What is going on here is, in my reading, this:
Levy claims: academic freedom is not a species of “free speech”. Rather, it is a distinctive corporate-and-individual norm composed of:
the**antiorthodoxyprinciple (that research and teaching may follow argument and evidence to any conclusion).associational self-governance(only the community of competent scholars, not trustees, donors, or legislators, may judge the quality of scholarship).
It is a hybrid inheritance of the corporate self-governance of medieval universities fused with the disciplinary, research-driven mission of the originally Humboldtian/German) university. Its fundamental freedom-of-association core is that the scholarly community and only the scholarly community has proper jurisdiction to define its own standards of inquiry. Academic freedom is thus a special kind of freedom of association, now under unprecedented assault.
It is not free speech: Lying is protected speech, but grounds for dismissal from the university. Religious indoctrination in some particular orthodoxy is protected speech, but is barred from the classroom. Thus both left and right critiques of “campus climate” fundamentally misunderstand academic freedom.
But, of course, Jacob says much, much more:
ABSTRACT: *Academic freedom is an unusual and complex set of norms and practices. It arises out of the combination of the corporate self-governance of medieval universities and the spirit of disciplinary scientific inquiry in modern research universities. It combines a principle of antiorthodoxy as to conclusions with the robust associational self-governance of scholarly communities whose members evaluate one another as participants in that shared enterprise. *
*It has never been easily or wholly embraced by wider societies; today it is under wholesale attack. *
This article combines conceptual, normative, and historical analyses of academic freedom as a general norm with attention to conflicts over it in the mid-to-late 2010s and early 2020s. Some genuinely hard cases and questions tested the meaning of academic freedom and university values well before the current crisis.
INTRODUCTION:
Searching for conceptual clarity about academic freedom in the current moment might be letting the owl of Minerva take flight at quarter past twilight. In the United States in particular, where the concept was most fully debated and fleshed out in the twentieth century, the higher education sector’s independence lies in tatters. A rapid decline since 2022 has arguably turned into a collapse in 2025. Universities can no longer credibly guarantee protection for research or teaching against political interference that leads to the wholesale suppression of fields of inquiry or politically unpopular conclusions. State-level regulation of research and teaching by legislation and by political appointment of leadership has been accelerating for years. Now at the federal level, research grant funding has been overtly politicized, with expert peer review panels dissolved and funding decisions subordinated to administration priorities. The Trump administration has moreover singled out one university after another by name, using both financial and nonfinancial (e.g., international student visas) tools to try to coerce compliance with partisan priorities about race, gender, student discipline, and the autonomy of entire fields of study.
Of course, normative arguments are not restricted to the United States, and ideas about the meaning of values should outlast moments when the values are violated. Moreover, the immediate crises—in state politics, in universities’ responses to the Israel-Gaza conflict, and in the Trump administration’s all-out attacks—have not arisen in a vacuum. Contestation both within universities and outside them about the meaning and value of academic freedom has been underway for many years, and an uncertainty about that meaning and value has arguably contributed to a lack of confidence in meeting the moment. Even in the United States, and even in the mid-2020s, understanding the debates surveyed here may help us see the crisis and its stakes more clearly.
Universities and their leaders have not always done themselves proud in articulating the values that were under attack. The scholarly literature on academic freedom has sometimes been thin, but the contestation over campus life of the last decade has spurred renewed attention and thought. Surprisingly little of this work has been done in political science, including political theory. Academic freedom raises important, distinctive questions about freedoms that are partly individual and partly institutional. It involves a system of norms and protections that in many respects resembles the constitutional rights of the liberal democratic state but has a different genealogy, a different institutional home, and different underlying values. Normative political theory on its own terms ought to be a central intellectual space for debates about the meaning and limits of academic freedom, since its comparative advantage lies in part in the analysis of normative ideas, including rights claims.
Political science adds further reasons of its own for attention to academic freedom. Universities as institutions are major actors in the public debates of constitutional democracies, and the illiberal movements and governments that have led democratic backsliding around the world have consistently targeted universities’ institutional and pedagogical autonomy (Ginsburg 2022). The best-known instance is perhaps Viktor Orbán’s successful campaign to push Central European University out of Hungary altogether, using a combination of suspicion about its international and cosmopolitan connections and a specific attack on its freedom to teach gender studies (Enyidi 2018,Pirro & Stanley 2022).
But the most dramatic and farthest-reaching instance was probably in Turkey beginning in 2016. During the purge and authoritarian consolidation that followed a failed coup, the Erdogan regime closed 15 universities altogether, dismissed thousands of academics ˘ from their positions, and criminally prosecuted hundreds (Abbas & Zalta 2022, Alemdaroglu ˘ 2022). In India, the Modi government has long been deeply concerned with forcing fields of study, including literature, anthropology, and history, into conformity with Hindu nationalist orthodoxies (Bhatty & Sundar 2020, Ganguly 2019). In recent years, it has been increasingly open about taking action directly against political dissident academics, including political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who was forced to resign first as Vice Chancellor of the private Ashoka University and later from his faculty position (Altbach & Mathews 2025).
Comparative scholars of autocracy and democracy have begun working to incorporate academic freedom measures into their field’s indices (Spannagel & Kinzelbach 2023). The variable and sometimes peculiar governance structures of public universities, including in the United States, likewise seem to call for analysis by political scientists. The attempt to hybridize the institution of an autonomous, corporately self-governing university with financial oversight and public accountability enforced by trustees who are appointed by partisan elected officials has sometimes been successful.
Today the best that one could say in the United States is that this hybridization is under strain. Under the contemporary condition of polarization and distrust of expertise, trustees are more and more often partisan agents of their political principals and less and less often buffers between the institution and the state.
During the initial years of the renaissance of normative political theory and philosophy, those subfields paid no sustained attention to universities themselves, beyond the question of affirmative action in admission for members of underrepresented and traditionally disadvantaged minorities (Cohen 1977, Walzer 1983). The traditional canon of political theory hardly does better, aside from Weber [2004 (1917)] and one essay by Kant [1991 (1798)] that is highly idiosyncratic, even by his standards. To some extent, this is consistent with a traditional neglect of intermediate institutions in both political theory (Levy 2015) and political science, only partly mitigated by the turn in the last generation to the study of membership organizations in civil society (Berman 1997, Putnam 2000).
Perhaps the two most prominent political science voices on academic freedom today both hold primary appointments outside the discipline of political science: Keith Whittington in law and Sigal Ben-Porath in education. One might also add Christopher Eisgruber in university administration. Recent collections of essays on the topic include primarily philosophers and law professors (Bilgrami & Cole 2015, Downs & Surprenant 2018, Lackey 2018, Mégret & Ramanujam 2024; these collections include about half a dozen political scientists, including me, out of almost 80 total contributors).
This article is thus as much an attempt to import questions into political theory and political science as it is a review of work done in those fields. Academic freedom as a normative idea and the increasingly polarized contestation around universities ought to be problems for political theorists and scientists to study.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND CORE IDEAS…. Neither research nor teaching is thus a free-for-all. The model of building knowledge according to scientific and disciplinary modes of inquiry requires evaluation. The evaluation is not, however, about the orthodoxy of the conclusions, but rather the soundness of the inquiry. And for this evaluation, only the community of other scholars is competent. Trustees, donors, and legislators have no place.
The antiorthodoxy principle demands the associational self-governance of competent scholars. They are the ones who can judge the quality of the scholarship, which is the legitimate ground of evaluation. The statement of principles does relatively little to interpret how they should be applied to cases and a great deal to insist on who has jurisdiction to apply them. This makes academic freedom both a corporate right, building on the medieval institutional inheritance, and an individual one. But the individual right is something like the right only to be judged by the university as a scholar according to the scientific and disciplinary norms suitable to the particular kind of scholarship. Those norms are in a real sense fundamental, and so the associational self-governance right to define them seems like the primary site of academic freedom.
For this reason, I have argued (Levy 2015, 2024a) in favor of an understanding of academic freedom as a special kind of freedom of association. (See Singer 2026 for a partly contrary view.) And, although the AAUP does not identify self-governance as one of the three central elements of what academic freedom means, its substantive argument depends on self-governance at every turn.
Academic freedom is thus something like freedom of religion. That freedom is both individual and associational: Both the individual believer and the corporate church have a right to be free from state interference, and the individual freedom in part is the freedom to join a church whose already-existing doctrine one believes in.
But the analogy runs out.
An individual congregant does not have a right of freedom of religion against the church when the church declares them a heretic or an apostate. The individual scholar does have academic freedom against the university or disciplinary department, namely a right not to be judged on inappropriate grounds. Neither external orthodoxy, as in adherence to political or religious dogma, nor internal orthodoxy, as in adherence to old views within the discipline, may be expected.
All that may be demanded, and what must be demanded, is adherence to the relevant norms of scholarly inquiry.
As Nelson (2010, p. 7) puts it, although “academic freedom cannot simply be construed as an individual right, it is fundamentally exercised by individuals within professional and institutional traditions.” This complicated set of rights and responsibilities is therefore much less similar to freedom of speech than it sometimes seems….
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THE CLIMATE FOR SPEECH AND DEBATE: I have already emphasized that academic freedom is not a free speech principle. Nor is it a general principle of debate, which is not typically the way in which scholars test each other’s ideas. Capacious freedom of extramural speech among students, along with a succession of visiting speakers and intellectual events, might make a university an unusually rich environment for exposure to a wide range of views (cf.Eisgruber 2025), but that is not central to the research or teaching mission.
And yet intellectual conformism, political orthodoxy, and the effective silencing of some scholarly voices pose genuine problems for the spirit of inquiry that academic freedom should protect and promote.
Moreover, universities advertise themselves as educating future citizens of a liberal democracy, not only future scholars. So questions that are formally unrelated or tangential to academic freedom, questions about the political-intellectual climate on campus, arise over and over again.
Even before the current wave of official crackdowns on universities in the United States began around 2022 (and thus also before the current Israel-Gaza conflict broke out), the status quo with respect to speech and academic freedom on campus had come under sustained critique from both the right and the left. In a sense, both critiques were about inclusiveness and whether the austere principles of academic freedom could suffice to create an inclusive campus climate for exchange, although they differed on the relevant sense of inclusiveness.
From the left… four overlapping… complaints… touch… on questions of academic freedom…. First and earliest, the standard model of disciplinary-departmental self-governance and self-perpetuation made it difficult or impossible for neglected perspectives and topics to make entry into either research or teaching. Status quo bias and institutional conservatism aggravated the sheer slow pace of new faculty hiring, such that long-standing exclusions of the study of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, as well as of specific topics inflected by those exclusions such as Black history, would continue indefinitely. Advocates found widespread success in circumventing traditional departments and creating new programs in (for example) Black studies or women’s studies (Rojas 2010).
Second, the content of courses, both in assigned reading and in the instructor’s speech from the podium, might involve anything from the silencing and invisibility of minority perspectives of various kinds to casual stereotyping to outright racism or misogyny. This raised questions about the limits of freedom of instruction. Much of this debate was ultimately lumped together in disputes about the specific remedy of so-called trigger warnings that treated the possible appearance of offensive material as a source of possible psychological trauma to students, although there are ways to think about whether a space is inclusive other than trauma.
Third, the extramural speech of (especially) faculty members came under scrutiny for possible racism, sexism, or other kinds of exclusionary content. Such speech, it was sometimes suggested, might make it impossible for students to trust their fairness in the classroom. That particular nexus did not, however, always seem necessary to generate calls for control or discipline.
Finally, the presence of invited speakers on campus who were judged already guilty of such offensive speech, or who were considered likely to engage in it while on campus, was said to create a hostile, unwelcoming environment for those stigmati…
