“Academic freedom is spoken with a solemnity in the United States that belies both its relatively short history and its present precarity,” Sarah Viren wrote in a June issue of The New York Times Magazine.
The first time the term academic freedom appeared in a court decision was in 1940 when a parent sued New York City’s Board of Higher Education arguing that the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s controversial views on sex and sexuality might unduly influence her daughter at the City College of New York.
Although Russell was hired to teach classes on logic, mathematics, and metaphysics of science, the judge hearing the case ruled against Russell’s appointment. He wrote that the court would not typically interfere with the board on issues of “valid” academic freedom; however, “It will not tolerate academic freedom being used as a cloak to promote the popularization in the minds of adolescents of acts forbidden by the Penal Law.”
Russell easily found a position at Trinity College, but he compared his plight with that of Socrates persecuted for “corrupting the youth and impiety” — though the latter with notably more dire consequences. Socrates was sentenced to death by poisoning himself with a deadly potion of hemlock juice, whereas Russell was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Since Russell’s case, the United States government has been developing a steady interest in colleges and universities — not only as centers of education, but as hubs of research and invention. Such support meant more funding for institutions of higher learning, as well as wider berth for faculties to manage themselves. During President Donald Trump’s second term, that dynamic appears to be under assault.
At least 60 colleges and universities have been threatened with losing federal funding after refusing to make a series of changes that compromise both academic freedom and institutional independence under the guise of removing the “woke agenda,” and effectuating a far-right culture shift that rejects civil rights protections and scientific research.
At Harvard, the Trump administration terminated more than 900 grants totaling about $2.6 billion in awarded federal funds, all destined to advance the research mission of the United States. Most of the cuts ($2.163 billion) affect research, training, and professional development for the National Institutes of Health, while approximately $500 million was cut from the National Science Foundation, the defense industry, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Education Department.
This spring, the federal government canceled about $11 billion worth of research funding and grants at universities that are not aligned with Trump’s agenda, from transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports to investigations into 52 universities as part of his DEI crackdown.
The cuts affect research across nearly every discipline and subject, including research on Alzheimer’s, cancer, and substance abuse; diabetes treatments; climate research; farming solutions; and studying domestic violence.
These are examples of numerous lines of attack, among them “ultimatums to strong-arm some of the country’s most well-reputed universities into reshaping academic governance, the harrowing arrests of students legally in the U.S., and the revocation of international students’ visas, a tactic the administration abruptly walked back after weeks of confusion on campuses,” wrote AJ Connelly in PEN America, an organization dedicated to protecting free expression in the U.S. and worldwide.
Prospective international students are already looking elsewhere. Clicks on American courses are now at their lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic. First quarter traffic to American courses was down by more than 20% year-over-year; the biggest drop was from India where interest fell by 40%, according to Studyportals, an online directory for degree programs around the world.
Such actions represent an attack on one of universities’ greatest strengths — its global diversity, in its ability to bring together the most brilliant minds from around the world to work, debate, and learn together. Take away that diversity, and universities become smaller, narrower, less innovative and less courageous.
“These moves by the Trump administration show that the goal is to bring American universities into submission, dictate their policies, control what is taught, and weaken their independence, regardless of how it may jeopardize the mission and durability of the sector as a whole,” said Kristen Shahverdian, PEN America’s Campus Free Speech program director.
This assault on higher education is leading to a “brain drain” in the United States; an exodus of academics and scientists lured by universities in Europe, Canada, Australia, and China taking advantage of the chaos and offering them secured funding and positions.
Driving the best and brightest away could weaken the U.S. for generations to come. More than half of America’s billion-dollar startups were founded by at least one immigrant; a quarter of them had a founder who arrived in the country as a student, according to The Economist.
Accreditation is the process colleges and universities must go through to receive federal financial aid aimed at ensuring that programs meet an acceptable level of quality. In April, Trump issued an executive order to “overhaul” the accreditation system as a way to stamp out DEI and to rein in “radical left accreditors” that have allowed post-secondary schools to be “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”
These actions amount to nothing less than “the most extensive and repressive imposition of government ideological control over colleges in American history,” according to John K. Wilson, an expert on academic freedom.
If a political party dictates who can be enrolled, who can be allowed on campus and what can be taught, then colleges and universities lose the very essence of what makes American education unique and the legacy it carries around the world.
Foreign institutions have not been spared Trump’s assault. Starting in March, American embassies began sending threatening letters to universities in countries such as Belgium, Portugal, and Australia, about whether their programs were in compliance with the administration’s executive orders.
“If you want to resist the powers which threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom, we must keep clearly before us what is at stake,” Albert Einstein told an audience in England four days before he left for the United States in 1933.
“Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Pasteur, no Pasteur, no Lister,” Einstein emphasized.