Free Speech In Academia

Peter W. Wood (President, National Association of Scholars), Free Speech in Academia, 27 Tex. Rev. L. & Pol. 761 (2023):

To win back a place for free speech in higher education, free speech has to be rediscovered as the best and perhaps the only secure path we have to worthy knowledge, no matter whether the endeavor be in the sciences, the humanities, or the arts. That for sure is not an easy path of return, but it may well be the only one.

We do, however, have resources. We should continue to dismantle, defund, and discredit the ideologies that trap today’s students. We should look beyond the legacy institutions of American higher education that have forfeited the esteem in which they were once held. And we should address ourselves to the irrepressible curiosity of students. They are vulnerable to the ideologues because those ideologues promise answers to the hard questions of life.

Why am I miserable despite living in such a prosperous society? Why do I feel such emotional pain? Why am I lonely all the time despite being plugged in to countless friends? What will the future bring? A society that cannot provide any better answers than those set forth by Marxists, critical race theorists, and doomsday prophets of climate change will have no place for free speech or intellectual freedom.

To advance free speech in higher education, we must begin by saying worthy, true, and compelling things, and then having the patience to wait for the students to come to us.