Why We Must Not Redefine Academic Freedom to Embrace Censorship

Gideon Steinbach argued at Heterodox STEM, “It is time to redefine academic freedom, and restore scholarly discourse on campus.” Redefining academic freedom with the dream of removing a perceived evil is a dangerous approach. Once you redefine academic freedom, there is no guarantee that your enemies will be censored rather than your allies.

But the deeper flaw in Steinbach’s reasoning is his belief that censorship is a useful tool for spreading truth. Censors throughout the ages have dreamed of creating a utopia by controlling ideas. It never happens because it cannot work. This is not to say that censorship never succeeds. Censorship definitely works–but only if you seek to create a totalitarian society where people tremble in terror. If you want rational thinkers who can carefully assess evidence, challenge dogmas, and imagine better ideas, ideological marching orders are the worst possible approach.

According to Steinbach, “The October 7 massacre shuttered the orthodoxy of academic freedom. More than 150 student organizations at Harvard, Brown, and Columbia, instantly sided with Hamas terrorists.” While this critique isn’t entirely accurate (criticizing Israel is not the same as siding with terrorists), the deeper flaw is in the logic of Steinbach’s attack: “Students were preconditioned by what they were taught at the university. They parroted disinformation that was fabricated by faculty and empowered by academic freedom.” Just because students have bad ideas, it doesn’t mean they have been “preconditioned,” and censorship does not banish bad ideas.

Indeed, censorship is a tool commonly used to entrench terrible ideas. And leftists who argue for limiting academic freedom make precisely the same arguments as Steinbach and likewise call for banning the “teaching and dissemination of ideology and disinformation on campus.” In It’s Not Free Speech, Jennifer Ruth and Michael Berube argue that the bad ideas of racists justify their excision from academia on these same grounds of malpractice. Bad ideas will always be among us; the danger that a good idea might be banned is far worse than what happens when a bad idea is allowed to exist.

Steinbach claimed, “It is time to codify professional practice and malpractice in education.” But we already have professional practice and restrict malpractice. Scholars who engage in fraud and plagiarism suffer severe professional penalties and have never been protected under academic freedom. The mistake Steinbach makes is to suggest that political views deemed undesirable should guide the definition of malpractice.

The power to persuade is an argument for academic freedom, not against it. Steinbach asserted, “Endorsement of false rhetoric by faculty and its spread to the media is far more destructive than physical force or damage to property.” His error is imagining that this is an argument for ending academic freedom rather than a pillar to support it. The power of academic freedom that gives it the potential to harm is precisely the same as what creates its benefits. You cannot have the power to educate and advance knowledge without the risk of disinformation spreading.

Steinbach’s argument applies not just to academic freedom, but to all information available. If you could make academia purely a force for good by banning bad ideas, why not extend that approach to all ideas anywhere? If you are going to silence and fire the professors with bad ideas, why not imprison everyone with a bad idea? 

Consider how far Steinbach’s proposed repression goes: “The recent failure to challenge untruthful and misguided rhetoric expressed by student protesters on campus, and the failure to educate protesters, are examples of gross pedagogical malpractice which the First Amendment was not intended to protect.” Steinbach is not merely calling for professors to be banned for expressing bad ideas; he thinks “the failure to educate protesters” is unprotected by the First Amendment, and any college or professor who adopts a position of neutrality and silence is guilty of “malpractice.” 

It’s easy to find a view you dislike pronounced by a professor and imagine that somehow the world would be better if the idea didn’t exist. But the process of banning bad ideas and firing professors who believe them is a cure far worse than any disease attributed to wrongheaded thinking. Academic freedom will never bring us to a state of glorious perfection where bad ideas disappear, students never say something stupid, and professors never spread misguided beliefs. But censorship will never achieve this either, and the price of repression can be extraordinarily high.

We must not get rid of academic freedom by reinterpreting it in a way that destroys its foundations. Instead, we need to reinforce academic freedom by protecting the right to criticize those professors with bad ideas and ensure that academia is a space for an ongoing debate of good and bad ideas.