We Preach Free Inquiry—but Don’t Teach That Way (opinion)

Higher education is under siege, and not only from the outside.

In recent years, colleges and universities have faced mounting external pressure on academic freedom from legislative bodies seeking to ban certain books, restrict curriculum and defund programs deemed ideologically inconvenient. These threats are real and well documented and must be met with a vigorous defense. But in the heated discourse over who is attacking the academy from without, we have been far too quiet about another threat operating from within: the gap between what faculty say they believe about teaching and what actually happens when the classroom door closes.

My research suggests this internal failure may be doing as much damage to the promise of free inquiry as any legislative intrusion. And unlike political pressure, it is something we can actually fix—if we’re honest enough to name it.

The Principle We Profess

Let’s begin with what nearly everyone in higher education agrees upon, at least in theory: Free inquiry—the right and responsibility to examine ideas rigorously, to follow evidence where it leads, to entertain uncomfortable questions and to engage diverse perspectives without fear—is the animating soul of the university. It is not simply an institutional policy to defend. It is a pedagogical practice demanding rigorous implementation in how we create learning environments.

This is not a politically contentious claim. Conservatives and progressives alike invoke free inquiry when it serves them. Accreditation bodies expect it. Mission statements everywhere pledge allegiance to it. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in its 2017 Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, explicitly called for higher education to move beyond content delivery and toward helping students develop the skills and modes of thinking that civic life in a democracy demands.

For those of us who have taught philosophy through the Socratic tradition, free inquiry is not an abstraction. It is the conviction that intellectual growth occurs only when students are challenged to step outside the familiar confines of their own “cave”—confronting assumptions, examining prejudices and subjecting comfortable beliefs to the scrutiny of reasoned dialogue. It is the understanding that genuine free expression requires distinguishing dialogue from debate: In dialogue, participants collaborate toward shared understanding rather than competing for victory.

That is the principle. Now for the practice.

The Problem We Rarely Discuss

A statewide faculty survey I conducted involving 198 undergraduate instructors across disciplines revealed a striking and largely underacknowledged finding: Faculty overwhelmingly believe in dialogic, student-centered pedagogy—but far fewer actually implement it.

Eighty-four percent of faculty in my study believed in incorporating experiential learning. Sixty-nine percent identified Socratic dialogue as an effective method for fostering meaningful student learning. Eighty-five percent endorsed collaborative, student-centered approaches. These are not the mindsets of a faculty resistant to free inquiry. On the contrary, faculty embrace the Socratic ethos of education—the idea that academic content should be a mode of thinking, that students should take intellectual risks, that real-world application matters.

Yet when the same faculty described their actual classroom practices, significant gaps emerged. The belief-practice difference for experiential learning was 30 percentage points. For Socratic dialogue, it was 29 points. For collaborative work, 23 points. On average, this belief-practice gap hovered between 20 and 25 percentage points across Socratic teaching methods.

In short: faculty preach free inquiry but in their classrooms, on average, practice something considerably more constrained.

Why This Happens: The Inheritance Problem

We need to resist the temptation to treat this gap as evidence of faculty hypocrisy. It is not. What my research reveals is something more systemic and more forgivable—and therefore more tractable.

Most faculty learn to teach the way most people learn to parent: by replicating the models they inherited. Only 9.45 percent of the faculty in my study reported receiving any formal graduate school training in how to teach adult learners. The rest learned by doing—and by watching. What they watched, in most cases, were lectures. What they absorbed were hierarchical classroom structures in which the professor held authority, students received information and assessment measured retention rather than reasoning.

These inherited mindsets and pedagogies persist not because faculty endorse them intellectually, but because they operate beneath conscious awareness. As Mackenzie Stephens and Jessica Santangelo have noted, there is a striking paucity of research on faculty metacognition—on whether faculty are thinking carefully about how they think about their teaching. Without formal training in andragogy, faculty lack the conceptual vocabulary needed to examine their own practice critically. They cannot identify contradictions they don’t know exist.

The result is a pedagogical inheritance passed, largely unexamined, from one generation of faculty to the next. And when that inheritance leans sophistic—toward lecture, toward passive receptivity, toward questions with single correct answers—it quietly undermines the very spirit of free inquiry that the same faculty would eloquently defend if asked.

The Threat From Without—and How It Compounds the Problem Within

The external pressures on higher education are not unrelated to this internal failure. They compound it.

When legislators threaten funding over course content, when administrators expand harassment definitions in ways that chill controversial discussion, when institutional responses to student discomfort systematically narrow the range of permissible speech—each policy may seem defensible in isolation. Collectively, they create a climate where genuinely rigorous inquiry becomes practically impossible. Faculty who are already uncertain about how to facilitate difficult dialogue receive an unspoken institutional message: Don’t try.

And faculty who do try—who create what I call “spaces for connection,” where students from diverse backgrounds engage candidly with contentious topics including political events, religious controversies, questions of racial equity and cultural diversity—often do so without institutional support, without pedagogical training and against a cultural headwind that conflates challenge with harm.

The external attacks on academic freedom are real. But we cannot credibly defend free inquiry in our mission statements while failing to instantiate it in our classrooms. Higher education’s authority to resist political intrusion rests, in part, on whether it is actually practicing what it preaches.

What We Must Do: Start With the Faculty

The good news embedded in my research is that it fundamentally reframes the problem—and therefore the solution.

Faculty are not obstacles to Socratic teaching. They are allies who lack support. The question is not how to persuade faculty to value free inquiry; they already do. The question is how to build the structures, professional development experiences and communities of practice that help faculty close the gap between their values and their practice.

This reframing matters enormously for how institutions approach faculty development. Too often, pedagogical reform initiatives are designed as corrective—implicitly suggesting that faculty are doing something wrong. This triggers defensiveness and resistance, which is both understandable and counterproductive. A better approach begins with alignment: you already believe in this. Let’s figure out together why the classroom doesn’t always reflect that belief, and what support would help.

Three principles can guide this work:

• Make the invisible visible. Faculty cannot close a gap they cannot see. Institutions should invest in structured self-reflection tools—video review, peer observation and honest assessment rubrics—that help faculty identify unconscious contradictions between their stated beliefs and actual practices. My own 20-year longitudinal self-study, which involved reviewing 50 teaching videos across my career, was transformative precisely because it forced me to confront moments where I lectured when I believed in dialogue, where I held authority I claimed to share.
• Treat professional development as a signature experience, not a workshop. Brief, episodic professional development rarely changes practice. What works are sustained communities of inquiry where faculty examine pedagogy collectively over time, build trust and have permission to be vulnerable about the gap between aspiration and reality. The goal is not compliance but genuine reflection.
• Distinguish pedagogical challenge from harm—and protect it. Administrators have a responsibility to create environments where faculty can exercise genuine pedagogical autonomy. When pressure mounts—from students uncomfortable with difficulty, from legislators hostile to certain ideas, from institutional risk aversion—leadership must consistently articulate why intellectual discomfort is a sign that minds are working, not a harm to be remedied.

The Civic Stakes

This is not merely a pedagogical conversation. It is a democratic one.

We are approaching a moment of profound crisis in American civic life. Polarization has made productive disagreement across difference increasingly rare. The habits of mind that sustain democratic participation—the capacity to examine evidence, to engage with perspectives unlike one’s own, to hold conviction alongside genuine openness to being wrong—are precisely the habits that Socratic pedagogy cultivates.

Colleges and universities are uniquely positioned to be the spaces where young people develop these capacities. The research is clear that faculty already believe this is their mission. What remains is the harder, humbler work of ensuring that in their classrooms they actually do it.

We will not defend free inquiry successfully by defending it in press releases and policy statements alone. We defend it—and advance it—by doing the patient, reflective, institutionally supported work of practicing the principles we claim to teach.

The external threats to academic freedom deserve our fiercest resistance. And so does the quieter threat of never fully living up to the ideals we’re fighting to protect.