Thread by David Decosimo

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Many are claiming the state has 'no business interfering in public universities' & that doing so violates academic freedom.
State interference can certainly destroy academic freedom, but the blanket 'no state interference' principle is no less of a threat to academic freedom.🧵
Obviously, states legitimately enact myriad policies that shape the running of a university - from civil rights & employment law to health & safety policies.
These don't bear on academic freedom & the current 'no state interference' crowd surely doesn't have this in mind.
But even here note that most states set admission policies requiring that a certain percentage of admitted students be in-state or that every in-state student above some threshold be admitted.
Such policies radically shape a university precisely *in its educational capacity.*
Arguably, such admissions policies are a widely-accepted mechanism by which the state *& state politics* directly shape the university's educational mission & identity in ways qualitatively unlike policies (health/safety) that don't directly touch the university *as university.*
But my focus here is different.
Universities sometimes violate a professor's academic freedom & a professor sues the university.
This is precisely an instance of state power forcing a college to uphold its fiduciary duty to honor academic freedom & *adjudicating whether it has.*
The 'states must not interfere in universities' crowd wholly fail to account for this.

They're leaving the individual faculty member *at the mercy* of the institution & the majority. They're siding w/ the institution over against the individual faculty member & academic freedom.
A university itself *as an institution* can betray academic freedom.
This can happen in relation to an individual professor.
But it can also happen systemically & collectively if the institution establishes an ideological orthodoxy or pursues systemic viewpoint discrimination.
An admin could set up, or a faculty itself could vote to endorse, an ideology/policy that limits academic freedom, as has sometimes happened.
That's a total betrayal of academic freedom, even if the vote is unanimous. It amounts to a betrayal of the university's fiduciary duties.
Saying 'the university should reform itself' in such a case is absurd, as though the institution itself cannot be corrupted.
It is analogous to a rotten police department rejecting any & all external interference or oversight & insisting that only cops can oversee other cops.
Imagine being a faculty member in the minority in such a case. A majority has abandoned a principled commitment to academic freedom. There are systemic, widespread violations. You yourself have been victimized. You do all you can to bring reform & you get absolutely nowhere.
At cost of maximal time & energy (& even your own research!), you exhaust every possibility. The institution is not only intractable but doubles-down, pouring millions of dollars into institutionalizing the ideology, even baking it into the hiring & tenure process. What then?
The 'state has no business interfering' & 'change can only come from within' chorus is absolutely failing to take seriously such scenarios. Such realities.

In so doing, they are hanging already vulnerable faculty out to dry & not really defending the cause of academic freedom.
I want to be clear:
I am NOT taking a stand on or defending any particular policy or state action.
I am NOT suggesting politicians don't have their own sometimes illiberal agendas.
And I am NOT suggesting state interference in public universities is mostly or always legitimate.
What I am suggesting is well captured by something a friend of mine once said to me.
He had the unique experience of serving at a high level in city government of a very major US city during a time of political upheaval *and* serving as a Dean at a major, R1 university.
When I told my friend, the former politician & Dean, about utterly outrageous & unethical academic freedom violations aimed at destroying someone's career, he said to me: "I'm not the least surprised. In my experience, the only thing more corrupt than politics is the university."
Any approach to academic freedom & the university at this moment must take seriously the threat of institutional corruption. The reality that, as institution, the university itself can be every bit as corrupt & opposed to the core mission of truth-seeking as a politician may be.
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