“Don’t tread on our academic freedom!” shouts Harvard while suing Trump to prove the point. “Frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn,” replies Trump, while slashing ever more federal dollars to force reform. Should conservatives wholeheartedly side with Trump? Or is it possible, on grounds of academic freedom, to summon up some sympathy for the academy’s resistance to the president? Is academic freedom a fundamental liberty to which conservatives owe deference and respect? Or, after decades of futile conservative pleas for reform at America’s colleges and universities, is it finally time to play hardball — to use federal money as leverage, even on curriculum and hiring?
Here at National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr., the answer might seem obvious. Buckley established himself as a national figure with his 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, the subtitle of which was, “The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom.’” Buckley took academic freedom to be a kind of hoax designed to justify and distract from what was in fact a secular leftist intellectual monopoly at Yale. Buckley’s proposed remedy may not have been a cut-off of federal funding (relatively slight at the time). It was, however, a roughly analogous leveraging of alumni financial support to mandate the teaching of Christianity and American liberty as approved perspectives at Yale.
Case closed? Not quite.
Although it is largely forgotten, Buckley’s stance was sharply at odds with that of another founder of the modern American conservative movement (and a founding columnist at National Review), Russell Kirk. In 1955, Kirk published Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition, in part as an answer to Buckley. Kirk, a scholar himself, saw academic freedom as “one of the few last and precious survivals of genuine European culture” and a bulwark of the quest for Truth. (Kirk capitalized “Truth” in the original.)
Although Kirk rested his defense of academic freedom on grounds quite different from that of libertarians and liberals, like them, he largely wanted government’s hands off of universities — even where Communists were found on the faculty. In practice, despite his hostility to John Stuart Mill’s anti-traditionalist streak, Kirk sounded rather Millian on the matter of academic freedom. In the end, in fact, Kirk’s position on academic freedom was far closer to that of the American Association of University Professors than to Buckley’s.
Conservatives, in other words, have long been divided on the matter of academic freedom — and the differences persist to this day. Can we, then, build a conservative case against leveraging government grants to reform university hiring and curricula? The answer isn’t obvious. In fact, a closer look at both Buckley and Kirk suggests that neither of them would be defending the Academy at this juncture. And notwithstanding his in-depth defense of academic freedom, Kirk may provide an even stronger case than Buckley for bringing down the federal hammer just now.
Before exploring Kirk’s largely forgotten case for academic freedom, let us quickly remind ourselves of Buckley’s case against.
How was it, wondered Buckley, that Yale, a university that drew its moral and financial sustenance from “Christian individualists,” could set about persuading the sons of its alumni to become atheistic socialists instead? The key to this subterfuge, said Buckley, was “academic freedom.” Supposedly, academic freedom operates within an atmosphere of “detached impartiality,” where students are presented with “the great value-alternatives of the day,” so as to make their choice between them. In reality, Buckley showed, no such neutrality prevailed at Yale, where Christianity and free-market economics were actively discouraged, while agnostic or atheistic collectivism was promoted instead.
What’s more, said Buckley, academic freedom’s advocates “do not practice, cannot practice, and cannot even believe what they say about education and academic freedom.” Education demands value judgments, observed Buckley. Yale would never tenure a literature professor who taught Joyce Kilmer as a great poet, for example. Buckley simply wanted Yale to narrow the sphere of admired authors to those who approved of Christianity and capitalism.
In Buckley’s scheme, this would still leave considerable scope for argument within those broad parameters — the same sort of internal debate encouraged by Buckley at National Review. Nor would Buckley’s prescription for Yale prevent other private universities from embracing alternative missions, be they socially liberal, secular, or anti-capitalist. Buckley simply argued that Yale could not, and should not, remain neutral on either the choice between Christianity and unbelief or that between free markets and collectivism. These two choices, for Buckley, were the leading challenges of his era, equally unavoidable, and, ultimately, two faces of the same struggle.
Kirk was not of this view. Far from its being a hoax, Kirk understood academic freedom to rest on the strongest imaginable ground. He saw academic freedom as a natural right, “long established by custom and prescription, and found by the test of time to accord with human nature and civil social nature.” Therefore, academic freedom was a right “superior to particular governments and particular states.” Although it had no basis or sanction beyond moral belief and custom, to Kirk, academic freedom was all the more real for that.
When Kirk called academic freedom “an inheritance from the wisdom and the courage of our ancestors,” he was thinking of Plato’s Academy and the medieval Schoolmen as sources and testing grounds of the right.
The allegiance of Plato’s Academy, and of Plato’s master, Socrates, was to Truth, ultimately in defiance of the people and the state of Athens. Plato’s Academy was founded, Kirk emphasized, not for public service but “for the sake of private wisdom and private needs.” The Academy existed for its own sake, although it’s true that over time its cultivation of wisdom had benefited the broader community as well.
While the medieval university conducted its inquiries within the bounds of core Christian assumptions, a considerable degree of intellectual latitude was allowed — far more freedom than was typical in other social orders of the time, noted Kirk. It is precisely because Truth was at stake that free inquiry was permitted and encouraged in the Schools. The Scholastics understood themselves to be, in Kirk’s phrase, “Guardians of the Word.” Their charge was to pursue the Truth, a goal beside which the attainment of worldly power and possession paled. Like the denizens of Plato’s Academy, the Scholastics held no property. If secular or religious authorities sought to control them, they would simply move away. Given the Scholastics’ eschewal of worldly power and possession for the sake of Truth, the broader community “simply recognized the justice of the Academy’s claim to privilege.” We might call the scholars’ right “self-evident.”
This, for Kirk, was, and remains, the basis of academic freedom. Although contemporary professors may enjoy only an attenuated faith, they remain, according to Kirk, a “clerisy,” if not a clergy. So long as scholars conceive of themselves as “Guardians of the Word,” jealously defending Truth as it is given to them to see — and willing to stand against political pressure and popular opinion on that account — their freedom, says Kirk, must be respected.
While Kirk did not demand poverty of modern academics, he did urge universities to refuse the largesse of government and private foundations alike. “It is well to look a gift horse in the mouth,” he said. In a prescient 1963 piece, “Massive Subsidies and Academic Freedom,” Kirk sketched out early instances in which federal and private foundation grants alike had determined the intellectual direction of academic programs, virtually extinguished disfavored sub-disciplines or schools of thought, and even suppressed the publication of articles. While the influence of large foundations in Kirk’s day was monolithically liberal, he sounded a warning: “Latter-day liberals, who at the moment embrace the cause of governmental grants on a grand scale, soon may find themselves the unhappy outsiders.” Not “soon.” Although it took six decades, Kirk’s warning has at last been vindicated.
In general, Kirk’s preference was for the private, liberal-arts-focused institution subsisting on its own endowment and maintaining high standards, as opposed to a heavily subsidized public university catering to a mass clientele. It’s a preference Kirk shared with Buckley. Whereas for Buckley private institutions subsisting on their own resources could devote themselves to a distinctive mission, however, Kirk valued such well-positioned schools as ideal citadels of academic freedom.
To Buckley’s desire to officially sanction Christianity, Kirk replied that, “faith, like love, cannot be forced.” A college-wide orthodoxy would merely spark a backlash, Kirk believed, thereby doing an “incalculable disservice” to the cause of religion. Sounding Millian despite himself, Kirk added, “really, the only way to counter the teaching of fallacies is to do a better job of teaching truths.” “What the cause of religious knowledge chiefly needs,” Kirk concluded, “is a fair hearing” — the hearing that Buckley showed had been denied to faith at Yale.
Buckley offered a sharp retort to all this in his review of Kirk’s book. Capitalized “Truth” notwithstanding, said Buckley, granting privileges and immunities to defenders of the Word cannot proceed without first identifying Truth itself and accepting “the social discrimination that would follow against those who believe in error.” Kirk must then be defending merely the search for Truth, said Buckley, which throws us back into the relativist soup. It also mistakenly assumes that most teachers are true scholars. In short, Buckley maintained, Kirk’s position was both incoherent and at odds with the realities of the academy.
Kirk, for his part, was perfectly willing to concede the existence of a great many sophists within the walls of the academy — doctrinaires who speak of academic freedom when their intellectual monopoly is threatened yet accord little such freedom to either students or colleagues with whom they disagree. To Buckley, this was the academy’s dominant faction. Kirk, in contrast, believed that true scholars — men of conviction, who were broadly tolerant of error precisely because they were secure in their convictions — still constituted the majority of the academy. “I would spare any number of academic Sodoms out of reverence for such men,” said Kirk.
Kirk may appear to be defending the autonomy of professors at all costs. Yet he was not. Kirk stressed professors’ duties along with their liberties, and this is where his relevance to our current situation impresses. As Kirk put it, “academic freedom consists of something more than merely an absence of restraints placed upon the teacher by the institution that employs him. It demands as well an absence of restraints placed upon the teacher by his political affiliations.” Without such distancing from politics, Kirk maintained, academic liberty declines into license. At that point, “the persons who pay a professor would be derelict in their duty if they did not endeavor to restrain the man who violates his own privileges.” Kirk’s position, in short, was that “the teacher and scholar ought to be free to speculate about politics and to make his speculations known, so long as he does not abuse his opportunities by indoctrinating his students.”
Kirk described what we might call an implicit bargain between the state and the academy. In ordinary circumstances, the state “should abstain on principle from taking any direct part in the guidance or governance of our institutions of learning; and the Academy, taken as a body, should abstain on principle from a preoccupation with politics.” If, however, the academy makes a practice of either “inculcating liberal social views” or “preserving individualism” (in Buckley’s sense), then it:
must expect the State to interfere with its affairs, for it will have presumed to direct the State. Once the Academy undertakes indoctrination in an ideology, the State must and will regulate that indoctrination. Politics ought to be freely discussed within the Academy; yet the Academy ought not to try to exert direct influence in favor of some particular scheme of politics.
Does anyone believe that today’s academy is characterized by political abstention?
Kirk repeatedly cites “indoctrination” as the most consequential violation of the duties imposed on scholars by academic freedom. Although he never defines the term, its meaning is implicit in his account. For Kirk, the best “guarantee of responsible performance of duties within the Academy” is “free discussion of the great problems in education — not merely political questions but all the principal topics upon which men’s opinions differ.” Although Kirk thought the “marketplace of ideas” was a low way of describing “the high dignity of independent thought,” he was not far from Mill and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on the point. Regardless of his views on politics, or any other weighty question, the true scholar lays before his students the best arguments on competing sides of contested questions. To do otherwise is to indoctrinate.
When it comes to programs such as women’s studies, African-American studies, Latino (or Latinx) studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, environmental studies, and more, indoctrination in this sense is built into the very structure of today’s academy. Perhaps even more widespread at today’s university is what Kirk described as “the half-unconscious type of indoctrination which is conducted by professors who, secure in a dim liberal orthodoxy, speak with contempt of other points of view.”
In addressing the controversy over allowing Communist Party members on the faculty, Kirk generally came down on the side of liberty. Kirk considered the judicial rejection of the University of California’s loyalty oath “a victory for true academic freedom.” And he opposed dismissing professors solely on grounds of their being Communists. Instead, Kirk embraced the position of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP — one of the groups suing Trump today). In their view, party member or not, a professor ought only to be dismissed on grounds of unprofessional conduct that would apply to anyone else. Practicing indoctrination of the sort cited by the AAUP in its various statements on academic freedom would be legitimate grounds for dismissal — of Communists or anyone else.
It is telling, then, that in the mid-2000s the AAUP advised universities to revise language in their academic freedom policies that had been borrowed from the AAUP’s famous 1915 “Declaration of Principles On Academic Freedom And Academic Tenure.” That statement’s strictures against indoctrination were cited and embraced by Kirk. Yet by 2006, the AAUP called its own ban on indoctrination “outdated.” In 2010, for example, Penn State’s faculty senate rewrote its policy on academic freedom, striking, among other passages, the following language: “It is not the function of a faculty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects.” A few years earlier, occasioned by a national dustup over a course on “Palestinian resistance” whose teacher had warned conservatives not to sign up, the University of California academic senate struck similar language from its regulations.
Rather than being causative, these belated language changes were symptomatic of a shift that had occurred years before. It was a shift that Kirk anticipated, to a degree. Kirk knew he was writing in an era of relative comfort for conservatives. Incredibly, he saw the professoriate of his day as “one of the few relatively conservative sectors of modern society.” Yet he well remembered the progressive dominance of earlier decades and knew that it lingered at many schools. Kirk referenced a professor who’d said in 1950 that “a purge of conservatives and moderates is easy to imagine on some campuses.” Less easy to imagine in 1955, Kirk remarked, but by no means impossible.
And that purge of conservatives came to pass not merely on a few campuses but throughout the academy. With that purge, the strictures against indoctrination fell, and American higher education turned political. During those decades, the federal role in education also grew to a degree that may have stunned even Kirk.
Although none of this would have been to his liking, it is clear that Kirk would have been entirely unsurprised at attempts by the federal government to rein in an openly indoctrinating academy. Indeed, Kirk would have viewed such government intervention as necessary and inevitable. Surely, even seeing the future, Kirk would not have abandoned his ideal of academic freedom. Yet just as surely, he would have deemed our status quo unacceptable and in need of the sternest corrective measures from the universities’ paymasters.
Throughout Academic Freedom, Kirk holds out the prospect of a systemic emergency requiring concerted remedial action by the state. He did not believe we were in that emergency during the 1950s. Yet given what has followed, I think he’d concede the emergency today.
Must we choose between Buckley and Kirk? Not entirely, since it’s easy enough to imagine multiple private institutions following the path of one or the other. Yet these two conservative founders are clearly at odds.
Kirk, I think, is right to cite academic freedom as an enabling condition of the quest for Truth. He pushes too hard, however, when he rejects even Jefferson’s education for citizenship as an improper intrusion by the state. Some sort of balancing of heritage education and determined questioning will have to be struck at either a Buckleyite or a Kirkian institution. In general, I find Kirk’s perspective congenial. Yet the on-the-ground reality of the academy keeps vindicating Buckley’s wary pessimism.
We don’t know how the president’s battle against Harvard will shake out. Trump’s procedural shortcuts may hand Harvard a temporary victory in court. Yet even if one wants somehow to return to Kirk’s enticing vision of academic freedom, the federal hammer will first have to come down, and come down hard — although of course with sound procedure and well targeted. Kirk’s world is gone, and even if we want to bring it back, we’ll have to clear the ground first.