Higher education in the United States is currently under intense scrutiny from the second Trump administration. A new working paper from Pippa Norris, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, says pressure on academic freedom is not new in this country and around the world.
“Political critiques of higher education are far from novel,” says Norris in the paper. “Threats to higher education arise from both external government interventions and internal academic cultures.”
The title of her paper alludes to a 1972 Oval Office recording of President Richard Nixon telling Henry Kissinger that “The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.”
Such pressures, however, do not only come from external forces. Norris’ new working paper, Professors are the enemy: Two Faces of Academic Freedom, examines both outside challenges to academic freedom universities as well as inside effects, such as self-censoring.
Norris frames the issue by discussing the concept of academic freedom, which both conservatives and progressives value but interpret differently. Critics on the right may condemn a lack of viewpoint diversity on campuses and argue that the law should intervene to correct a perceived liberal bias at universities. Conversely, the classic liberal argument is that universities and their faculty should have autonomy and expect to teach and research free of political interference from outside the academy.
Norris explains that the 21st century has seen growing risks to autonomy in higher education. Norris writes, “The evidence suggests that growing limits on academic freedom are associated with broader processes of backsliding in liberal democracy, evident in many parts of the globe. Equally importantly, legal constraints on academic freedom encourage processes of self-censorship, thereby silencing unorthodox voices, suppressing debate, and weakening viewpoint diversity in higher education.”
“Threats to higher education arise from both external government interventions and internal academic cultures.”
“The autonomy and self-governance of institutions of higher education face growing threats from external regulations limiting decisions about what scholars can teach, who they can recruit and promote, and what they can research and publish,” the author writes.
She argues that there are two threats to academic freedom—one external (interfering with university autonomy) and one internal (from academic cultures limiting viewpoint diversity).
“It remains to be determined whether external or internal forces exert the greater impact in chilling academic freedom of speech,” Norris writes.
Norris looked at data from the Varieties of Democracy Institute from 179 countries from 2000 to 2023 and studied trends for these countries in the Academic Freedom Index, which measures the extent to which faculty members can teach without censorship.
Evidence suggests that academic freedom was most repressed in autocratic countries such as Iran, Russia, China, and Egypt. Her research also showed that in countries experiencing democratic backsliding, academic freedom diminished as well. Such backsliding, she notes, has increased in countries around the world in the 21st century, such as Hungary and Turkey, as well as in the United States. She also analyzed an international survey of scholars, showing that self-censorship of heterodox views was also common among socially conservative academics.
She concludes that “institutions of higher education need to resist these pressures if they are to fulfill their classic mission of advancing human knowledge, expanding scientific progress, and strengthening civic deliberation.”
Norris has been on faculty at Harvard for more than 30 years, conducting research and teaching on democracy and comparative politics. Her forthcoming book, The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding, will be released later this year.
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Photograph by Brandon Bell/Getty Images.