Free Expression in Peril

Student and faculty speech is sometimes ugly and offensive. But we must protect it. All of it.

Until recently, and for roughly half a century, American universities enjoyed an era of relatively robust academic freedom. In the past few years, though, that has changed. Ironically, the threat to academic freedom in the United States today comes not from government and not from the institutions themselves but from a new generation of students who do not understand the nature, the fragility, and the importance of this principle.

Universities must educate our students to understand that academic freedom is not a law of nature. It is not something to be taken for granted. It is, rather, a hard-won acquisition in a lengthy struggle for academic integrity.

Students today seem not to understand that, until well into the 19th century, real freedom of thought was neither practiced nor professed in American universities. Before then, any freedom of inquiry or expression in American colleges was smothered by the prevailing theory of "doctrinal moralism," which assumed that the worth of an idea must be judged by what the institution's leaders considered its moral value. Through the first half of the 19th century, American higher education squelched any notion of free discussion or intellectual curiosity. Indeed, as the nation moved toward the Civil War, any professor or student in the North who defended slavery, or any professor or student in the South who challenged slavery, could readily be dismissed, disciplined, or expelled.

Between 1870 and 1900, however, there was a genuine revolution in American higher education. With the battle over Darwinism, new academic goals came to be embraced. For the first time, to criticize as well as to preserve traditional moral values and understandings became an accepted function of higher education.

In 1892, William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, could boldly assert: "When for any reason the administration of a university attempts to dislodge a professor or punish a student because of his political or religious sentiments, at that moment the institution has ceased to be a university." But, despite such sentiments, the battle for academic freedom has been a contentious and a continuing one.

For example, in the closing years of the 19th century, businessmen...