Time for the Left To Reclaim Academic Freedom

In recent years, “academic freedom” has become a loaded term.

For many at Harvard and beyond, it evokes the rhetoric and ambitions of a conservative project to regain footing in an increasingly progressive academy.

That connotation is reductive and regrettable, as the politicization of formally unpolitical terminology often is. But the association of “academic freedom” with cultural conservatism is surely founded in reality.

Over the last thirty years, the academy has left behind certain schools of thought as outmoded and unworthy. We rightly no longer consider the existence of trans identity, for example, an acceptable subject for debate in college classrooms and auditoriums. Likewise, the drift away from critical engagement with such topics as racial science, gay marriage, or the place of women in the workplace is well-merited.

A general reduction of right-wing views in intellectual spaces could have passed without resistance. But the likes of Heather Mac Donald, Jordan Peterson, and Charles A. Murray ’65 have mounted a concerted campaign to subvert that trend. Thought leaders of this variety have, with all their might, sought to reassert largely discredited worldviews in academic spaces they perceive as hollowed out by “cancel culture,” DEI, and progressive hegemony.

Conservative “scholars” like Murray regularly tour college campuses advocating concepts as objectionable as race science and genetic determinism. Under the auspices of free speech advocacy, conservative personalities and organizations like Young America’s Foundation have defended the most fringe positions of the far right and branded higher education as a misguided progressive project that has outlived its usefulness.

Let me be clear: I fully support viewpoint diversity as a mission to widen the breadth of discussion, and I know that entails more conservative positions with which I disagree. My concern, however abstract, is that leaving academic freedom to be articulated by the right alone will render it more a shield for very particular, fringe bands of thought than the general good I know it can be.

When it comes to academic freedom, it is true that Harvard has been falling short. It is less an open marketplace than a restricted trading floor replete with unspoken policies, expectations, and penalties. Though the severity of self-censorship and constraint on campus remains a matter of dispute, it is undeniable that large swathes of our community feel disillusioned by the state of dialogue at Harvard.

In a recent message, interim University President Alan M. Garber ’76 announced two new initiatives: one on “institutional voice,” the other on “open inquiry.” Paired with the appointment of John F. Manning ’82 to the interim provost position, it appears Garber’s Harvard is primed to engage head-on with academic freedom and related problems at the University.

This is a moment of opportunity for everyone — if we are careful. For the laudable ideals of academic freedom to succeed, they demand a prudent, selfless, and balanced vision for the coexistence and exchange of competing opinions. More specifically, I worry that if those on the left are unwilling to come to the table with our ideological counterparts, the cause of academic freedom and viewpoint diversity will fail, and it will fail in favor of the right.

The enthusiastic and charitable participation of liberal academics, students, and administrators would ensure that the expansion of academic freedom does not sacrifice the need for respect for both the dignity of members of our community and the standards of serious inquiry.

It goes without saying that, in an academy dominated by progressives, a commitment to academic freedom will generate the most visible gains for the conservative minority on college campuses. But we need liberals at the table to articulate specific qualifications, exceptions, and nuances such that an expansion of debate produces a healthy rebalancing of perspectives — not a harsh counterswing.

Of those on the left suspect of the movement for academic freedom, this moment also asks a deeper question: Why should a progressive academy not want to be challenged? Challenge on equal terms and within reasonable bounds enables schools of thought to demonstrate the superiority of their solutions.

Indeed, I believe the left can and should be the standard bearer of academic freedom and viewpoint diversity. The legacy of dissent in academic spaces is a legacy of progressivism and liberalism. For decades, it was the cultural and intellectual left who bucked convention and expanded the boundaries of debate.

It was the left — articulating their then-marginal worldview in classrooms, in protest, in arts and literature — who made the university a laboratory of ideas in the 20th century. It was the left who clashed with administrators and police on civil rights and women’s rights, on war in Vietnam and apartheid in South Africa.

It was the left who leveraged academic freedom to shape the discourse and, therefore, to remake society.

We need to reconnect with that heritage, with the fire and self-confidence to conceive of the university as a space of intellectual challenge. We need to find our backbone, to understand that academic freedom is good for us all.

Academic freedom is a progressive force. Progressives should remember that.

Lorenzo Z. Ruiz ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Greenough Hall and is a student leader of Harvard Undergraduates for Academic Freedom. His column, “Searching for Harvard,” runs bi-weekly on Mondays.