The slow death of academic freedom

State legislatures restricting what faculty can teach about race or gender — banning discussions on transgender and nonbinary identities. Public health scholars facing political retaliation for vaccine research and guidance. Legally mandated-national climate assessment reports disappearing from government websites.

These are not hypotheticals — this is what universities and research communities are facing right now. To see how quickly academic freedom can erode when legislatures meddle, look at the University of Texas. Faculty senates have been dissolved, courses are subjected to political approval, leadership appointments are based on ideology and professors are quietly changing syllabi out of fear. 

But it’s not just happening in red states like Texas. Universities nationwide are making changes in an attempt to hang on to funding from the federal government. The Trump administration reportedly pressured lawyers to find evidence of antisemitism at the University of California, Los Angeles as an excuse to gut a renowned public university and exert political influence over its speech, disciplinary processes and institutional autonomy.

As the chair of the University of California, San Francisco’s Committee on Academic Freedom, I’ve witnessed first-hand how precarious that freedom can be. Recent proposed revisions to the University of California’s academic personnel manual included language that would shift academic freedom from a protected right to a mitigating factor in disciplinary processes. There’s a profound chilling effect when faculty are no longer protected for speech the university deems troublesome, and academic freedom is merely a consideration they can raise while going through a burdensome and stressful disciplinary process. Although there was backlash against the policy at all 10 University of California campuses and a task force has been formed to evaluate the policy, it’s unclear whether the university will ultimately listen to their faculty. 

The consequences of compromised academic freedom are already visible. Recently, a student who is pursuing research related to the occupied Palestinian territory confided that they wanted to be “brave” and publish their research, but they started to feel afraid after someone described it as “career suicide.” This fear — echoed by others across disciplines — underscores a shifting landscape in which researchers increasingly weigh personal and professional risk before pursuing critical lines of inquiry. That hesitation is a disservice and loss to us all.

We tend to speak of academic freedom in the United States as if it were a guaranteed right, a pillar of our universities that is secured by precedent and protected by policy and legal traditions. But the reality is far more tenuous. Academic freedom in the U.S. rests on a patchwork of legal rulings, institutional norms, faculty bylaws and administrative discretion. In most of the country, it is not a legally protected right.

Recent events have made this fragility impossible to ignore. Federal courts have repeatedly refused to recognize broad First Amendment protection for faculty speech within their institutional roles, holding that when public employees speak as part of their official job duties, their speech may not be protected by the First Amendment. These rulings are chilling scholarly expression. The most influential decision affirming academic freedom as protected speech is binding only within the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, which includes only nine states and two territories, and creates a narrow judicial exception for faculty scholarship and teaching. In other words: Academic  freedom is not a constitutional guarantee, and existing protections are partial, inconsistent or limited to specific educational contexts. It is a professional norm, and norms can be chipped away.

At the same time, the public investment that was once the financial foundation stabilizing universities has failed to keep pace with inflation, enrollment growth and institutional costs. State appropriations have fallen short, even during periods of economic recovery. As funding declined, universities became more dependent on tuition revenue, federal grants and private donations, transforming universities into financially-insecure institutions. 

With the Trump administration’s sustained attacks on federal funding, a precarious situation has transformed into a full-on crisis, and universities are now more vulnerable to political, economic and ideological pressure than ever. Administrators cannot protect teaching and research from political pressure when their budgets rely on unstable federal grants, fluctuating enrollment that is now impacted by ever-changing international student visa regulations, and donor preferences. The need to be responsive to external political and financial forces is fundamentally at odds with the independence that evidence-based, scholarly research requires. 

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It’s a paradox: Donors routinely support the products of academic freedom, such as discoveries and innovations, but rarely the conditions that enable those breakthroughs. We need a new model of philanthropic engagement, one that sees academic freedom as a public good worthy of direct investment, and not as a luxury.

Academic freedom matters because universities exist to generate public goods, such as reliable climate and environment monitoring systems, nonpartisan economic and budget analyses, and independent analysis of government information — and disinformation. Higher education serves society by educating future professionals and generating human capital, expanding scientific knowledge, informing evidence-based policymaking and producing research that benefits communities far beyond campus boundaries. These functions produce public benefits — improving public health, strengthening democratic institutions, advancing equity — that society depends on but receiving markets undervalue. As federal funding diminishes amid weak legal protections, the conditions that make these public goods possible, including evidence, expertise and independent truth-seeking, have become increasingly fragile. 

Academic and intellectual freedom needs its own infrastructure. Funders and institutions that care about long-term social impact must invest not only in material infrastructure and scientific outputs, but also in the intellectual independence that allows universities to generate public goods in the first place. Historically, breakthroughs in science and democracy were often supported by philanthropists who understood that intellectual independence is necessary for societal progress. Donors have funded new research institutes, hospitals, cancer centers, endowed chairs and gleaming new buildings, but only a few investments are dedicated specifically to intellectual and academic freedom. Philanthropy, though, is uniquely positioned to respond quickly and strategically to securing intellectual and academic freedom. 

Several targeted investments could build a durable shield and generate layers of public goods. Donors can create academic freedom endowments to provide legal defense for schools and protections for politically-sensitive research. Scholars depending on “soft money” like federal grants need “hard money” that isn’t vulnerable to political shifts. The U.S. can also borrow from European models, such as the European University Association’s Autonomy Scorecard and monitoring index. Funding can go toward monitoring, transparency and public education. Funders could create “intellectual independence funds” for public health research, which has taken major blows in the first year of the second Trump administration, threatening evidence-based vaccine, drug and health equity policies, and undermining the health of millions of Americans.

The decline of public funding has left universities financially precarious. The absence of legal protections has left scholars exposed. The rise of political interference has left intellectual independence on shaky ground. The costs of inaction are not abstract—they will be measured in lost scientific breakthroughs, damage to evidence-based policymaking and a public increasingly unable to rely on academic expertise. If American higher education is to remain credible, independent and worthy of public trust, we will need philanthropists who recognize that the most important thing to protect is the freedom required for discovery. The time to invest in that freedom is now.

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