I just read a valuable forthcoming article about bias in college syllabi. I don’t want to “scoop” that piece and won’t address its claims here. It did get me thinking more broadly about why some texts are widely assigned in college courses.

• Fashion: When I was a humanities-oriented undergraduate in the 1980s, it seemed as if every professor assigned Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). I don’t hear much about that book these days, and other texts are more fashionable. Such changes presumably reflect shifts among intellectuals as well as prominent developments in the world. For instance, Benjamin’s book seemed prescient when culture was first turning digital but may now seem dated.
• Ideological proclivities: Individual professors tend to prefer to assign works that they agree with. I recognize that many of my colleagues intentionally choose texts that they would criticize, but I am asserting that there is some degree of bias in the whole population of professors, with variations by discipline. By the way, a proclivity is not a bias if it’s reflective, acknowledged, and open to change. The main concern is unconscious bias.
• Genre and style: It is much easier to use a text that is addressed to a general reader and aims to interest people in the topic and influence their behavior, rather than a text that is written for academic colleagues and meant to contribute to a literature. One issue is jargon (specialized terminology), but some jargony works are widely assigned anyway. I think the main issue is the purpose of the work. If it aims to influence a public audience, it is more likely to be assigned.
• Marketing, broadly defined: Like everyone else, academics are influenced by marketing. I am not thinking of the deliberate advertising and promotion of specific academic books, because those investments are very modest. I am thinking about the difference between any academic book and a mass-market paperback that is sold in bookstores and reviewed in The New York Times. The latter will be used in more courses. By the way, ideological bias could be relevant here, but it would be the bias of commercial publishers and mass-circulation journals, not academics.
• Personal branding: Some authors, including some professors, turn themselves into recognizable personalities. Nowadays, that means that they are prominent on broadcast and social media, and they exemplify a particular position or perspective. Academics quickly think of their works when deciding what to assign.
• Hedgehogs, not foxes: When you’re designing a syllabus, you often want texts that clearly and directly represent a particular view, even if you are also looking for contrary views. For instance, in teaching 20th century political philosophy last spring, I wanted to include fascist texts. This was certainly not an endorsement; I just thought that we should analyze their views. I went looking for clear expressions of fascism, not subtle or equivocal arguments. I assigned a speech by Mussolini (probably ghost-written by Gentile). I did not end up using Heidegger’s 1933 “Rector’s Address” because it’s too complicated and addresses too many things at once. Authors and individual texts are more attractive if they say one thing clearly (like the proverbial hedgehog) rather than many things with various qualifications and complexities (like the fox). Therefore, our syllabi fill up with works by “hedgehogs.”

See also: on hedgehogs and foxes; trying to keep myself honest; don’t confuse bias and judgment

In US law and in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, free speech means rights of individuals and associations against their governments. If you have a right to a given form of speech, then your government may not block, ban, or punish that speech.

Free speech is very extensive in the USA. In 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court found that a KKK leader had the right to advocate publicly for “revengeance” against “black peoples” and “Jews.” This decision clearly protected hate speech and remains the law.

One important exception has involved non-US citizens. Periodically throughout US history, the federal government has barred people from entry or deported them on the basis of their speech. This is an unsettled area of constitutional law that is before courts right now.

Notwithstanding their constitutional free speech rights, Americans generally lack the right to speak as they wish at work. An employer can usually fire you for what you say, or even for speaking at all.

There are some exceptions. Many employees have a right to advocate unionization under the National Labor Rights Act, although that right is poorly enforced. Some public employees have free speech rights because their employer is also the government, but they are not protected when they are speaking in their governmental role. For instance, a state attorney does not have a constitutional right to dissent publicly about a case being handled by his office (Garcetti v. Ceballos, 2006).

Since the late 1800s, some have argued that students and faculty need freedom of speech to advance the mission of an educational institution. An early statement was by the University of Wisconsin in 1894: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

This is academic freedom in the form of rights for individuals and groups of students and faculty in relation to their own educational institutions. Today, it is encoded in the form of policies adopted by specific schools and colleges, employment contracts, student disciplinary codes, prevalent norms and expectations, and some state laws that afford rights to students or faculty in state schools and colleges.

For the most part, academic freedom is not a constitutional right derived from the First Amendment. A college or a state system can choose not to offer it. When individuals sue for academic freedom, it is usually for breach of a contract that was voluntarily adopted by their employer.

It is tempting to envision academic freedom as just like freedom of speech, except that an educational institution is like the government: prevented from censoring or punishing individuals’ speech. But this model quickly falls apart, because educational institutions are fundamentally and intrinsically involved in choosing, evaluating, rewarding, and penalizing speech. For example, a department will select the prospective instructor who offers the best writing and oral presentation among all the applicants. That person is hired to teach courses in the approved curriculum. Professors award grades based on the quality and relevance of the students’ writing and speaking.

Thus the idea of neutrality or non-interference, which applies to governments, simply cannot govern schools or colleges.

Instead, academic freedom is a patchwork of provisions that vary by institution. Many universities have adopted explicit policies of not restricting faculty or student speech based on its point-of-view or position, usually within limits. (For example, the right to express opinions on political issues does not allow a faculty member to take extensive time in the classroom to discuss issues unrelated to the course content.) Colleges generally adopt procedures for faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure that are meant to enhance freedom along with quality. We talk about a “tenure case” because it has the feel of a legal process, with rights afforded to the applicant. Receiving tenure then prevents professors from being fired for the content of their speech.

Further, universities assign many decisions to groups of students or faculty instead of the central administration. For example, student groups often have broad rights to invite speakers of their choice. Departments are influential in choosing faculty and determining curricula. The whole body of faculty of a college votes on key curricular matters. These are examples of academic freedom as a kind of freedom of association for specific categories of people within the institution. The Supreme Court has also sometimes acknowledged a free speech right for each university to determine its own programming (Justice Powell in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1978).

The norm not to interfere with speech on the basis of viewpoint or content is quite strong in higher education (much less so in K12), yet the prevalent rules leave many gaps. In particular:

1. Only students and “instructors” are typically protected. At my university, just under 30% of the employees are faculty, broadly defined. In general, if you cut the grass at a college, you have no more free speech than if you cut the grass at a condominium. And if you are a dean or vice-provost, a laboratory technician, a clinical physician, or a counselor, you may not be covered by academic freedom.
2. Academic freedom is quite strong in a setting like a philosophy seminar, where the participants probably enrolled by choice, the professor had a lot of scope to choose the curriculum, and everyone can choose their own positions. But switch your example to a laboratory in the medical or engineering school. This is a highly capitalized enterprise with expensive equipment and many at-will employees. It probably exists thanks to government grants and private philanthropy. These two go together because private donations are what allow universities to hire the faculty, attract the graduate students, and build facilities that make them competitive for federal funds. Harvard wins $8 billion in federal grants annually because it has $53 billion in private money. In the lab sciences, key decision-makers include donors (often members of the board of trustees) and government officials. Now switch back to the philosophy class and bear in mind that overhead from STEM research may subsidize the professor’s salary. From this perspective, a university is not a community of citizens in a republic of letters who each decide what to say. It is an expensive, top-down enterprise whose research agenda is negotiated with outsiders.
3. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prevents discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. For decades, it has been interpreted to mean that schools and colleges have a legal obligation to prevent speech by their own students and employees that causes discrimination. This principle is in tension with academic freedom as the right to choose and express one’s own view.

I do not regard this tension as simply unfortunate. In an educational institution, which is an employer, a gatekeeper to professions, and usually a landlord as well as a venue for “continual and fearless sifting,” both academic freedom and anti-discrimination are important. But I have long worried that penalizing speech and treating it as a disciplinary concern violates valid speech rights, hampers debate, and creates opportunities for bad actors to suppress valuable speech.* The Biden Administration investigated at least a dozen universities for potentially failing to protect Jewish students’ civil rights by stopping anti-Israel protests. I strongly disagreed with those actions, but far worse are the Trump Administration’s arbitrary and vindictive attacks on specific universities, which use Title VI as a weapon. (Interestingly, the latest letter from the Trump Administration to Harvard drops the pretext that the issue was ever antisemitism.)

4. Alex Gourevitch makes an important point that the whole framework of preventing harm to students especially threatens the right to protest, because protests involve “public expressions of hostility toward political views and often the people who hold them.” I would add that protests are collective actions, during which individual participants can say a range of things. If a whole protest is shut down or punished because of what some people say, then all the other people’s right to protest has been curtailed.
5. There is a live debate about whether educational institutions, as opposed to individual faculty and students, may or should speak. Proponents of the Kalven Report argue that speech by university leaders may chill individuals’ dissenting speech and purport to represent employees and students who cannot determine what the college says in their name. Critics of the Kalven Report argue that universities should be able to speak freely in the public sphere and doubt that these institutions could or should be neutral. I served on Tufts’ committee that considered these issues, and I am proud of our report, but I can’t describe it yet because it hasn’t been released. I would only say that this is a complex topic because institutions communicate in so many ways. Statements by university presidents are just one example.

*See also: freedom of speech for universities (2003), free speech and school discipline (2006), a theory of free speech on campus (2009), free speech at a university (2014), science, law, and microagressions (2017), podcast on free Speech, democracy, and campus discourse (2024), etc.

Harvard is prominent in the news because of its battle with the Trump Administration. The model that Harvard epitomizes is worth fighting for, but fragile. While defending it, we should also be thinking about radical alternatives.

Harvard spends more than $6 billion per year, drawing its revenue from philanthropy (45%), tuition, including executive education (21%), research grants (16%), and an “other” category (18%) that includes clinical fees and intellectual property.

Harvard spends very large sums on scientific research and depends on the federal government and wealthy donors for a majority of its budget. It’s largely an illusion that philanthropy provides financial aid. With an endowment of $2.1 million per student, Harvard could charge zero tuition for all. Instead–and, I think, understandably–it charges a high sticker price for those who are able to pay, offers steep discounts for others, and uses a large proportion of its net revenue for research.

The advantages are whatever benefits society obtains from the research. The vulnerability is the university’s dependence on national politicians and the donors who dominate its board of trustees. From an outsider’s perspective, another drawback is that the university rejects an extraordinary proportion of the people who might want to study or work there. Its exclusiveness makes it a rewarding political target.

Such universities also face internal conflicts when federal grants or endowment funds are threatened, because their funding models vary drastically within the institution. For example, the Harvard Divinity School is really financed by endowment returns, obtaining few grants and little tuition revenue. The much larger Harvard Medical School gets a majority of its funds from grants or clinical revenues and only 27% from endowment. The Law School relies on tuition for 43% of its revenue, as compared to 10% in the Medical School. If the trustees stop donating, the market falls, or the federal government suspends all grants, the repercussions will be very uneven. At Columbia, internal conflicts between STEM programs and the liberal arts contributed to its weak response to the Trump administration.

Of course, the Harvard model is not relevant across academia. Wesleyan, which has been courageously opposing the Trump Administration, received a total of $11 million in government and private grants in 2024, representing four percent of its revenues. Wesleyan does not generate the kind of labor- and capital-intensive research that Harvard produces, so it is much less vulnerable.

Most US college students attend public institutions that are not research-intensive or endowed, where tuition really dominates revenue. If Trump’s assault on higher education succeeds, it will cause massive damage on some campuses and have little effect on others.

Traditionally, one way that Americans have responded to crises is by creating new types of colleges–from Calvinist beacons in the 1600s, to Black institutions in Reconstruction, to the California public system after WWII (and many other examples). However, I have shown that the rate at which new institutions are launched has fallen to an all-time low. And, despite the prevalence of several different basic models, the degree of similarity across categories of universities is striking. Each research-intensive university operates largely like all the others.

Here is an alternative that we might consider today:

A new institution would be a cooperative owned and run by its employees, with considerable involvement by students.

The college would incorporate as a nonprofit but only accept donations into its general fund (no earmarks), and its governing board would be elected by its employees plus some student representatives. Employees and students could accept grants and contracts, but there would be no sponsored research office, so the college would be ineligible for most federal grants.

It would minimize costs. It would not provide housing or many services to students outside of the classroom. (As a result, it would be less appropriate for students who have various kinds of needs.) Faculty, staff, and students would do a lot of the management by rotating on committees.

The base tuition price might be set at $12,000, with a faculty/student ratio of 15:1, producing about $180,000 per instructor, which would be divided between instructors’ salaries, benefits, and additional staff (such as accountants, facilities workers, an IT department, etc.). Financial aid would, for the most part, consist of salaries for student workers who would provide essential support. So more financial aid would equal lower staff costs.

The location would have to be urban or suburban, because this would be a commuter school. It could be located in an underserved city, perhaps one of the cities that ring Appalachia. Or, for symbolic reasons–and because there are educational advantages to studying in Washington–it could take residence in the Nation’s Capital.

This design is meant to maximize autonomy and accessibility and serve as a refuge if the existing models succumb to political pressure.

See also: Society is corrupt? Found a new college!; investing in the Appalachian cities; and a co-op model for a college (written in 2015).

Anyone who is attending this year’s annual American Political Science Association meeting in Philadelphia and who is curious about engaged research might consider:

“Cutting Edge Community Empowerment through Civically Engaged Research: A Roundtable Discussion and Panel“

This session will include five original papers and 8 responses, almost all by people who have been part of our annual Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER) at Tufts’ Tisch College of Civic Life. There will also be an ICER reception on September 7 from 7:30-9:00 PM, which anyone at APSA can attend. ICER will continue in 2025 and beyond, so these are good opportunities if you think you might be interested.

Another aspect of this year’s meeting is a mini-conference on “Civic Learning on Campus” (part 1 and part 2). One of my contributions to that strand will be a talk about Elinor Ostrom’s 1997 APSA presidential address. In that talk, she defined civic education as learning to address problems of collective action at all scales, not as studying the national government.

Finally, the Civic Studies Group brings you a panel on Innovations and Theories for Public Engagement, with papers on forms of self-governance at the community level.

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