Authoritarians in the Academy

Free thought in America’s universities is suffocating. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the country’s leading watchdog for campus free speech, recently published its annual rankings. The results are grim. For the second year in a row, Harvard University is last. Columbia and New York University sit alongside it in the bottom three, each branded with an “Abysmal” speech climate. The University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College round out the bottom five, both earning a “Very Poor” rating.

These aren’t minor blemishes on otherwise stellar reputations. The scores are rooted in years of scandal after scandal, many involving the same pattern: suppression of free expression, punishment of dissent, and enforcing conformity disguised as “tolerance”. FIRE’s metrics track “Administrative Support”, “Comfort Expressing Ideas”, and “Tolerance Difference” which gauges how willing students are to hear from both liberal and conservative voices. The bottom-ranked schools scored disastrously low across the board. At precisely the institutions that boast of producing the next generation of leaders, free inquiry is treated like contraband.

FIRE senior scholar Sarah McLaughlin has spent years documenting how easily universities abandon principles when they threaten their funding streams or prestige. Her new book, Authoritarians in the Academy, is a damning exposé of how American higher education has become compromised. Universities talk endlessly about their commitment to truth and discovery, but when pressed, those ideals collapse under the weight of money, fear, and vanity.

McLaughlin’s book brims with examples that would be comical if they weren’t so chilling. In 2022, students at George Washington University put up artwork satirizing Beijing’s role as Olympic host. The posters drew attention to the persecution of Uyghurs, the suppression of Tibet, and China’s vast surveillance state. The backlash came quickly. The university’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association condemned the posters as racist, demanded punishment of those responsible, and filed a bias complaint. Instead of defending free expression, GWU’s president at the time, Mark Wrighton, said he was “personally offended”, ordered the posters be taken down, and vowed to identify those who had made them. Campus police combed through surveillance footage, while administrators arranged support sessions for students claiming to be traumatized by criticism of China.

It took an outcry from FIRE and national commentators to put an end to the farce. Only then did Wrighton backpedal, ending the investigation. Yet the message had already been sent: offend Beijing and you’ll pay. McLaughlin points out that this wasn’t about protecting students; it was about protecting revenue. American universities rake in billions from full-paying Chinese students and lucrative partnerships with Chinese institutions. When Beijing’s proxies demand censorship, administrators catch the message loud and clear, and comply rather than risk the cash flow drying up.

McLaughlin calls this “sensitivity exploitation”: the weaponization of offense. Foreign students, backed by authoritarian governments, cry harm at criticism of their regimes. Administrators, fearful of losing tuition dollars or lucrative partnerships, cave to the pressure. What starts as a call for cultural sensitivity turns into a tool of censorship, essentially a shakedown carried out in academic robes.

The most obvious vehicle for this leverage has been the Confucius Institutes. Pitched as cultural exchange programs, they were in fact pipelines of Chinese soft power, funneling money into American campuses in exchange for propaganda and silence. Thankfully, many have now been shuttered under political pressure, but, as McLaughlin notes, Beijing is already building new channels of influence. And it is not alone. India, Turkey, Qatar, and the UAE have all used financial ties to pressure American universities into muting criticism.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when university presidents stood tall and showed real resolve. In 1967, the University of Chicago set the gold standard with the Kalven Report, a document endorsed by President George Beadle that declared the university’s role was not to bend to political fashion but to provide “the fullest freedom” for faculty and students to explore even the most divisive ideas.

That stance — placing inquiry above all else — became a lasting touchstone for academic freedom. Decades later, in 2016, the University of Chicago once again showed what real leadership looks like. President Robert Zimmer wrote to every incoming freshman, making it plain that the university would not cancel invited speakers, would not create safe spaces, and would not shield students from unsettling ideas.

The Chicago Principles marked not just a defense of free inquiry but also a stark contrast with the direction most universities were taking. While Chicago remained firm, the ground was shifting elsewhere. Universities increasingly learned to suppress expression in the name of protecting their “brand”. McLaughlin cites the case of Truman State University, where officials refused to allow a student chapter of PETA on campus. Their reasoning was telling: activism, they claimed, might cause “emotional risk” for students and “reputational risk” for the school. Faced with the choice between free speech and institutional image, they chose to muzzle speech and avoid controversy.

That instinct to censor doesn’t stop at home. It carries overseas, where American universities eagerly establish satellite campuses in authoritarian states while promising to uphold Western values. The reality is far different. Once on foreign soil, these institutions surrender to local laws and suppress speech that host governments deem “sensitive”. Students often assume they will enjoy the same freedoms abroad that they do at home. All too often, as McLaughlin shows, they discover in frightening ways that those freedoms vanish the moment they test them. Each time a university censors to appease a foreign government, or hides behind claims of “protecting students”, it erodes the very foundation of free inquiry. What begins as a small concession soon calcifies into policy, until censorship feels natural and speech is treated as something to be contained, controlled, and crushed.

That is why Authoritarians in the Academy matters. It exposes the decay inside institutions that claim to guard truth. The assault on free thought seldom arrives with shackles or guns. More often, it seeps in through boardrooms, dressed in the language of safety and dignity, while delivering submission and suppression.

Harvard, Columbia, and Penn, once symbols of fearless inquiry, now sit at the bottom of national rankings for free speech. Their leaders preach enlightenment while policing language. It is a betrayal of their students, who come to have their minds expanded rather than narrowed. It is also a betrayal of the very idea of the university itself. America deserves better. It deserves schools that once again dare to defend free thought.