Academic Freedom Shouldn’t Be a Privilege of Wealth

The recent upheaval at the New College of Florida is a story of power, but it is also a story of money. Reliance on public funding renders colleges increasingly vulnerable to legislative overreach, and thus to restrictions on academic freedom. As a result, public institutions are less protected than their private peers when it comes to research and teaching, despite benefiting from more robust First Amendment protections. The risks are evident in the current state of affairs at New College.

In 2001, the Florida state legislature voted to make New College independent from the University of South Florida. Spurred largely by John McKay, then-president of Florida’s senate, and New College alumni, this decision was made under the guise of pulling New College out from USF’s research-oriented mission. But it also meant that New College’s funding would be determined directly by the Florida legislature. Students and faculty expressed reservations about how this new financial relationship would play out. New College has long valued a liberal-arts approach: small classrooms, independent research, and a teaching-oriented faculty. But that costs money. In the year that the institution went independent, New College was spending twice as much per undergraduate student as Florida’s other public institutions. As one New College faculty member put it at the time, “I can only wonder how we will look to a conservative legislature.”

McKay, said to be less partisan than his fellow Republicans, reportedly dismissed “questions about the possibility of a culture clash” between the college and the legislature. “Lawmakers have to represent all kinds of constituents,” he told the Tampa Bay Times, assuring reporters that “most of his colleagues understand that a premier liberal-arts program has significant value to Florida.”

Those assurances ultimately rang hollow. Direct vulnerability to Republican legislature made New College’s mission harder to execute. As recently reported in The New York Times, New College persisted against budgetary constraints since 2001 — and successfully too, ranking in the top five public liberal-arts colleges in the country four years in a row and producing an abundance of Fulbright scholars. But facilities and marketing suffered, and the hopes of fund raising for a larger endowment never materialized. Meanwhile, the larger political environment became more and more polarized. In January 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis used his financial and constitutional power to take over the institution entirely. He replaced six trustees with personal appointees, hired his old education commissioner to be college president (at twice the salary!), and fired the chief diversity officer.

Recent discourse on the New College takeover focuses, rightfully, on political overreach. But we must also be mindful that the power used by politicians in this and similar cases rests in longstanding policy arrangements. Certain policy arrangements — like New College’s heavy reliance on the Florida state legislature — can undermine or even prohibit the institution’s mission, especially when those policies make institutions vulnerable to politically motivated actors. This infringement threatens the institution’s academic freedom — that is, the institution’s ability to select and pursue its educational mission without ideological interference.

As this case illustrates, academic freedom is unequally distributed and protected. Some institutions rely heavily on public monies or private contributions for solvency — while other, wealthier institutions do not at all. As Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell observe in their book, Unequal Higher Education, the sector relies on four sources of revenue: research grants, public subsidies, tuition from enrolled students, and private donations. Elite institutions and “multiversities” (institutions containing over 40,000 students) have large applicant pools to maintain their class sizes, reliable success at obtaining external research grants, and significant endowments to support financial stability. Even that does not always protect their institutional autonomy and academic freedom, as was evident in the debacle at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill around the attempt to hire the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. Regional and smaller public institutions, which rely on a combination of tuition and state subsidies, are even more vulnerable to intervention from state legislatures.

Given that the sector as a whole is a flashpoint in the current iteration of the culture wars, those interventions are only increasing. Institutional inequality matters because the more an institution depends on those funds, the more its academic freedom is jeopardized. The demands of funders produce unequal support for speech, expression, and free thought in different institutions. The students, and the public, pay the price.

Protecting open and receptive environments on college campuses from undue pressures is vital to the mission of academic institutions: to expand the boundaries of knowledge, to disseminate this knowledge to students and to the benefit of the public, and to offer spaces for students to encounter a diversity of views and to refine their own. Institutional inequality threatens free inquiry by making less-wealthy institutions more vulnerable to financial pressures aimed at restricting speech or circumscribing research topics.

This imbalance is obvious when it comes to private contributions. Elite wealthy institutions have greater autonomy to turn down offers they find too demanding or restrictive of speech. Not only are they already fiscally stable, but they are also more regularly the recipients of large donations from wealthy alumni or external donors. Meanwhile, colleges that are more financially precarious feel greater pressure to take private donations, even ones restrictive to speech. For example, the Charles Koch Foundation has used large donations to gain influence over faculty hiring at institutions like Bowling Green State and Florida State Universities. As a result, the ideas presented at these institutions may be more susceptible to the influence of philanthropic donations, which are increasingly affected by ideological positions about issues like climate or business policy.

Pressures to limit academic freedom and open inquiry are always a concern, but they are especially so when those pressures come from the political sphere, and when those who are charged with leading and supporting education as part of their elected roles — as state leaders, or as members of boards of public systems — use their power to constrain the work of the institutions they are leading.

Colleges, especially elite and private institutions, are often portrayed now as stifling environments for speech; their students are criticized for being hypersensitive and censorial. This portrayal in turn is used to justify legislative, regulatory, and budgetary interventions in the sector over all — interventions that have little effect on the private, wealthy, selective colleges from which the caricature is drawn. The resulting legislative and political overreach restricts speech and expression disfavored by the legislature and promotes speech that is ideologically aligned with its views. Perversely, legislators describe this rebalancing of ideological perspectives as tantamount to protecting academic freedom, whereas, in fact, it restricts speech protected by both the First Amendment and academic freedom. Public institutions, especially those in red states, are thus hampered in their ability to freely research, teach, and learn.

As a result, the inequalities within academe are compounded. A two-tiered system is created: Wealthy private institutions are shielded from regulatory overreach, politically motivated tenure denials, and rules that chill speech and inquiry, while more than half of state legislatures nationwide have introduced bills to prevent public colleges from teaching critical race theory. Faculty and staff at the University of Idaho were advised by general counsel to avoid mentioning abortion unless it’s directly related to class discussion. The Board of Governors for the University of North Carolina system issued a ban on “compelled speech” regarding “contemporary political debate” after North Carolina State University included a question in their college application about whether the student was committed “to building a just and inclusive community.” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas’ statement against considering factors outside of “merit” led three different public university networks in the state to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion statements. Artwork was removed from an exhibition at Lewis-Clark State College, in Iowa, for “depicting abortion pills.”

As college enrollment (and with it, tuition revenue) continues to decline, this vulnerability will only worsen. The more dependent a college is on public funds and regulatory support by elected officials, the more opportunities politicians have to shape the content of its work, and to tighten the boundaries around what students and instructors are allowed, encouraged, or prevented from saying and learning.

These asymmetrical effects on free inquiry, brought about by institutional inequality, have a deep cost for students and for the public in general. Institutional inequality leaves public and less well-off institutions in a position of vulnerability to ideologically motivated pressure, whether from politicians seeking electoral benefit or from wealthy donors. As a result, students and professors at some institutions — private or well-off colleges — can engage and challenge a broader diversity of ideas, while others — public institutions dependent on political support or even private institutions dependent on external funds — will lack access to truly open classroom discussions and campus environments, and the learning and civic freedoms they afford.

Some conservative scholars are calling on federal and state governments to penalize institutions that maintain their autonomy and resist interventions into curricular matters, including restrictions on teaching about race and gender. Quixotically, they call for restricting academic freedom (commonly understood as the freedom to teach and conduct research in an atmosphere free of government intervention) in the name of protecting academic freedom (which they define as the protection of unpopular speech from social and institutional accountability).

Longstanding inequities in vulnerability to legislative intervention exacerbate inequities between students at wealthy and less-wealthy institutions. While higher education may not be able to single-handedly change the culture of politics, it can advocate for policies that better safeguard the sector as a whole from anti-democratic, ideologically motivated action — in short, that can truly protect academic freedom.