The Rush to Trust Endangers Academic Freedom

Justin P. McBrayer wrote an excellent column that’s a response to my recent column about the Yale report, “Trust Is Not an Academic Value.” I disagree with McBrayer’s views about trust, but he makes some good points, and I think we’re often talking about different things using the same term, so I don’t want to debate vocabulary. What concerns me far more is his implicit suggestion that universities need to regain public trust by opposing activism: “One of the primary drivers of distrust is the recent trend of universities shifting their mission from knowledge production to activism.”

I think the premise, logic and conclusions of this claim are wrong. There has been no shift in university missions toward activism. There is no conflict between “activism” and “knowledge production.” Activists produce knowledge, too. And universities have always been activists in seeking to change the world, whether their mission statements (which are distinct from their missions) have stated this fact or not. More importantly, there is no evidence that anyone cares about university missions, nor any evidence that it is driving distrust toward universities.

I also disagree with McBrayer’s attack on activists: “Many faculty no longer consider themselves primarily scholars. They see themselves as activists or perhaps activist-scholars who are on campus primarily to advocate for social justice issues and to partner with students who want to do the same. Needless to say, this is not what many people thought the university was supposed to do.” Those people are wrong, and their anti-activist views undermine the truth-seeking function of any university. If the public hates colleges for protecting the free speech of activists, then we need to persuade people that they’re wrong rather than bowing down to their prejudices.

In reality, activist professors do consider themselves scholars, they just prefer a different kind of scholarship. And when universities attempt to appease the ignorant by banishing professors with disfavored political views, they endanger the core values of higher education. When colleges discriminate against (or for) activist scholars, they are violating academic freedom, institutional neutrality and academic standards.

Now, I don’t want to be naïve, and I think there is some truth to McBrayer’s claim that “social trust in universities is undermined by mission drift and activism. Surely that’s part of the explanation for why trust in universities has dropped the most among Republican and independent voters.”

It’s certainly true that some Republicans distrust universities because they think colleges have not done enough to suppress academic freedom and ban activism by leftists.

But I don’t think that likely reality provides us with any useful advice for reform. Could colleges increase public trust by greater censorship of left-wing activists? Beyond the problem that such repression would be morally abhorrent, I don’t think that would work at generating trust. As the McCarthy era shows us, when the far left is silenced, conservatives simply move to demand the censorship of liberals. From the far-right perspective, every liberal is a left-wing extremist who must be purged. As long as colleges continue to employ faculty who are more liberal than the average American, Republicans living in a silo of partisan bile will distrust higher education. Censorship of the left only publicizes examples of activist professors and convinces Republicans to hate higher education, even if colleges eventually fire the professors. And if colleges suppress free expression of left-wing activists, they will reduce the trust of liberals in these institutions, outweighing any benefit from appeasing Republicans.

Censorship is not a solution to the problem of distrust. Free expression is the best approach. If colleges take a principled position and reject censorship of all sides, including right-wing activists, that could help convince some Republicans to trust higher education more.

The rush to trust can endanger the academic freedom and viewpoint diversity that McBrayer calls for. When colleges are obsessed with the public trusting them, they will tend to purge any dissenters—left and right—who offend public opinion.

Ultimately, colleges may need to learn how to operate in a climate where many Americans distrust them. That’s simply the reality of living in a country with political polarization.

However, higher education cannot sacrifice its core values on the altar of trust. Trust is not an academic value. But academic freedom is.