Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi recently wrote an essay titled, “The Vanderbilt-WashU Report Doesn’t Threaten Academic Freedom. It Defends It.” Tomasi imagines a “duty to intervene” that I strongly disagree with: “Academic freedom does not prevent university leaders from reforming wayward scholarship. Indeed, if professors abandon scholarly norms to pursue purely political projects, university leaders may have a duty to intervene.”
It’s disturbing that Tomasi has shifted his emphasis from advocating viewpoint diversity to declaring certain viewpoints (“political projects”) off limits and endorsing administrative intervention to prohibit them. The goal of viewpoint diversity should be to bring more perspectives into academia, not to banish those deemed to have the wrong political viewpoint.
But I want to focus on Tomasi’s argument that American Association of University Professors documents support his position: “Perhaps surprisingly, this duty of intervention is set out in the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure—the classic defense of academic freedom, written by the founders of the AAUP.” That is surprising. Unfortunately, it’s surprising because it isn’t true, and the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration is directly opposed to Tomasi’s theory of an administrative “duty to intervene.”
