Edward Skidelsky
Trump’s return to power has divided the academic freedom movement. Is this a salutary counterblast to the wokery which has blighted higher education for at least ten years? Or the dawn of a new tyranny of the right? One thing is clear: whatever happens in the US will be decisive for the UK and the rest of the Western world.
On 10 March, the Committee for Academic Freedom staged a public debate on this question of the moment at Queen Mary University of London. Our speakers were four veterans of the campus culture wars: on the “Trump will be good …” side, Eric Kaufmann and James Orr, and on the “Trump will be bad…” side, Alan Sokal and Helen Pluckrose.
This will be the first of many such debates on controversial issues to be staged by CAF on campuses around the country. Our aim is to demonstrate that UK universities are still places where even the most divisive topic can be discussed in a robust yet rational manner.
Eric Kaufmann
I cannot defend Donald Trump. He is an immoral, corrupt, bullying narcissist who has laid claim to the country I’m from (Canada) and has also slandered the brave Ukrainians who stood up to Putin — a dictator with blood on his hands. Trump is intent on tearing up our rules-based international order, a dispensation that has led to peace and prosperity since World War II, something I have not been shy to point out.
However, we are not here to debate Trump’s character or broader suite of policies, but rather to assess his impact on academic freedom. On this issue, the effects are mixed — some negative, some positive — yet, on balance, the positives outweigh the negatives.
A wrecking ball may destroy valuable structures, but it can also knock down rotten ones. The primary rotten timber that the Trump administration is challenging is the cultural left’s capture of the modern western university. This ideological dominance lies at the heart of the problem of progressive illiberalism, which is the primary threat to academic freedom on campus.
That is not to say there is no problem on the right: Trump’s directives clamping down on anti-Semitic speech, or arresting those who express support for Hamas, are too broad and chill those who engage in extramural pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel commentary. But this threat is nowhere near as far-reaching in its impact as the internal threat from the institutional left.
There are two primary threats to academic freedom. The first is what I term “hard authoritarianism,” where universities actively punish individuals for speech, often in response to pressure from activists. Many academics have already faced this process. According to the 2024 FIRE faculty survey from Nathan Honeycutt, 14 per cent of American academics have been either punished or threatened with punishment for speech in teaching, research, or public commentary. This represents a significant challenge to intellectual freedom.
The second, and perhaps more insidious, threat is horizontal, peer-to-peer political discrimination against conservatives, gender-critical feminists, and other political minorities. This creates a hostile academic environment, leading to self-censorship. Where hard authoritarianism is about being fired or punished for speech, soft authoritarianism is about not being hired, promoted, published, funded or socially included. For instance, only 10 per cent of Trump-supporting social science academics in the U.S. are willing to disclose their political views to their colleagues. In the U.K., only 20 per cent of Brexit-supporting social science academics would do so. 50 to 80 percent of conservative academics self-censor in teaching, research and public writing, compared to under 25 percent of left-wing academics. 80 per cent of right-leaning American students self-censor — twice as high as those on the left. US faculty are four times as likely to self-censor as they were at the height of McCarthyism. There is clearly a massive academic freedom problem on campus.
A third major issue is the increasing political homogeneity of academia. The latest US data for 2024 shows a left-to-right ratio of 7:1 among American academics, a sharp increase from 1.5:1 in 1989. Other surveys show similar trends, indicating that the political imbalance has tripled in severity since the 1960s.
In the Ivy League, political donations lean 96 per cent Democrat and 4 per cent Republican. A Harvard faculty survey found that 82 per cent identify as liberal, while only 1.5 per cent identify as conservative. This monoculture exacerbates both punishment and discrimination, as faculty in homogenous environments tend to push ideological extremes. As John Ellis notes in his book The Breakdown of Higher Education, intellectual homogeneity fosters extremism and further marginalizes minority viewpoints. Despite this, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) focuses on race, sex and gender diversity, not viewpoint diversity. Unlike mainstream newspapers like the New York Times or Washington Post, there is no attempt to recruit conservative staff.
Trump’s response to academia’s ideological bias has been blunt and chaotic
Indeed, DEI actually reduces intellectual diversity by pushing political intolerance and conformity. It enforces equal outcomes by race and sex, censors dissenting views, and imposes rigid ideological orthodoxy. This manifests in policies such as affirmative action, compelled diversity statements for funding or employment, and speech codes. Implicitly, faculty orthodoxy enforces these codes by marginalizing dissenters, as in the case of black Harvard professor Roland Fryer, whose research used meticulous data on police shootings by race to question progressive shibboleths. As a consequence, he was subject to ostracism and physical threats.
Trump’s response to academia’s ideological bias has been blunt and chaotic. Elon Musk’s DOGE has exposed left-wing bias in institutions such as the National Science Foundation — where DEI-themed grants have exploded from 0 to 27 per cent of the total — defunding programmes in a manner that, while hamfisted, has forced much-needed public scrutiny.
Contrast this with Canada, where DEI-based discrimination is running amok. Canada Research Chairs are explicitly allocated on race and gender lines, DEI-themed grants make up over 15 percent of the federal research spend, medical schools openly exclude white men, while dissenters such as Frances Widdowson are fired for questioning blatant lies around the fiction of residential school “genocide” against indigenous people. Due to the timidity or complicity of Canada’s politicians, the country’s universities continue to double- down on unchecked woke extremism.
Can universities reform themselves? No. There are simply too many activists and administrators wielding taboos around race, gender and sexuality as weapons of emotional blackmail. This results in many who fail to question — or are too scared to question — fine-sounding euphemisms like “diversity” or “anti-racism”. This permits ideologues to resist internal reform. Speech codes, affirmative action, and ideological litmus tests have stubbornly popped up over the past four decades, despite being struck down in the courts and voted down at the ballot box.
The only effective force is external intervention. Prior to Trump, efforts to protect academic freedom were sporadic, with occasional victories at individual institutions. However, broader change only began when conservative media, particularly Fox News, highlighted the ideological insanity at work on campuses. Republican confidence in higher education plummeted from 55 per cent in 2015 to 20 per cent in 2020, paving the way for state-level interventions like those led by Ron DeSantis in Florida. Lacking these same mechanisms, British and Canadian universities have not faced the same scrutiny, have not suffered as large a drop in trust, and continue to elude accountability.
External pressure is required to check the naked politicisation of the university
The October 7 congressional hearings on campus anti-Semitism further exposed institutional bias, prompting shifts of attitudes in university leadership and in higher education policy discussions. Even historically left-leaning publications, such as the Washington Post and New York Times began to underline the importance of free speech and political neutrality in universities. American university presidents increasingly embraced political neutrality and free speech but their British equivalents have not because they face no pressure. Change came about in the US because external political pressure discredited the woke thought police enough to empower the suppressed voices of — often older — centrist liberals.
In short, persuasion alone is necessary but not sufficient to reform higher education. External pressure is required to check the naked politicisation of the university, limiting the anti-conservative hostile environment enough to temper orthodoxy and, by extension, self-censorship. Only when universities become wary of engaging in political discrimination can viewpoint diversity and academic freedom be revived.
Trump and Musk are wrecking balls where a scalpel is required, but their impact on higher education is prompting long-overdue reflection. While their methods are uncivil and overbroad — which should be criticised — the fact they are disrupting the titanic edifice that is the left-wing university means that their effect on academic freedom is likely to be net positive.
More often than not, liberal change comes about due to a balance of competing forces rather than ideological persuasion. Stalemate between nobility and the King produced the English liberties of the Magna Carta while the inability of the Church of Scotland to control the Free Church produced religious toleration in Scotland. While religious toleration as an idea was exported as part of a liberal package to Scandinavia in the 19th century, this was only possible because the elite was receptive. Today’s academia is not receptive to viewpoint diversity and academic freedom for conservative or gender-critical dissenters. Where there is resistance from a dominant power — as with the Church of Scotland or the “Social Justice” university — the only way to achieve liberty is through a countervailing power that compels the establishment to give up on orthodoxy and embrace toleration.
Trump and state-level Republicans like DeSantis are providing a disruptive but necessary countervailing force which can hopefully break the straitjacket of progressive illiberalism that has suffocated higher education for decades.
Alan Sokal
Tonight’s topic is Trump and academic freedom. But I feel obliged to say at the outset: with Donald Trump in power for the next 4 years, academic freedom is really the least of my worries. I’m much more concerned about truth, about democracy and the rule of law, and more generally about sanity — to say nothing of Trump’s appalling and very dangerous conduct of foreign policy.
Let’s start with truth. Of course, we all know that many politicians have a challenged relationship with truth; but Trump is simply off the scale. The problem is not just the hundreds of minor lies like those concerning the size of his 2017 inauguration or Haitian immigrants in Ohio supposedly stealing and eating pets; it is Big Lies like insisting he won the 2020 election and calling the January 6 riots a “day of love”. As one incisive 20th-century political thinker observed, condescendingly but at least in some instances accurately,
[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility … [T]he broad masses of a nation … more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world …
(I’ll let you figure out who that thinker was.)
For the same reason, one may worry that Trump 2.0 will follow the playbook of Viktor Orbán and Recep Erdoğan in harnessing the power of the state to harass and economically cripple his opponents and critics, or simply to intimidate them into acquiescence, while rewarding his allies; in packing the courts with compliant judges, and using those courts to prosecute and further harass his political adversaries — as his new FBI Director, Kash Patel, has openly vowed to do; in using executive actions to override duly enacted laws or even the Constitution, daring anyone to challenge him in court; and potentially in refusing to comply at all with court decisions when they go against him.
Last but not least, one may worry about the sanity of public discourse when the president muses openly, and out of the blue, about invading Greenland and Panama — comments that have not gone unnoticed by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin — and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps this penchant for bizarre public remarks reflects nothing more than a narcissist’s feeling of entitlement to blabber on about whatever crosses his mind. But maybe that underestimates Trump’s cleverness, and it is actually a calculated strategy to keep his critics off balance, flooding the news cycle with loony comments that divert everyone’s attention from the more serious actions being taken behind the scenes. Either way, it’s not exactly a socially beneficial way to exercise the most powerful office in the world.
Now, how does all this affect academic freedom? Well, for starters, the traditional liberal justification for academic freedom is based on a conception of scholarship and university teaching as committed to an honest search for truth, a respect for evidence and reasoned argument, and the valuing of good-faith debate and viewpoint diversity; moreover, academic freedom is buttressed in practice by robust legal guarantees for the freedom of expression. A president who disdains truth and the rule of law, and who routinely treats his critics with ad hominem insults, is unlikely to be an ally for academic freedom, to put it mildly.
But should we have more specific worries? What does the Trump administration plan to do concerning higher education in general, and academic freedom in particular?
On the one hand, Heterodox Academy president John Tomasi took — or at least pretended to take — a friendly and optimistic stance in his January 20 letter to Trump, listing a number of steps that Trump could take to promote viewpoint diversity in higher education and to require institutions to conform their free-speech policies to established Supreme Court jurisprudence. On the other hand, one may plausibly fear, along with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, that Trump intends to use the power of the federal government to “crush the academic left” and remake higher education in a right-wing direction, following the game plan of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, and their allies.
For instance, Trump’s executive order on Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling mixes sensible efforts to end indoctrination in one ideology — namely, “woke” ideas concerning race and gender — with blatant attempts to impose indoctrination in a different ideology. On the one hand, the order purports to praise “critical thinking”; but it then goes on to demand that schools “instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation” and a “celebration of America’s greatness and history”. Schools are told to provide “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles” — overlooking that “accurate” and “honest” might in some instances conflict with “ennobling”. The order instructs federal departments to eliminate federal funding that “that directly or indirectly support[s] or subsidize[s] the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” — running roughshod over the key distinction between teaching about ideas and indoctrinating in ideas. One may worry that similar pressures will soon be brought to bear also on higher education, using once again the hammer of federal funding, on which most universities are utterly dependent.
I don’t want to silence my ideological adversaries by defunding them
Another worry concerns debate around Israel and Palestine. Trump’s Executive Order on Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism takes specific aim at “institutions of higher education” and instigates them to “monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff” — that is, anyone other than a U.S. citizen — that might render them deportable under existing law. That law covers any noncitizen who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization” — where the nature of “support” is never defined — or whose activities “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”. The risk, of course, is that people will self-censor in order to avoid being accused of “supporting” Hamas — that is, self-censor far beyond what the law actually requires, were it to be tested in court. Moreover, instilling that fear is presumably not a bug, but rather a feature. Even more appalling is Trump’s recent threatening tweet, taking literally the tone of an absolute monarch.
Fairness does, however, require me to point to one positive thing that Trump has done, which may perhaps have some indirect effect on academic freedom: that is Trump’s Executive Order “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government”. This document is an eloquent defence of both women’s rights and biological reality; it could easily have been written by a pro-science gender-critical feminist such as myself. As the eminent biologist Richard Dawkins commented:
In my opinion Donald Trump is a loathsome individual, utterly unfit to be President, but his statement that “sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce” is accurate in every particular, perhaps the only true statement he ever made.
Of course, I don’t delude myself into thinking that Trump has any principled attachment to either women’s rights or scientific truth — indeed, he has repeatedly proven in the past his disdain for both women and science. Quite simply, in this case Trump has accurately figured out the moderate and sensible position that most Americans support. I am deeply disappointed that the Democratic Party has resolutely refused to do this, and has adhered with religious fervour to a gender-identity ideology that is not only deluded and intellectually incoherent but is also deeply harmful to women and to gay people, especially gay teenagers. It is depressing that sanity on this issue has to come from a Republican Party that is, in nearly all other respects, deeply insane.
That said, I should draw attention to one point in this Executive Order that could have a serious negative effect on academic freedom. Section 3(g) provides that:
Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology. Each agency shall assess grant conditions and grantee preferences and ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology.
That is, I think, a sensible requirement concerning federal grants for the provision of social or health services; but if applied to research grants it would constitute a dangerous infringement on academic freedom. This concerns not only researchers in the humanities and social sciences who might wish to advocate aspects of gender-identity ideology; it also imposes an anti-scientific constraint on medical researchers who might wish to investigate, impartially and without preconceptions, the causes of and treatments for gender dysphoria. Indeed, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have already been ordered to withdraw research papers “that promote or inculcate gender ideology or that have been flagged as at risk for such” [emphasis mine] — a blatant political interference with scientific freedom. And even with regard to the former group, I don’t want to silence my ideological adversaries by defunding them; I want to defeat them in the court of public opinion by reasoned argument. This provision should be amended to exclude research grants. But I doubt that the Trump administration will do so, because the Trump administration does want to silence its ideological adversaries by defunding them.
The closing speeches, by James Orr and Helen Pluckrose, will be published tomorrow.
