The Free Inquiry Papers, eds. Robert Maranto, Catherine Salmon, Lee Jussim, and Sally Satel, AEI Press, 2025, pp. vi + 357, $14.94 paperback.
The Free Inquiry Papers brings together twenty essays—introduction and conclusion included—by a wide range of education reformers. Together they examine why freedom of inquiry matters to both the university and the republic, how it has been compromised, and what might restore it. Yet the very framing around “free inquiry” limits the scope of both the diagnosis and the cure. To define the university’s troubles in terms of free inquiry is to begin from classical liberal assumptions—and to imply that classical liberal, proceduralist remedies will suffice. That may offer a partial remedy at best, and a counterproductive one at worst.
The essays provide an accurate catalogue of the aspects of the modern “woke” ideology that has taken over the university and the means by which that ideology systematically undermines free inquiry:
First, they define people primarily as members of groups rather than as individuals. Relatedly, they hold Manichaean approaches to truth, with clear divisions between good and evil thoughts and people. This mindset lends itself to cognitive closure, censorship, and repression.
They also prize theory more than either scientific empirical testing or practical experience. Finally, like Marxism, Hegelianism, and Platonism, and resembling early 20th-century American progressives such as Woodrow Wilson, they harbor a deep-seated distrust of pluralism, the distribution of authority, and a democratic public’s judgment. (9) … virtue signaling and groupthink mostly silence alternative viewpoints via “cancellation” and sometimes the threat of job loss and reputational damage. (10)
The “woke” left increasingly has abandoned pluralism and constitutionalism, prefers to impose its policies by resort to (friendly) bureaucrats and “experts” (13), and, as it seeks to stifle dissent, also stifles free speech and (particularly in the universities) free inquiry. The “woke” left has acquired a stranglehold over the university by adroit takeover of the commanding heights of the administration and the professoriate.
The Free Inquiry Papers’ Table of Contents provides a good summary of the book’s arguments: the titles are admirably lucid.
The Free Inquiry Papers: Why Now? … Why Democracy Requires Free Inquiry … Why Free Speech? … Why Social Justice Requires Free Inquiry … The Rise of Self-Censorship in America … How Institutional Speech Erodes Academic Freedom … Academic Freedom and the Social Media Veto … Do No Anti-Racist Harm: Medical Education Under Threat … Lysenkoism Then and Now: A Cautionary Tale of Censorious Social Norms … Ostrich Syndrome and Campus Free Expression … Examining the Tensions Between Free Markets and Free Speech … Mobilization for Academic Free Speech: The Wisconsin Model … Make a Bureaucracy to Beat a Bureaucracy? Free Speech Bureaucracies and How to Get Them … Can Intellectual Diversity Be Recovered in Academia? … Merit, Fairness, and Equality: An Alternative to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion … Rhetorical Jujitsu: Leveraging Campus DEI to Promote Ideological Diversity … Fighting the Good Fight in an Age of Unreason: A New Dissident Guide … Free Speech Advice for the President of Hypothetical U … Beyond Free Speech: The Constitution of Knowledge … Conclusion: How to Bring Back Free Inquiry. (v-vi)
The essays argue for the value of free inquiry, and substantiate its vitiation in the modern university generally by adopting the language and means of the social sciences—cursory history, charts, and potted statistics. For example,
We first focus on recent scholarship studying affective polarization, a type of division in the mass public in which “ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from another party.… Although grounded in a small number of data points, the relationship between the two indicators is quite strong: Based on filling in yearly scores using linear interpolation, the correlation of self-censorship with ideological polarization is 0.91 (N = 48); with partisan polarization, r = 0.86 (N = 43). (51-52)
The presumed audience generally would seem to be liberal-but-not progressive academics—a group which the authors apparently believe can be peeled off from “woke” progressivism by rational, classical-liberal argumentation. The chapter “Why Social Justice Requires Free Inquiry” exemplifies this approach. (28-45) Free Inquiry Papers aims more to persuade a liberal academic audience than a broader audience of moderate and conservative Americans.
Perhaps in consequence, Free Inquiry Papers suffers from odd lapses. Sometimes the authors conflate free inquiry with support for interventionist foreign policy priorities. (6-7) Other authors, credulous of previous generations of leftist polemic about the “Red Scare,” assume there was no justification for purging Communists from the U.S. government during and after World War II (23, 33-34, 48, 82, 185, 204). Yet others conflate support for pornography and birth control with free inquiry (24), or casually accept the shallow myths of the Catholic Church (82) and Trofim Lysenko as emblems of suppressing free inquiry (82, 130-32, 213).1 These lapses ultimately lead to statements that are historically illiterate and basically false:
These [McCarthyite] witch hunts created a generally chilling effect for leftists and nonconformists, so that the civil rights movement was effectively put on hold for fear of being labeled Communist. (34)
The height of American anti-Communism coincided with the desegregation of the military (1948), the prohibition of exclusionary racial covenants in housing (1948), and Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—and by and large it was the same bipartisan establishment that championed the most effective purges of Communists from government service that also championed these revolutions for civil rights.2 An historical error of such magnitude undermines confidence in the authors’ accounts of the present day and their preferred policy prescriptions.
And their account of the present day does give pause. Most consequentially for modern education reform, the authors repeatedly condemn recent state legislation to limit critical race theory, DEI, the 1619 Project, and other aspects of woke indoctrination (25-26, 28, 35-36, 65, 75; and see 144, 151). We may take it as likely that they also would condemn the Trump administration’s initiatives to roll back Woke illiberalism in higher education. The tenor of The Free Inquiry Papers is to condemn the bolder wing—the effective wing—of modern education reform.
The Free Inquiry Papers’ approach can be a useful tool, as part of a broader campaign to reform American colleges and universities. But such an approach can be a danger, if it eschews and distances itself from bolder spirits and subordinates education reform to the ends and means of proceduralist classical liberalism. That, above all, is because proceduralism assumes continued liberal governance of the academy. Consider these chapter titles:
Make a Bureaucracy to Beat a Bureaucracy? Free Speech Bureaucracies and How to Get Them … Rhetorical Jujitsu: Leveraging Campus DEI to Promote Ideological Diversity … Fighting the Good Fight in an Age of Unreason: A New Dissident Guide … Free Speech Advice for the President of Hypothetical U.
These chapter titles, and their contents, assume that the Woke will continue to run the universities. The solutions they therefore proffer, necessarily, are defensive bureaucracies, rhetoric, dissent, and advice. The same may be said about The Free Inquiry Papers as a whole: the concluding chapter’s list of headings of policy advice generally prescribes timid reforms:
Sponsor Campus Debates on Contentious Topics … Humanize the Canceled … Hold Hearings on Bureaucratic Attempts to Limit Free Speech and Open Inquiry … Repair or Reduce Higher Education Bureaucracies That Limit Free Speech … Teach Free Speech and Open Inquiry … End Public Funding for Higher Education Organizations That Require Political or Ideological Statements of Faith … Add Ideology to the List of “Protected Classes” … Evaluate DEI Interventions …Fight Bad Speech with Counter-Speech … Reform Institutional Review Boards … Improve Public Education on Pluralism and the First Amendment … Create New Institutions of Higher Learning [such as the University of Austin]. (334-42)
The Free Inquiry Papers catalogues the Woke’s tyrannical temper and policies, fundamentally accepts their continued rule over the universities as a given, and (save for the last option of creating new institutions, which it presents as a last resort) proffers parchment barriers as a solution.
One author puts these presumptions especially clearly: “We will never persuade the academy to jettison its diversity projects.” (248) Well, no. And these advocates of free inquiry seem to blink at the corollary that education reform should not, cannot, must not satisfy themselves with persuasion.
We should meet professors where they are and provide a positive narrative as to how ideological diversity is consistent with DEI’s values and goals. This is likely to be more persuasive than a negative narrative arguing against DEI. (253)
Not every author in The Free Inquiry Papers takes quite so timid a tack—but this assumption pervades these chapters, that one should accept that the status quo cannot be changed.
This, ultimately, is to accept the defeat of education reform in advance, for we cannot reasonably expect that we can succeed in persuading the academic establishment to mend its ways. Paper reforms proffered to our ivory tower tyrants have as much chance of enduring as did the Munich Agreement. The Woke cannot be persuaded; they must be dislodged from power.
Americans at present have a once-in-a-lifetime, perhaps unique, chance to genuinely reform our colleges and universities. The Free Inquiry Papers’ classical liberal approach seems rather to seek a tame reservation for the non-Woke within a continuingly woke university. Even if sustainable—which one may doubt, given the aggressive dynamics of Woke ideology—this would be to exchange an academy modeled on the one-party dictatorship of the USSR for an academy modeled on East Germany, where harmless licensed opposition parties continued to provide the illusion of freedom. We have a chance to make a revolution, but such an approach risks converting the revolution into the eternal procrastination of Prufrock professors:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool.
Let us consider how a classical liberal approach might affect our new-founded civic centers, planted in our colleges and universities. These ought to be the beachheads for the reconquest of the universities as a whole, their deans training to be provosts and college presidents who will remake the larger universities. But what if they take their cue from the author who writes, “Appeals to the professoriat[e] for ideological diversity should be made often and mostly by academics and political liberals or progressives, rather than conservatives or nonacademics”? (258) Then we could expect the centers to hire solely the classical liberals and clubbable conservatives who would appeal to a dominant liberal establishment for better conditions, rather than lead a revolution to overturn that establishment.
That would be a grave error. Our civic centers should hire staunch conservatives, and unreservedly champion nonacademic education reformers, to make clear that they are not appealing for change, but instituting it—with or without the cooperation of the existing education establishment. The civic centers should be hiring Scott Yenors and Scott Gerbers, John Eastmans and David Azerrads, as bona fides that they will not be tame. If they limit themselves to winsome classical liberalism, which eschews the ambition to revolutionize university governance and seeks only polite and meaningless procedural reforms, then they will have wasted a great opportunity, perhaps our final one.
They also will ensure that education reformers ultimately will abandon these new institutions. They are only worth our support if they commit themselves to effective conservative reform, and make clear that they are not simply seeking a licensed enclave within the academy. If education reformers within the existing academy are too weak to do more than appeal to the better angels of the existing establishment, then we should turn, and will turn, concertedly toward the demolition of the old network of colleges and universities and the creation of a new one.
The university radicalized, after all, because classic liberals failed at the task of university governance. We should welcome the assistance of those classic liberals who realize how badly the university went wrong—but they do not give signs of having learned from their failures how to lead a counter-revolution. We should not grant them leadership of the movement for education reform.
I write all this in tones of somewhat sharp polemic that emphasizes the distinctions within the camp of education reformers. I don’t want to exaggerate this. NAS and I are friends and fellow-workers with many of the authors of The Free Inquiry Papers, as we are friends and fellow workers with the bolder reformers who seem notably unrepresented in this book. At least one of the editors of The Free Inquiry Papers also has signed The Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, which may be taken as a manifesto for the bolder school of education reformers.3 The Free Inquiry Papers is only a book written for a particular purpose, and not a manifesto. Education reform can and should be baggy, capacious, and pluralistic in its approach.
Yet it is worth stating clearly some strategic and philosophical presumptions. The Free Inquiry Papers, and the approach it exemplifies, can be a useful tool. There are doubtless some administrators and professors within the university who can be persuaded by these charts and arguments to abandon the Woke—although I fear that most of the persuadable are gray-haired. But it should only be a tool, and not a comprehensive strategy. The institutions and personnel that carry out education reform should aim ultimately to seize control of academic governance as a whole, they should full-throatedly embrace the radical reform of staunch conservatives and external policymakers, and they should hire Yenors and Gerbers and Eastmans and Azerrads to make clear that they are not trying to join the university club. They should not satisfy themselves with procedural reforms in a university still staffed, still governed, by a Woke establishment.
The university’s architecture of intellectual freedom4 only can be renewed by regime change. We must be clear that we aim at nothing less.
David Randall is director of research at the National Association of Scholars, 13 W 36th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10018; randall@nas.org. His most recent books are The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero’s Sermo to the Grand Siècle’s Conversation (2018) and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought (2019). Randall’s review “Is Western Civilization Even Real?” of Giorgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea appears in the current issue of AQ.
1 For some complexities, see J. L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); J. Scott Turner, “Mixing Politics and Science: Lessons Learned,” Academic Questions (Summer 2025), https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/38/2/mixing-politics-and-science-lessons-learned.
2 The most effective purges of Communists from the government were conducted by the Truman administration between 1945 and 1953. David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978).
3 The Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, https://manhattan.institute/article/the-manhattan-statement-on-higher-education.
4 Peter Wood, The Architecture of Intellectual Freedom (National Association of Scholars, 2016), https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/the_architecture_of_intellectual_freedom.
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