Some of my best work in my twenty years as a university educator happened when things went wrong. The times I meant to base the day’s discussion on a film and the projector failed. The time my son’s daycare was temporarily closed without warning and I consequently had him on my hip while teaching the history of the medicalization of birth. The time I assigned a reading I had long used, on the history of the criminalization of homosexuality, without realizing that the version I had assigned this particular semester had (to my horror) a new addendum arguing for getting rid of legal limits on the age of consent. The time the planes hit the towers and the towers fell.

In all of these circumstances, I was forced to essentially abandon my lesson plans and let the students’ reactions to the moment lead where my teaching would go. I was reminded in these times of an adage that long guided me: Teaching is mostly listening, and learning is mostly talking. What that captures most is the idea that a teacher must be open to the possibility that inquiry will lead somewhere unpredictable.

In the U.S., we are facing more and more attempts to use the powers of government to ban specific subjects from classrooms. The earnest, well-meaning individuals promoting these bans want to stop what they see as political indoctrination carried out in the name of real education, to prevent students from being made to feel guilty about historic wrongs, and to limit the spread of what they strongly believe to be untrue.

At Heterodox Academy, we are definitely concerned about higher educational classrooms being misused as sites of political activism rather than as sacred places where we encourage the pursuit of truth and teach the practices of open inquiry (including especially intellectual humility). But we are also working to call out and push back against government bans on classroom subjects.

Tax dollars support higher education – including private colleges and universities – in myriad ways, and some have argued that, when higher education is paid for with tax dollars, taxpayers should determine what can’t be taught.

But the most obvious problem with government-imposed classroom bans is that it chains inquiry to politically-instituted walls. As HxA’s Director of Communications Nicole Barbaro Simovski and Director of Policy Joe Cohn wrote earlier this week, “Government bans on ideas in the classroom undermine open inquiry that is fundamental to the university and its community. The contemporary ‘divisive concepts’ of the day may become tomorrow's cannon, disgrace, or footnote, but it is for the community, not the government, to figure that out in an open, rigorous, and critical examination.”

Incidentally, while many of the current government classroom restriction attempts have occurred at the hands of Republican elected officials (as in Ohio and Florida), it would be wrong to assume these issues fall neatly along partly lines, as a recent case in New York shows. It’s worth noting that, last September, Republicans in the House with an assist from just four Democrats passed a higher education bill that, if it were ever signed into law, would formally urge institutions “to adopt the Chicago Principles or similar commitments to campus free speech and open inquiry.”

We hope that politicians of all stripes come to understand the vital importance of keeping inquiry open, particularly since another problem with aggressive government action on higher ed is the potential for overinterpretation by university personnel worried about crossing government officials. This happened in Texas recently. There, a law was passed to eliminate DEI-promoting administrative offices, particular kinds of DEI training, and DEI statements being required of job applicants. Then a compliance officer for the University of North Texas advised faculty classroom lessons were also subject to limits around DEI topics.

As our policy director Joe Cohn, a First Amendment specialist, wrote at the time, “It’s easy to understand why a campus administration fearful of government retaliation might try to preempt legislators who hold the purse strings, but when those efforts would infringe on constitutional rights, that simply is not an option.”

Whenever political litmus tests are used to screen out “wrongthinking” individuals from jobs and promotions, we should be alarmed and take action. But as our director of communications Nicole Barbaro Simovski has noted, attempts to stop DEI ideological tests have ballooned into moves to halt research and teaching on women, LGBT people, and black people.

And DEI is hardly the only area where problematic silencing can occur in response to fear of the heavy hand of government. We can certainly appreciate why elected officials want to fight antisemitism, and institutions must take action to ensure their campuses aren’t permeated with harassment. Yet attempts to stop allegedly antisemitic teaching can wind up silencing those who want to teach about antisemitism. In my own history of medicine courses, I purposefully had my premed students read Nazi medical texts specifically so that they could appreciate, at a gut level, Hannah Ardnt’s point about the banality of evil.

The best teaching, I learned over the years, comes from having finely-tuned lesson plans…and a willingness to abandon them, to be open to unexpected moments, to students’ needs, and to free inquiry.

We must assiduously avoid creating an academic culture where nervous professors turn themselves into thought police. That would be a painfully ironic outcome, to be sure, because so much of what’s causing the harm has been a reaction to perceived thought-policing on campus.