the end, the actual practice of academic freedom will always be secondary to the question of what kind of community, what sort of collegium — and, by extension, what kind of society and what kind of nation — we should believe we inhabit or that we seek to realize. This fact is revealed once you scratch the surface of even the most passionate free-speech absolutist (for instance, many of yesterday’s free-speech absolutists are today seeking to eliminate DEI programs and ban what are determined to be antisemitic protests and practices, and even activists, from campuses).
There is no “safe space” from the need to draw lines, only the freedom that is generally permitted within the expanse of acceptable views that define the collegium, and the peril that awaits the person or people or even institutions that would challenge that view. They may succeed, or they may fail, but there is no guarantee of indifference or theoretically limitless toleration. This gray area of where perilous words and ideas reside is ultimately what we call “politics,” and there is simply no escaping that the contestation of politics is and will forever be a part of every collegium, including universities and the larger nations in which they exist. Here again, Stanley Fish is on point: “The good news is that precisely because speech is never ‘free’ in the two senses required — free of consequences and free from state pressure — speech always matters, it is always doing work. … Because everything we say impinges on the world in ways indistinguishable from the effects of physical action, we must take responsibility for our verbal performances — all of them — and not assume they are being taken care of by a clause in the Constitution. Of course, with responsibility comes risks, but they have always been our risks, and no doctrine of free speech has ever insulated us from them.”
I conclude then by suggesting that there is no such thing as “academic freedom” in the way that it is usually meant — “academic freedom” in its pure form is a myth. We are currently living through a period in which the underlying assumptions that have governed liberal institutions are undergoing profound reevaluation, which inevitably involves and implicates politics — narrowly in the academic sense, and more broadly, as a matter of national debate. But, while this contestation today is quite visible, it is never inescapable, and the appeal to pure “academic freedom” is always an effort to smuggle in one’s own commitments behind a veil of neutrality.
Today, it is the leaders and faculty of progressive liberal institutions that are (once again) invoking “academic freedom” as a shield against a now-aggressive government seeking to reorder their internal culture in accordance with a substantive set of commitments. We should recognize that what an institution like Harvard is defending is a particular kind of collegium — one that offered little academic freedom within its walls in recent years — and that the invocation of “academic freedom” on all sides is an increasingly flimsy shroud that masks substantive, and substantively different, worldviews.
In the service of truth, we should be frank about the nature of the vision of our collegium, our society and the political order that we are actually seeking to defend, challenge, advance — and, yes, in some cases, to defeat. The truest form of freedom would begin with a frank acknowledgement of the exclusions that define the domain in which freedom is lived, focusing on the substance and limits of what our community deems acceptable, rather than retreating behind a veil of false neutrality. That examination is never without its potential perils and costs, but as the old saying goes, “freedom is never free.”
Patrick J. Deneen is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame.
This story appears in the September 2025 issue of DeseretMagazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.