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Academic freedom is under assault in the U.S. This attack has included state censorship of educational materials and classroom discussions; bans on initiatives to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; and proposals to end tenure and faculty governance.
Many right-wing officials even embrace the notion that conservatives should capture and reshape higher education to serve hyper-partisan interests, led by appointees who come from outside of academia and are instead loyal to state power holders. In 2023, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin directed all of his appointees to university boards to consider themselves an “extension of the executive branch.”
During recent oral arguments in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, a lawyer representing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration took this position to its logical extreme: “In the classroom, the professor’s speech is the government’s speech, and the government can restrict professors on a content-wide basis and restrict them from offering viewpoints that are contrary.”
Organizations like the conservative Heritage Foundation justify these partisan takeovers as necessary to restore “classical education” in universities. Yet such claims misunderstand classical education. In fact, the idea that teachers ought to be free to teach their specialties unobstructed and that students should be free to learn what they want is integral to ideals of classical education dating back centuries.
Protections for academic freedom in medieval times helped pave the way for a flourishing of individual liberties in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The idea of academic freedom is older than the Magna Carta, classical liberalism, and modern declarations of rights. In a very real way, like those seminal ideas and documents, academic freedom is directly related to traditions of self-governance and individual liberty.
Read More: Academic Freedom Is More Important Now Than Ever
The first…
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