Academic Freedom is Still a Superstition

June 3, 2025

By Nicholas Mosvick

With the initial successes of President Trump’s second term, American conservatism is at a crossroads. The philosophical fractures and schisms among American conservatives are in significant ways not new. Questions about the purposes and proper ends of political society, the meaning of freedom and justice, and the place of order and authority remain as vital today as they were among the nascent conservative movement 70 years ago.

In the wake of President Trump’s efforts to reform some of the country’s foremost academic institutions, questions about how conservatives should define and defend academic freedom and free speech have returned to the forefront. In a recent article, “Defusing Academic Freedom,” Oliver Traldi makes a partial defense liberal notion of academic freedom and free speech based on the ideas of John Stuart Mill.

As Traldi puts it:

Mill’s arguments in On Liberty were aimed against censorship. The best defense against bad speech is good speech. Even falsehoods can improve our arguments or give us a piece of the truth we might have been ignoring. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. That sort of thing. Academic freedom, however, does not only protect against censorship. In fact, in some cases it protects the power to censor.”

In particular, Traldi goes to the well-trodden ground Mill's most important text on the subject, his Essays on Liberty and his desire for more speech to combat bad speech in the search for truth, what Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes would refer to infamously as the “marketplace of ideas” in his Abrams v. U.S. opinion in 1920.

Traldi does add a crucial caveat. He does not think that the anti-censorship considerations of Mill alone are the justification for academic freedom. As Traldi puts it, “academic freedom protects academics’ hands-on choices in this sense, and it also protects our power to judge when we have all, collectively, contributed enough to the collective mechanism that it has in fact found its answer.” He admits that the Holmesian idea of the “marketplace of ideas” requires a sort of “double consciousness,” whereby the citizen “simultaneously trusts the system regardless of how they act and acts in a way that forms a necessary part of the system.” The epistemic-systemic approach to democracy, as he calls it, requires that the citizen maintain an independent judgment about which option to vote for.

Interestingly, Traldi’s essay concludes with the argument that it is emblematic of a“fusionist” view of academic freedom which he says represents a real conservative consensus. The conservative consensus position Traldi describes includes not just academic freedom as defined by Millian conceptions, but viewpoint diversity, asking provocatively whether “abandoning those principles would self-destructively play into the paws of the still-rabid DEI brigade, who mock the whole idea of political principle as a milquetoast defense mechanism for nail-biting moderates insufficiently committed to the woke revolution.”

Traldi contrasts this consensus view with that of the “New Right,” which he admits has captured the “actual and the desirable practice of academic freedom,” while stating that he remains “Millian enough to think that challenging the calcified conservative consensus on academic freedom is a worthwhile project in its own right.” He believes that Mill’s classical liberal approach was the fusionist one. Traldi writes that “the fusionist perspective on academic freedom seems to represent a real conservative consensus,” while admitting that within this consensus is “a set of divides now hotly debated at the Great Books programs and civics centers cropping up across the country.” While Traldi’s view flatters the presuppositions of classical liberals and libertarians, it does not accord with the chief historical proponents of fusionism. A look at the history of the early modern conservative movement and its chief proponents, namely William F. Buckley Jr., calls into question whether such a conception of the “fusionist consensus” is accurate.

Buckley, the founder of National Review and leader of the modern conservative movement, was clear in his rejection of the Millian understanding of speech and academic freedom. The subtitle of Buckley’s notable 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, was the “Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom.’” He meant, in part, that liberal notions of academic freedom were based on the merits of laissez-faire education but that these liberals did not in fact make any gestures of “obeisance to the toleration and open-mindedness they so ostentatiously enshrine.” In other words, while liberals thought it a “violation of freedom, a denial of justice, and a travesty of education for the educational overseer to insist upon some value orthodoxy,” liberals did in fact have a value orthodoxy.

Buckley pointed to President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard as a key historical exponent of laissez-faire education, who said in 1869 that, “A university must….above all…be free; the winnowing breeze of freedom must blow through all its chambers….The corporation demands of all its teacher that they be grave, reverent, and high-minded; but it leaves them, like their pupils, free.” Or as Professor Edward C. Kirkland put it, the academic institution was “an arena” for “this free and open contest” where “truth will be victorious and error defeated over the long time.” That is, the University’s obligation was to foster the search for truth.

Buckley’s response to this “marketplace of ideas” notion of academic freedom, like its application to free speech, was to point out that its exponents tended to start with Milton’s Areopagitica, Jefferson’s “First Inaugural Address,” and Mill’s Essay on Liberty. Buckley thought that this conception of academic freedom was mere license to pursue a destructive value orthodoxy. He asserted it was an “indisputable fact that most colleges and university, and certainly Yale, the protests and pretensions of their educators and theorists notwithstanding, do not practice, cannot practice, and cannot even believe what they say about education and academic freedom.” Buckley here not only rejects Traldi’s conception of academic freedom, but his defense of viewpoint diversity which he believes is a fixture in the “fusionist consensus.”

The notion of a “value orthodoxy” was for Buckley key to his rejection of the broader liberal view of academic freedom and speech. He took the concept from his mentor at Yale and future NR co-founding editor, Willmoore Kendall. In Buckley’s mind, viewpoint diversity like academic freedom was a hoax because the value liberals upheld were in fact attached to was that truth was probably not apprehendable and thus, that it was “folly to try to indoctrinate the student in any specific formula.” The orthodoxy was that “there are limits within which its faculty members must keep their opinions if they wish to be ‘tolerated.’” The universities also acted in favor of Democracy over totalitarianism, thinking that, as Buckley put it, “Democracy may not be truth, but so far as at least Yale University is concerned, it is the nearest thing to truth that we possess, so that while a faculty member is perfectly free to point out the limitations, defects, and weaknesses of democracy, as is right and proper, he is not privileged, at the margin, to advocate the abolition of democracy in favor of totalitarianism.” As Buckley pointed out, men like Kirkland were happy to angrily denounce the boycott of Communist teachers and to consider them inviolate under academic freedom.

Another telling example is Buckley’s treatment of the question of whether or not Communists could be banned from the classroom, which he took up in a 1957 NR column. Buckley used the question to state his conception of academic freedom in the negative: “It is my view that so long as academic freedom takes the implied position that all ideas are equal, or that all ideas should, in the student’s mind, start out equal, it is a dangerous and essentially anti-rational concept.” The conservative view, he thought, was that the justification for academic life was to search out truths “in order to discover truths,” because to “justify education merely on the grounds that it seeks out (but cannot, by definition, find) the truth is to reduce education to an essentially frivolous exercise.” Conservatives, Buckley believed, took from the experience of recorded civilization to yield certain conclusions and values, one of which was the certainty that Communism was an error, a truth that liberal exponents of academic freedom were afraid to ponder.

Buckley expanded on this criticism both in later books and his early columns at NR. His second book in 1954, McCarthy and His Enemies, which Buckley co-wrote with his brother-in-law and fellow NR founder L. Brent Bozell Jr., likewise reflected the wisdom of Kendall. The book gives a concrete example of precisely why Buckley and other early founders of modern American conservatism were suspicious of Millian notions of speech and academic freedom–it would allow for the festering within American society and institutions of an ideology which sought the destruction of the existing order. As the two authors critiqued Justice Holmes and the liberal argument for a “marketplace of ideas,” they argued that the liberal argument “forgets that societies are, after all, educated as well as educable. It is one thing for society to give a hearing to new ideas, and quite another thing for it to feel impelled to put new ideas–simply because they are new or unorthodox–on a plane of equality with cherished ideas that have met the test of time… It should be after all clear that a free market in ideas ceases to be free or a market if the latest huckster to arrive can claim his share of trade without regard to the quality or appeal of the commodity he is selling, and merely because he is a parvenu.” 

In the early years of National Review, the editors joined Buckley in this rejection of what Traldi sees as the consensus “fusionist” Millian concept.  They felt compelled, in one instance, to defend Father Hugh Halton, the Catholic chaplain at Princeton University who was dismissed after giving an incendiary speech on a speaking tour decrying the school’s faculty as “atheistic and incompetent.” They rejected as implausible the liberal view of viewpoint diversity–defined is the notion that “a university is a place where all points of view can be accommodated”—saying that there “can be no such place, and even if there could be such a place it ought not be allowed to exist.” This, they thought, was because the educational theories that underlie the liberal notion of “academic freedom” were “wicked and false” because to insist that all ideas must be tolerated was to ensure that true ideas “get persecuted as a matter of course… by wedding the untruth that no man has any business calling another man wrong, those theories render inevitable the university’s divorce from all men who love the Truth”

Similarly, NR’s editors again offered a stirring rebuked against the Millian philosophy when after a series of early victories in the 1950s at the Supreme Court in favor of bans on Communist Party membership among public employees, the Supreme Court in 1967 overturned parts of a New York state law requiring that public school teachers renounce Communism. The Editors dismissed the reasoning of the Court’s majority as a “Newtonian version of the philosophy of John Stuart Mill” in which citizens “function only as isolated atoms in external relationships with one another.” The implications of this liberal reading of free speech–the extension of the “marketplace of ideas” that Mill’s notion of academic freedom also encompasses–were stark for American society. If no objective claim of discipline or responsibility could be recognized by society, then “each citizen may believe and say whatever he thinks or feels about anything… He may advocate Communism, sodomy, anarchy, fascism or slavery; he not only can exempt himself, by pleading a personal belief, from all obligations to defend his society but can urge others to join in his refusal and to take steps to make the defense impossible.” The problem with this conception was both that it went far beyond anything prior American generations, including the founders, dreamed of and because it meant society would be held together only through “the free and utterly unfettered choice of each individual, without any coercion, pressure or reminder from any law, from government or from any objective social source.”

In the mid-1970s, when the conservative historian Stephen Tonsor reviewed the neoconservative scholar Gertrude Himmelfarb’s critical take on Mill’s “On Liberty,” he understood Himmelfarb to agree with traditional conservatives that Mill’s radical individualism ultimately undermined the social order necessary for its existence by fermenting a culture of rebellion against authority and tradition. As Tonsor put it, in such an individualist society as Mill envisions, “the reign of opinion becomes total, social forms are dissolved in anarchic confusion, and taste rather than truth and morality becomes the test of every action.” Tonsor, sounding like the young Bill Buckley, confirmed the more common view among the first generation of modern American conservatives: Mill, and the liberal view of freedom he represented, was not properly conservative and his understanding of speech and by implication, academic freedom, should be resolutely defeated in favor of truth, order, and just authority.

Upon examination of the thinking of many of the most important members of the modern American conservative movement in the mid-20th century, Mr. Traldi’s thesis about the “fusionist consensus” on academic freedom and its acceptance of Millian thinking appears strained and credulous. He offers that his is a new and fresh perspective on academic freedom which would not grant “more leeway to conservatives flush with the novelty of the power to do such things” and which would not offer “an intoxicating mirror image of progressive academic activism” but instead a “new focus on academic protections should be based specifically on competence and excellence.”

But a purely meritocratic vision based on Millian presumptions is not new—it itself is a mirror image of the old liberal vision of education and academic freedom which Bill Buckley and his conservative allies fought so sternly against in the 1950s and beyond. In particular, they not only disagreed with the Millian idea that no one should be censured, but saw the argument that academic freedom was a guild privilege, as Traldi suggests, as a hoax and fraud.

Traldi is right when he says that the concept of academic freedom as being about support of the university’s mission to disseminate knowledge and to find and speak the truth is one not necessarily reflected in experience. Academia is not, as he implies, flushed with dedicated Millian absolutism. Traldo argues that this idea of academic freedom is a consistent part of the right’s “antipathy to the censoriousness and ideological uniformity of higher education,” and part of a “characteristic fusionist mantra," but this does not adequately describe the history of the conservative movement.

Mr. Traldi should be commended for inviting a public discussion about what intellectual excellence consists in, what sorts of pursuits exemplify it, and what value it has for broader society. The answer, fittingly, is best found in the very thinkers who rejected Millianism in favor of a robust public orthodoxy in higher education and society at large.

Nicholas Mosvick serves as the Buckley Legacy Project Manager at National Review Institute.