The hottest Academic Freedom Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
Category
Top U.S. Politics Topics

Why we need to reform the IRB review process and how we propose to do it

Heterodox STEM • 142 implied HN points • 18 Mar 26
🔬 Science Academic Freedom
  1. IRBs have drifted from their core job of assessing participant risk and now too often overregulate, police intellectual content, and block or delay valid research.
  2. The Mudd Code lays out concrete reforms—more transparency, stronger fidelity to Belmont principles, and a renewed focus on balancing risk and benefit instead of trying to eliminate risk entirely.
  3. Momentum is building for change: professional groups and institutions are engaging with the Mudd Code and investigators are encouraged to read it and discuss these reforms with their IRBs.

Why I Let Anti-Israel Protesters Interrupt My Talk

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 4164 implied HN points • 08 Feb 26
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. A lecture focused on Jewish history highlighted how displacement and mass death shaped Israeli identity and politics.
  2. Masked, keffiyeh-wearing anti-Israel protesters interrupted the event, a form of disruption that has become routine on many U.S. campuses.
  3. Rather than shut them down, the lecturer let the interruption happen and turned it into a teaching moment, keeping most of the protesters until the end.

Neanderthals, Morality, Ivy League Criticism

Rob Henderson's Newsletter • 1117 implied HN points • 04 Mar 26
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Graduates can legitimately criticize elite colleges without being labeled hypocrites; defenders often attack the critics instead of addressing the substantive problems, which discourages informed dissent.
  2. Moral behavior is driven more by emotions and intuitions than by abstract philosophical reasoning, so moral psychology (including theories like Haidt’s and Gray’s) explains everyday judgments and how traits, sex differences, and development shape morality and happiness.
  3. Recent findings include sex-biased Neanderthal–modern-human interbreeding patterns, evidence that social stigma deters crime more effectively than threats of distant harsh punishment, and a link between openness and crystallized (accumulated) intelligence rather than fluid reasoning.

Dr. Atlas and the Crucible of Open Dialogue

COVID Reason • 495 implied HN points • 15 Oct 24
🏥 Health Politics Academic Freedom
  1. Government lockdowns during the pandemic didn't work as intended and caused more harm than good, affecting people's mental health and education.
  2. Censorship stifled important discussions and alternative viewpoints, which are essential for scientific progress.
  3. Academic institutions didn't uphold free expression and debate, which is key for critical thinking and finding the truth.

Columbia’s Modern Arab Studies Chair Contenders Have One Thing in Common: Hating Israel

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 343 implied HN points • 12 Feb 26
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Columbia is overhauling its Middle Eastern studies programs and replacing the Modern Arab Studies chair after losing federal funding and reaching a settlement.
  2. Several top candidates and committee members have publicly taken strongly critical positions toward Israel, including framing violent events as responses to Israeli policies, which raises concerns about ideological bias.
  3. Despite university promises to ensure "balanced" curricula, the candidates' views suggest the program may stay politically slanted, fueling accusations and institutional consequences.
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Corporate Soap Opera at UATX

In My Tribe • 531 implied HN points • 17 Jan 26
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Personality and ego conflicts get amplified into supposed principled battles. Many disputes are more about people than deep ideological differences.
  2. The school’s challenges go beyond DEI to include debates over AI, curriculum, and earlier rushed commitments. A lack of shared priorities means individuals launch initiatives that often collide.
  3. Stronger internal processes and some bureaucracy are needed to manage trade-offs and reduce drama. A change in leadership may have made the place better positioned to improve things.

What Qatar Bought from Carnegie Mellon for $1 Billion

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 315 implied HN points • 02 Feb 26
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Qatar has poured far more money into American universities than other countries, spending about $6.6 billion since the 1960s and outpacing China.
  2. Carnegie Mellon received roughly $1 billion from Qatar and runs a campus in Doha.
  3. A Jewish student's antisemitism lawsuit and unsealed court documents have raised questions about whether large Qatari gifts come with strings or influence university decisions and policies.

When The Times asked, “Why is Britain educating China’s scientists?” What did they really overlook? by Michael Jinghan ZENG

Pekingnology • 101 implied HN points • 02 Mar 26
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Treating Chinese students as strategic threats and closing academic openness will damage the UK's universities and its role as a global centre of ideas.
  2. UK universities depend heavily on tuition from international students, especially Chinese postgrads, and losing that income would trigger layoffs, cuts, and a fall in research capacity.
  3. The global higher-education map is changing as Asian universities rise and students have more options, so the share of Chinese students in the UK will likely adjust; narrowing the focus to ‘British’ STEM while sidelining the humanities would weaken the UK's soft power and intellectual influence.

The NYT Recruiting Brochure for New College

Can We Still Govern? • 808 implied HN points • 28 Dec 25
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Major coverage presents the takeover as a manageable makeover but leaves out many critical facts and voices, mostly quoting people aligned with the new regime.
  2. The political takeover has sharply curtailed academic freedom: programs were closed, books removed, faculty were fired or denied tenure, and classroom speech is chilled by state pressure and surveillance.
  3. The overhaul is politically driven and financially unsustainable — per‑student costs have exploded, academic standards dropped with heavy athletic recruiting, and the campus now depends on ongoing government subsidies.

Truth, Trust, and the Case for Viewpoint Diversity

Unsafe Science • 106 implied HN points • 15 Feb 26
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Viewpoint diversity is essential for getting closer to the truth in unsettled or politicized areas because it encourages competing hypotheses, adversarial collaboration, and stronger tests of ideas.
  2. Framing calls for intellectual pluralism as merely a conservative or authoritarian plot is misleading; the case for viewpoint diversity predates modern politics and its advocates are not uniformly partisan.
  3. Many academic fields are heavily left-leaning, which fosters self-censorship and biased scholarship, so increasing ideological diversity would improve research, teaching, and public trust.

Have universities become bastions of ideology instead of truth?

Heterodox STEM • 206 implied HN points • 04 Feb 26
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Many universities show ideological conformity, with measurable patterns of disagreement and exclusion on campus.
  2. That conformity risks harming truth-seeking—examples like frequent deplatforming around topics such as Israel-Palestine show both sides try to silence opponents, though the full effect on research and teaching is still uncertain.
  3. Policy responses should protect academic freedom with clear time, place, and manner rules and avoid treating exposure to opposing viewpoints as harassment or creating biased protections for particular groups.

A Modern-Day Academic Rapprochement

Heterodox STEM • 135 implied HN points • 11 Feb 26
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. DEI ideas that started on campus have spread into big corporations and now shape hiring and workplace culture, which critics say undermines merit-based advancement and open debate.
  2. Corporate leaders can and do pressure universities—using partnerships and donations—to push administrators to rebuke or silence faculty who criticize DEI, creating a chilling effect on academic freedom.
  3. University administrations often respond by issuing bland DEI statements and promoting bias training instead of defending free speech, though there is growing political and public pushback against this trend.

American biomedical science in 2026

Can We Still Govern? • 190 implied HN points • 27 Jan 26
🔬 Science Academic Freedom
  1. NIH is being run more from the White House than by Congress and independent scientists, which undermines stable, long-term peer review and research planning.
  2. Chronic underfunding and falling grant success rates have overloaded researchers and damaged the biomedical workforce; the fix is steady public funding or fewer applicants, not relying on billionaire philanthropy.
  3. Scientists must stop staying silent and organize publicly and politically to defend scientific independence, free speech, and trustworthy journalism.

Donald Trump vs. Academia: A War on Science or a Loss of Trust?

Heterodox STEM • 355 implied HN points • 16 Dec 25
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Public trust in science depends more on shared values and perceived neutrality than on education, and when topics become politicized people often assume scientists are biased and stop trusting them.
  2. Academia has become ideologically one-sided and built large administrative structures like diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that many see as promoting activism over open inquiry and silencing dissent.
  3. Some scientists are pushing back by speaking out, cutting ties with politicized institutions or publishers, and calling for reform or new institutions because they fear silence will erode the integrity of science.

Decolonizing The World (w/ Amin Husain) | The Chris Hedges Report

The Chris Hedges Report • 145 implied HN points • 22 Jan 26
🌍 World Politics Academic Freedom
  1. Palestine today reveals an extreme form of settler colonialism that uses dispossession, erasure, and violence as a model for maintaining power. It shows how these same logics of control are linked to global systems of empire and racialized capitalism.
  2. Museums, universities, and cultural institutions often reproduce colonial stories and are backed by wealthy elites, so they shape public memory and block justice. Activists can challenge those narratives through targeted protests, alternative education, and concrete demands to win real change.
  3. Effective resistance requires broad coalitions and tactics like boycotts, strikes, refusal, and building independent infrastructure. Because money and state power protect the status quo, movements must connect struggles across communities and sustain long-term organizing.

Is Abigail Spanberger Seeking to Escalate or to De-Escalate Youngkin & Trump's Culture War?

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 130 implied HN points • 17 Jan 26
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academic Freedom
  1. University trustees should act as a buffer that protects academic independence, not as transmission belts for political agendas, because merit-based assessment and research integrity depend on it.
  2. The governor asked several board members to resign amid concerns that political pressure and donor involvement had steered the board’s actions and compromised its neutrality.
  3. A rushed firing and hurried appointment of university leadership raised legal and procedural questions and risked undermining proper governance and academic freedom.

Zachary Patterson: University ‘decolonization’ is a threat to academic freedom

Heterodox STEM • 384 implied HN points • 23 Nov 25
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Universities are adopting decolonization plans that aim to decentre Eurocentric knowledge and cultivate a stated “critical consciousness” across programs, drawing on critical theory and post‑colonial ideas.
  2. Academic freedom and political neutrality are important for universities to act as truth‑seeking institutions, and when a university takes political positions it can make faculty feel less free to teach, research, or comment on opposing views.
  3. Decolonization efforts are presented as rooted in thinkers like Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon and are portrayed as a neo‑Marxist or radical political approach that could impose an agenda on curriculum, risk public trust, and jeopardize funding.

How to Get Rid of a Tenured Professor

The Honest Broker Newsletter • 4249 implied HN points • 16 Dec 24
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academic Freedom
  1. Universities are becoming more politicized, making it harder for professors to speak freely. Many faculty feel they can't express their opinions without fear of backlash or discipline.
  2. Tenured professors can face significant challenges, including administrative pressure and hostile work environments. This can happen despite their experience and achievements.
  3. Academic freedom is at risk when universities prioritize political agendas over teaching and research. When that's the case, it often leads to a lack of support for diverse viewpoints.

From DEI to DSI: Handling the Neofascist Trumpist Turn to “Discourse Safety Initiatives”

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 169 implied HN points • 30 Dec 25
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Universities should stick to their core job: protect academic freedom and judge scholarship by merit, while fostering communities where people can speak, listen, think, learn, and support one another.
  2. New waves of weaponized cancel culture and ‘discourse safety’ initiatives risk repurposing campus rules to stifle inquiry, so institutions must resist transactional compacts that trade academic integrity for political favor.
  3. The practical response is to recommit to institutional neutrality: protect nonviolent, non-disruptive protest, prevent violence and major disruptions, avoid policing off-campus political speech, and use clear norms and measured enforcement to preserve open debate and scholarship.

Protests and Civil Disobedience in Totalitarian Regimes and in Democracies

Heterodox STEM • 227 implied HN points • 09 Dec 25
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Protests under totalitarian regimes are often the only way to expose injustice and carry severe personal risk, while in democracies protest is protected but should be exercised without disrupting core civic and institutional processes.
  2. The 2024 campus protests were described as deliberately disruptive and at times intimidating or violent, with vandalism and little accountability for participants and insufficient enforcement by university administrations.
  3. Universities should protect learning and research by enforcing clear time, place, and manner rules, applying consistent, content-neutral sanctions for violations, and educating students in democratic civic engagement to avoid outside intervention.

Resisting the Politicization of Science

Heterodox STEM • 199 implied HN points • 14 Dec 25
🔬 Science Academic Freedom
  1. Science must stay independent from politics and ideology, with research, publication, and recognition judged by scientific merit rather than identity or political alignment.
  2. Threats to scientific independence come from multiple directions—both activist pressures within academia and political or governmental interference can undermine research integrity.
  3. Researchers and institutions should defend norms like rigorous peer review, open inquiry, unbiased evaluation, and autonomy in funding and education to preserve science’s reliability and universality.

Is Internal Reform of Academia Possible?

Unsafe Science • 183 implied HN points • 14 Dec 25
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Academia is seriously skewed by left-wing ideological capture that affects theory, methods, hiring, teaching, funding, and publishing. That bias leads to censorship, politicized journals, and distorted scholarship.
  2. Many insiders block reform through denial, deflection, and a ‘now is not the time’ or ‘can’t do’ mentality, and some reformers weaken efforts by worrying about optics or jargon instead of acting. Common excuses include claiming reform is a right-wing plot, minimizing the problem, or endlessly debating terms.
  3. Internal reform is possible but difficult and requires sustained, practical action like working groups, viewpoint-diversity initiatives, and firm pushback against obstructionary rhetoric. Progress will be slow and needs a mix of patient inside efforts, outside pressure, and educating skeptics with evidence.

Academia’s most notorious thought criminals unite to discuss controversial topics

Heterodox STEM • 192 implied HN points • 04 Dec 25
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. A group of academics urged open, uncensored debate on taboo or controversial topics, arguing that free discussion is needed to challenge prevailing campus norms.
  2. They criticized a strong egalitarian and cultural-relativist mindset, saying it can block honest inquiry about human differences and raise real concerns about cultural compatibility and assimilation.
  3. Universities were described as facing a crisis of protests, weak leadership, and mission drift, prompting debate over whether outside pressure or government leverage is necessary despite potential harms to international students and STEM.

Taking Institutional Neutrality Seriously on Campus

The Honest Broker Newsletter • 1050 implied HN points • 27 May 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academic Freedom
  1. Neutrality in universities sounds good but is hard to achieve in reality. It can lead to messy situations where it's unclear what position is acceptable or not.
  2. Some universities have shifted towards being more politically active, which can hurt their public support. People want universities to serve all views, not just those of a few.
  3. The way universities handle controversial topics needs strong leadership. It’s important for leaders to find a balance between being neutral and supporting necessary public health or social issues.

I Support Viewpoint Diversity

Justin E. H. Smith's Hinternet • 691 implied HN points • 16 Jul 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academic Freedom
  1. Viewpoint diversity is important, especially in universities. It's good when people have different ideas and opinions.
  2. There are issues with hiring practices that prioritize a single viewpoint. Universities should focus on diverse thoughts instead of only hiring those who fit a specific mold.
  3. The Hinternet is evolving, with new opportunities for collaboration and creative projects. They are looking for a cartoonist and someone skilled in machine learning.

Universiteten välkomnar en viss sorts politisk aktivism

Rak höger med Ivar Arpi • 707 implied HN points • 01 Feb 24
🌍 World Politics Academic Freedom
  1. Universities are selective in addressing challenges to academic freedom, with instances of cancel culture being omitted in responses.
  2. There is a discrepancy between how universities present academic freedom and the actual management of challenges and controversies within academic institutions.
  3. Some universities tend to prioritize certain ideologies and political activism, creating tensions around issues like cancel culture and academic freedom.

Part 2, Breaking the bureaucratic mold of instruction

Unsafe Science • 42 implied HN points • 24 Jan 26
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Universities often proclaim values like critical thinking and open debate, but growing surveillance and tight classroom controls can quietly undermine those ideals.
  2. Students and institutional pressures push education toward measurable outcomes, detailed rubrics, and atomized syllabi, turning learning into scorekeeping instead of exploration.
  3. Instructors can push back by leaving room in the syllabus, encouraging student initiative and struggle, and treating knowledge as testable hypotheses rather than demanding one cookbook solution.

Oh Man — Imagine If Universities Were Politically Biased In Their Hiring

Singal-Minded • 618 implied HN points • 14 Jul 25
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Academic Freedom
  1. Universities often lack conservative ideas, and there are calls for more political diversity among professors and students. This can help students see different perspectives.
  2. However, hiring based on political views might create pressure to stick to those views. This could lead to closed-mindedness instead of open discussions.
  3. There's evidence that universities, especially in liberal arts, have favorited liberal views in hiring. This creates challenges for those with conservative opinions trying to enter academia.

Samiska aktivister fĂśrsĂśker tvinga bort Jonny Hjelm

Rak höger med Ivar Arpi • 589 implied HN points • 10 Feb 24
🌍 World Politics Academic Freedom
  1. Samiska aktivister kritiserar UmeĂĽ universitet fĂśr kursinnehĂĽllet som handlar om samer, och anser att en icke-same som Jonny Hjelm inte borde studera detta.
  2. Akademisk frihet och Üppen debatt är viktiga värden pü universitet enligt fÜrdrag som Umeü universitet har skrivit under.
  3. Det finns oro kring hur aktivister och media porträtterar en kurs om samer vid Umeü universitet, och det finns frügor kring varfÜr det inte finns offentligt stÜd frün institutionen eller forskarkollegor fÜr den kursansvarige.

Why This Israeli Dance Professor Is Suing Berkeley

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 421 implied HN points • 20 Aug 25
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. A dance professor at Berkeley, Yael Nativ, is suing the university after her application to teach was rejected. She had previously taught a successful class and was invited back.
  2. The university's rejection was reportedly due to tensions among graduate students, which made it uncomfortable for them to host her class.
  3. Nativ claims the school acknowledged discrimination against her and promised to address it but then failed to follow through.

Fixing Universities

The Honest Broker Newsletter • 1413 implied HN points • 23 Dec 24
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Universities need to focus more on their main jobs: teaching and research. It's important for them to prioritize these roles over sports and other activities.
  2. They should take institutional neutrality seriously, meaning universities shouldn't push political views. Instead, they should let students and faculty discuss and debate these issues freely.
  3. Expanding access to education for all kinds of students is crucial. Universities should aim to serve everyone in society and help improve American democracy.

Media School Research: Sedatives, Politics, Somatic Healing, and Racial Justice

Heterodox STEM • 120 implied HN points • 27 Nov 25
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Researchers are examining somatic healing and so-called “sedative technologies” that soothe and regulate bodies in response to racial trauma. While these practices can calm individuals, they may also limit more disruptive, collective ways of responding to ongoing racial violence.
  2. A best-selling book popularized body-focused trauma therapies and helped spark widespread interest in somatic approaches. Many scientists, however, criticize the book’s claims as pseudoscientific, so its authority is contested.
  3. Media schools increasingly study topics like bodily regulation and trauma using qualitative case studies rather than traditional experiments, blurring lines with humanities and social science. Institutional shifts can also lead to conflicts over student journalism and administrative censorship when reputation is prioritized over reporting.

The 1915 AAUP Warned the AAUP Not to Become the AAUP of 2025

Unsafe Science • 109 implied HN points • 21 Nov 25
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. A major faculty organization has shifted from defending academic freedom to taking partisan progressive positions. Examples include endorsing DEI-based faculty evaluations, permitting academic boycotts, and supporting divestment actions.
  2. A century-old warning said academic freedom should not be used as a shelter for uncritical partisanship, because that breeds outside intervention and damage to universities. Current policies show that warning coming true by inviting controversies that harm internal order and public standing.
  3. These partisan moves carry real risks: DEI criteria can be vague and unevidenced, boycotts are likely to be applied selectively, and divestment campaigns can be hypocritical and damaging to a university's reputation. Such outcomes may undermine, rather than protect, academic freedom.

Assorted Links

In My Tribe • 470 implied HN points • 10 Jun 25
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Colleges, especially elite ones like Harvard, have been criticized for not being open to conservative ideas and for having a biased hiring process. Many believe they aren't likely to change on their own.
  2. There's a call for breaking up large universities into smaller entities to focus on research and education more effectively. This might help reduce their political activism and improve academic standards.
  3. New societal trends are shifting the way people view knowledge and expertise, often valuing common sense over traditional authority. This can create a space for new types of knowledge systems to emerge.

The High Educational Costs of Politically One-Sided Campuses

The Missing Data Depot • 7 implied HN points • 23 Feb 26
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. Most colleges and universities are politically one-sided, with faculty, administrators, and many students leaning left, and students’ perceptions of that tilt are generally accurate.
  2. Students who feel out of step with professors and peers report much more self-censorship and far less comfort speaking up, creating an “outsider penalty” that hits moderates and conservatives especially.
  3. That chilling effect undermines open debate and learning, so campuses should take ideological climate seriously and pursue changes that make students feel safer expressing diverse views.

Free Speech on College Campuses

The Future of Education • 495 implied HN points • 02 Jan 24
🚌 Education Academic Freedom
  1. In the dialogue on college campuses, there is a need to broaden perspectives and engage in deeper conversations to foster resilience.
  2. University leaders should maintain neutrality on controversial issues, creating an environment for open debate without imposing specific viewpoints.
  3. Higher education institutions should focus on developing students' abilities to engage with complexity, debate ideas, and build humility for better societal cohesion.

Free Press Investigations Get Results

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 2735 implied HN points • 17 Jan 24
🌍 World Politics Academic Freedom
  1. DEI initiatives are being scaled back and in some cases shut down in various states, leading to significant reform efforts in higher education
  2. An imam in Gaza who was kidnapped by Hamas was successfully released due to public pressure and challenges to Hamas' legitimacy
  3. A New York City school apologized for removing Israel from a map, sparking discussions on bias, hate, antisemitism, and foreign influence in education