Further contributing to the universities’ woes are serious concerns about academic freedom. Some 80 percent of college students reportedly self-censor in their interactions with peers and professors (Carrasco 2021). Those findings align with my own experience. I regularly queried my students on the first day of each semester as to whether they felt any pressure to answer in-class discussion or examination questions to appease the political or social leanings of their professors. On average, 85 percent answered this question in the affirmative. There is a certain irony in the fact that academic freedom is under attack by the very professors who claim their First Amendment right to freedom of speech is being violated.

It is common practice for universities to ban certain speakers from campus because they are deemed too controversial and may incite violence. Those concerns may be well-intentioned, but there is a significant risk that they will morph into something more sinister: thinly veiled attempts to control students’ thinking and squash unfettered debate.

Principles

The principle of academic freedom is the time-honored idea that both professors and students should be free to engage in research, critical intellectual discourse, and passionate, reasoned debate on virtually any relevant topic or question without fear of retribution or prejudice. The university is supposed to serve as the intellectual arena that promotes a rigorous, objective, and unabashed contest of ideas. There are essentially two types of professors: those who educate to develop thought leaders and those who indoctrinate to create uncritical followers. The former understand that learning is a process of creative destruction in which new ideas constantly challenge and displace old ones. In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson underscored this idea in an oration entitled “The American Scholar” before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College:

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

The educational mission is not to produce intellectual clones of professors, but to embolden students with the courage to think rigorously, critically, and objectively in challenging prevailing orthodoxy. John Maynard Keynes described this exercise as “a struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression.”

Elusive Boundaries

Professors sometimes make divisive statements and universities have struggled with how to deal with the fallout. In a story that attracted national attention, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax was relieved of teaching a first-year required course, docked half her annual salary, and stripped of her endowed chair because she purportedly made derogatory statements about the ability of black students. In an October 2017 podcast hosted by Brown University economist Glenn Loury, she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half.”

The issue is not whether these statements are protected by the First Amendment; they are. But Penn is not a government institution; it is a private entity that, within certain parameters, sets its own employment policies. Among those policies is granting broad academic freedom to faculty. However, those policies also obligate faculty to respect students’ academic freedom. Thus, the issue is whether Wax’s statements undermine Penn’s educational mission by rendering it virtually impossible for black students to engage in critical discourse in her classroom and still believe they will be objectively evaluated solely on the merits of their performance—that is, whether their academic freedom is violated. If it is, then Wax has eclipsed the bounds of academic freedom, and her employment can be jeopardized.

In another high-profile example, Larry Summers was dismissed as Harvard’s president after remarks he made at an academic conference were construed to suggest that women have a lower mathematical aptitude than men. (What he actually said was that men are overrepresented in both tails of the distribution of mathematical aptitude, and this could be a reason why men outnumber women in elite engineering and science faculty positions.) The response from the academic community was swift and virulent. Summers’ remarks may have been phrased insensitively, but they were not purposely malicious. He was specifically asked to address why academia has met with limited success in awarding tenure to women faculty in engineering and the physical sciences despite efforts to balance gender representation.

There is presently a lack of strong empirical support (which is not to say there is no support whatsoever) for Summers’s hypothesis and, in particular, whether any such differences that may exist are biological or environmental in nature (Vos et al. 2023). Nonetheless, the conjecture itself is not beyond the pale. Educational psychologists have found that males and females do not necessarily learn in the same way, and this has prompted experimentation with gender-specific schools and classrooms. It is therefore not inconceivable that the relative strengths of men and women may vary across academic disciplines.

All this begs the question whether Summers was removed as Harvard’s president because his conjecture did not have strong empirical support or because it was reflexively deemed heretical. Disavowing the possibility that differences exist because such an idea may “offend” is contrary to the academy’s purpose, which is to actively engage with difficult (and sometimes uncomfortable) questions. The university should be a sacred place where no question, regardless of its potential to offend, should be considered off limits.

Assuming there are no differences when differences exist can result in an inefficient allocation of society’s resources. Universities would naturally default to implementing a uniform percentage of female faculty across academic departments when efficiency may call for a non-uniform percentage. This is the economic principle of comparative advantage at work. This is not to suggest that static efficiency should be dispositive, as the weight assigned to role models that foster greater interest in the sciences among women should enter the calculus as well.

A related “free speech” controversy came to the fore in the aftermath of political activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination. A Fort Hays State (Kansas) psychology professor, Nuchelle Chance, was suspended after she wrote on Facebook that “White American men are the most dangerous animals on the planet.” A University of South Dakota art professor, Phillip Michael Hook, was threatened with termination when he supposedly referred to Kirk as a “hate-spreading Nazi.” In a temporary ruling, the judge in the Hook case found that the professor “is entitled to First Amendment protection” and that the school failed to produce “any evidence of disruption” in response to his social media post.

In yet another case, this one indicative of a growing problem with antisemitism on college campuses, a University of Kentucky law professor, Ramsi Woodcock, claimed his First Amendment rights were violated when he was removed from the classroom after publicly calling for military action to terminate Israel’s existence. The university counters that it has an obligation under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to provide for the safety and well-being of its students and staff.

Universities have not established a litmus test for determining when a professor’s exercise of free speech violates the principle of academic freedom, nor is such a test likely forthcoming anytime soon. Nonetheless, it is useful to outline what the broad contours of such a test might look like. The test may commence by inquiring whether there is a high likelihood that the professor’s public statements, inclusive of social media posts, place members of the university community at risk or discourage critical discourse and the free exchange of ideas in the classroom in a manner that validates concerns about bias, prejudice, or lack of objectivity in the evaluation of student performance. An affirmative answer to either condition is presumptively disqualifying.

The courts have long struggled to strike the proper balance between protecting free speech and regulating content deemed harmful or inappropriate. In Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), a landmark case on obscenity, Justice Potter Stewart famously conceded that while he may not be able to define obscenity “I know it when I see it.” Similar challenges present themselves in the context of constitutionally protected speech and speech that is deemed antithetical to the principle of academic freedom.

Conclusion

The critical issue for debate is not whether professors are entitled to freedom of speech, but whether the unconstrained exercise of that right risks trampling on the academic freedom of their students. A professor who embraces the principle of academic freedom and is fully committed to the educational mission writ large should be willing to self-impose certain limits on his free speech. Admittedly, this is a slippery slope, and society will ultimately have to decide on which side it would prefer to err.

Readings:

• Carrasco, Maria, 2021, “Survey: Most Students Self-Censor on Campus and Online,” Inside Higher Ed, September 22.
• Kelchen, Robert, Dubravka Ritter, and Douglas Webber, 2024, “Predicting College Closures and Financial Distress,” Working Paper WP 24–20, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, December.
• Shaw, Catherine, Dan Brennan, Ria Bharadwaj, et al., 2025, “Driving Toward a Degree 2025: Delivering Value and Ensuring Viability,” Tyton Partners, August 13.
• Vos, Helene, Mila Marinova, Sara C. De Léon, et al., 2023, “Gender Differences in Young Adults’ Mathematical Performance: Examining the Contribution of Working Memory, Math Anxiety and Gender-Related Stereotypes,” Learning and Individual Differences 102: 102255.