Newsletter

September 2025

Academic Freedom and Our Right to Freedom of Thought

Sinclair A. MacRae

Working in higher education in Canada the past ten years or so has
been dispiriting for defenders of academic freedom and excellence.
During this time we have witnessed the dreadful rise of “Social Justice
Theory” (SJT). Although different views of justice have long been
argued, what sets SJT apart is its methods. Whereas defenders of other
theories have debated their beliefs from within a shared intellectual
framework, embracing such liberal goals as the pursuit of truth, respect
for principled dissent and fairness, tolerance of disagreement, the
academic freedom rights of challengers, and so on, SJT seeks to subvert
all this, rejecting not just truth and science, but universities
themselves as tools of oppression. To borrow a concept from chemistry,
this has resulted in SJT being an unstable compound, the destructive
consequences of which continue to unfold.

Eschewing rational persuasion and the fairly regulated contesting of
ideas, defenders of SJT employ cancelling and similar tactics: what
Jonathan Rauch calls “coercive conformity”. He outlines the essential
differences:

Criticism expresses arguments or evidence with the goal of
influencing opinion through rational persuasion. It belongs to the realm
of truth-seeking. Canceling belongs to the realm of propaganda warfare:
like other forms of information warfare, it seeks to organize and
manipulate a social or media environment to demoralize, deplatform,
isolate, or intimidate an adversary.¹

While advancing anti-racism, decolonization, and DEI initiatives,
SJT’s defenders have shielded their interpretations and justifications
for these projects from scrutiny by employing techniques of coercive
conformity, audience limitation, and dissent suppression – trigger
warnings, microaggressions, obscurantism, crybullying, ad
hominem attacks, de-platforming, exercising the “heckler’s veto”,
and so forth. And so we now operate in a climate of cowardly leadership,
toxic hypocrisy, emotional safetyism, and self-censorship.

Although much has been written about how this toxic climate impairs
academic life, the consequences of this for our enjoyment of our
fundamental rights to freedom of conscience and freedom of thought have
mostly been overlooked.² In this discussion I will try to
help rectify this omission and thereby further develop the case for the
importance of the values of academic freedom and academic
excellence.

Freedom of Thought

Despite its foundational nature, relatively little attention has been
paid to freedom of thought partly because, unlike our other rights,
threats to it are considered more hypothetical than real. Although
totalitarians dream of controlling not just what we say but what we
think, many of us are comforted by the thought that such control remains
the province of science fiction dystopia. As John Milton wrote, “Thou
canst not touch the freedom of my mind.” Similarly the Stoics argued
that no matter what happens to us, we are always free to think. If this
right to think freely cannot be violated, then it may seem that claiming
it is at best symbolic and at worst empty and performative. For it
imposes no duties on others, beyond not inventing and using the means to
literally control people’s minds.

However, this view is too narrow. To see why, consider the science
fiction worry more carefully. We find the idea of someone else
controlling our mind, literally dictating our thoughts and actions,
abhorrent because this would eradicate our personal identity. Although
our bodies would remain, what essentially matters to us about ourselves
– our reason and unique ways of seeing the world, our self-conception,
and so on – would cease to be, and so this ultimate violation of our
right to freedom of thought would constitute a kind of metaphysical
homicide. Moreover, if such thought control involved the deception that
we were unaware of what we had lost, then although we could not
comprehend the crime while we were in that state, our awareness of this
now makes vivid just how insidious and evil such a right’s violation
would be.³

Reason Versus Power

“It would, methinks, become all men to maintain peace, and the common
offices of humanity, and friendship, in the diversity of opinions; since
we cannot reasonably expect that any one should readily and obsequiously
quit his own opinion, and embrace ours, with a blind resignation to an
authority which the understanding of man acknowledges not.” – John
Locke

“The act of giving a reason is the antithesis of authority. When the
voice of authority fails, the voice of reason emerges, and vice
versa.” – Frederick Schauer

We can turn away from this science fiction worry to a more realistic
concern by acknowledging, as Locke implies, that to exercise a
meaningful right to free thought one must be able not just to think
freely but to think as an autonomous person. This requires that we
interrogate efforts to influence us and not simply accept claims and
values on the say-so of some alleged authority, or, more precisely, some
threatening power. Both Locke’s and Schauer’s references to “authority”
in the above quotations overlook the fact that it is typically
legitimate. Rather, the enemy of truth and reason is power
propelled by fear, intimidation, and threats; power that stifles
dissent, truth, and knowledge.

Power is the ability to control or influence other people’s actions,
including, I am arguing, their thoughts. The way it does this is not
totally via mind control but by degrees by restricting
the domain of acceptable speech and the boundaries of academic freedom,
which, of course, is exactly where SJT has succeeded. Although others
cannot directly censor our thoughts, what we think can be impaired and
manipulated via the censoring, including the self-censoring, of others.
Education is a collaborative enterprise which includes the fair
contesting of ideas. Whereas beliefs that emerge out of this process are
like steel tempered in fire, those produced through exercising illiberal
power and censorship are like cheap cardboard left out overnight in the
rain. The quality of the thoughts we think is enhanced by the principled
contesting of ideas. This not only has a critical social dimension to
it, but it is a crucial feature of both the exercising of academic
freedom rights and the pursuit of academic excellence. Similarly, the
range and quality of the thoughts we think are degraded by the coerced
limiting of free inquiry and research, and the exchange of ideas. Seen
from this perspective, self-censoring among academics is not just
self-censoring, it is the self-censoring of experts paid to
teach and research, to propagate ideas for the common good. Such
propagation not only helps make our right to freedom of thought robust;
it makes exercising that right valuable. It is also the university’s
raison d’être.

To usefully exercise our right to freedom of thought we need access
to a broad range of ideas and we need access to facts. Having this right
is not an either/or proposition; it is a question of where we are on a
continuum. It can be robust and vital, or it can be more-or-less
impaired, just as a person’s right to security of their person can be
more-or-less protected depending upon whether they live in a
more-or-less criminal environment. So, yes, Milton and the Stoics were
right that we are free to think but the quality of a person’s thoughts,
along with much of the value of their right to freedom of thought, is a
function of the quality of the ideas to which they have access,
including, obviously, whether those ideas are true or false.

Some Principles of Academic Freedom

Colleges should be places where people can “think the unthinkable,
discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” – Yale
Committee on Freedom of Expression

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted on man have come
through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was
false.” – Bertrand Russell

To think the unthinkable, we need access to other people’s ideas, and
they need the freedom to form, express, and test those ideas. Doing so
helps to create an intellectual milieu within which we can realize our
right to freedom of thought. Unfortunately, the intellectual milieu
within higher education has become increasingly constricted and autonomy
subverting. It has also become increasingly dogmatic, bringing with that
the attendant dangers to which Russell refers. The scope of topics that
academics are free to research, discuss, debate, and teach continues to
be illegitimately restricted, depriving those thinkers of their right to
freely pursue their professional expertise and interests, and thereby
limiting the rest of us from enjoying not just the instrumental benefits
of their work, but also one of the best intrinsic sources of welfare –
the contemplation and appreciation of knowledge for its own sake.

Whereas academics (in the evaluative sense of that term) believe in
academic freedom and the pursuit of academic excellence, SJT academics,
at least judging by their actions, do not. Rather than seeking to
rationally persuade, they aim to manipulate and intimidate. As academics
only in the descriptive sense of that term, they practice coercive
conformity and endorse cancelling those who challenge their views. They
are aspiring totalitarian activists.

Considering this, it is worth reminding ourselves of some basic
principles necessary for realizing and protecting academic freedom:

1. Academic administrators should maintain institutional neutrality
   in their announcements and public communications pertaining to matters
   not directly related to academic administration lest they bias or be
   seen to be biasing free enquiry into those topics on their
   campuses.

2. Secular universities and colleges should not endorse, or be seen
   to be endorsing, any religious or faith-based claims advocated by
   proponents of any specific religious view. This principle is necessary
   for ensuring that, as much as possible, academic research and teaching
   be inclusive and evidence-based, rather than faith-based. It is also
   consistent with showing respect for all religions.

3. Determinations of academic expertise should not be discriminatory
   or biased in any of the ways that wrongful discrimination in Canada is
   standardly identified – by sex, race, ethnicity, age, etc. This means
   that just as expertise should not be discounted or dismissed for any of
   these irrelevant reasons, neither should claims of expertise be
   privileged or exalted for any of these irrelevant reasons.

4. Academic administrators should not just resist the techniques of
   coercive conformity that subvert academic freedom – scurrilous and
   inflammatory social media campaigns targeting teachers and researchers
   exercising their academic freedom rights, ignorant petitions demanding
   that those expressing unpopular but lawful ideas grounded in academic
   expertise be fired or censured, and so on – they should actively oppose
   them. They have a duty to lead by example and to educate, and facilitate
   the education of, members of their communities about the nature and
   importance of academic freedom.

5. Considering that the social justification of the university
   itself is to advance the cause of truth and the creation and propagation
   of knowledge, all other campus initiatives should be subordinate to this
   imperative, or at least consistent with it. Academic administrators
   should withdraw support for any other institutional goals or projects,
   or aspects of projects, that undermine academic freedom.

Sinclair A. MacRae (smacrae@mtroyal.ca)is
a philosopher and an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities
at Mount Royal University in Calgary. Dr. MacRae is the author of
An Introduction to Ethics: Theories, Perspectives, and Issues
(Pearson, 2002).