William Reville: We must defend our academic freedom or we will lose it

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an American non-profit civil liberties group founded in 1999 to defend free expression rights in the United States – focusing particularly on college students and faculty – recently released its 2023 report.

Amazingly, Harvard University, the oldest and arguably most acclaimed American university, ranked bottom of the list for free speech, scoring 0.00 on a 100 point scale. Harvard has scraped the bottom of free speech rankings for several years now. Freedom of speech and thought are the most essential qualities of liberty and particularly sacred to the university, so what is going on here?

All western democracies guarantee academic freedom to university academics. For example, The Irish Universities Act 1997 defines and guarantees academic freedom: “A member of the academic staff at the University shall have the freedom, within the law, in his/her teaching, research and any other activities, either in or outside the University, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas and to state controversial or unpopular opinion and should not be disadvantaged or subject to less favourable treatment by the university for the exercise of that freedom.”

I cannot find an official Harvard management response to the FIRE report. However, the Harvard School of Public Health’s position on academic freedom and freedom of expression, reads like a decent attempt to accommodate these principles.

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FIRE evaluates institutions on the basis of factors such as strength of policies protecting free speech and numbers of campus speakers and students negatively targeted for exercising their right to free speech. FIRE reports – notably its “scholars under fire database” – confirm that across the US (2014–2022), there were 877 attempts to punish scholars for expressing opinions that would qualify for protection under the First Amendment to the Constitution (protecting freedom of speech, religion and the press), 60 per cent of which led to sanctions, including 155 personnel firings, 44 of whom were tenured professors.

History is replete with examples where dogma closed down debate allowing wildly erroneous positions to hold sway for long periods

In 2023, nine Harvard professors/researchers faced calls to be punished or dismissed for recently aired opinions. Seven were disciplined. This level of oppression rivals university oppression during the infamous McCarthy era and, of course, in this atmosphere many academics self-censor.

In 2023, FIRE surveyed more than 55,000 students across 254 universities. Fifty-six per cent of students worry about getting cancelled for something they said or that their reputation would be damaged by what they say or do. Twenty-seven per cent of students deem it acceptable to use violence sometimes to stop campus speech and 57-72 per cent of students said certain conservative speakers should be banned from speaking on campus.

The general public are given the impression, for example by viral videos of professors being heckled and even assaulted by protesters, branded as “racists”, “transphobes” etc, that universities repress differences of opinion, mimicking the Inquisition. Consequently, only half of Americans believe higher education has a positive effect on American life.

[ The western world is besieged by criticisms - academics must be free to investigate ]

Thankfully, developments are now in train to counter this repression of academic freedom. More than 100 Harvard professors (including renowned psychologist Steven Pinker) have banded together to form a Council of Academic Freedom. Pinker and Bertha Madras explained its approach in the Boston Globe.

Academic freedom is vital to the truth – seeking nature of academic research. Uncovering new knowledge is difficult and must overcome natural negative impulses such as overconfidence and preference for confirmatory evidence. Experience has shown that the only way to advance is through reasoned conjecture and refutation. Researchers think hard, propose their best reasoned explanations of the matters under consideration, others test whether these explanations are sound and, in the long term, the best ideas prevail.

Stifling academic freedom disables this process, producing erroneous guidance especially in areas not yet objectively/scientifically settled, where competing explanations are vigorously contested, eg pandemics, gender, inequality and violence. History is replete with examples where dogma closed down debate allowing wildly erroneous positions to hold sway for long periods, from medieval religious interpretation of our solar system to Marxist science in 20th century USSR.

Academic freedom is also under assault in Europe, even in Ireland, as I described here earlier this year. Why are universities so timid in the face of attacks on academic freedom? I think the answer is mainly academic culture. Academic research generally proceeds quietly and politely whereas attacks on academic freedom operate like barroom brawls. Academics are not used to getting “down and dirty”.

However, the stakes are now so high it is time for academics to adopt the Munster rugby motto: “Stand up and Fight.”

William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC