When universities punish faculty speech, everyone loses 

Higher education is facing an epidemic of faculty censorship. 

Last September, Texas A&M University fired lecturer Melissa McCoul for discussing gender identity during a class on children’s literature — a decision an appeals panel later found “not justified.” The next day, Texas State University terminated tenured historian Thomas Alter for remarks he made at a conference on “Revolutionary Socialism.”

In November, following a complaint by Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Indiana University suspended Jessica Adams, a lecturer in the School of Social Work. Adams showed her class on “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice” a widely used graphic with several dozen statements, including “Make America Great Again,” intended to illustrate them as overt or covert expressions of white supremacism.

In January, Texas A&M told philosophy professor Martin Peterson he could not teach writings by Plato that touched on “race and gender ideology.” Hunter College placed biology professor Allyson Friedman on leave for appearing to suggest, during a community education council meeting, that Black students were “too dumb to know they’re in a bad school.” 

These cases illustrate a dangerous trend. Under pressure from conservative activists, the federal government, red state legislatures and sometimes their own boards, universities are increasingly willing to suppress faculty speech. According to the Foundation on Individual Rights and Expression, “more scholars have been punished for their speech in the last few years than during the entire Red Scare.”

U.S. law does not codify academic freedom or even clearly define it. The Supreme Court has described it “as a special concern of the First Amendment,” but in this area, as one free speech expert put it, the law is “frustratingly inconsistent and confusing.” There is little agreement about academic freedom’s scope, its legal basis, who qualifies for protection, or whether it applies to off-campus........

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