It’s no longer news that scholars feel less free academically. In November, an Inside Higher Ed survey showed that 91% of faculty feel that academic freedom is under threat. And the just released 2025 Academic Freedom Index (AFI) shows that, in the U.S., academic freedom has significantly declined since 2014, with a particularly precipitous drop after 2019.

Many of the threats to open inquiry come from within the academy. Some institutions have imposed political and ideological litmus tests on hiring and promotion of faculty, scholars have been compelled to add DEI content to their syllabi, research projects, grant reports, and too many academic departments have lacked viewpoint diversity. But, as Musa al-Gharbi has recently argued, addressing these very real problems requires solutions that don’t replace one set of partisan and ideological barriers to open inquiry with new restrictions from the other direction.

At Heterodox Academy, our primary mission is to ensure that universities are places where open inquiry — in classrooms, scholarship, and research — is a reality. We are therefore concerned with the culture and experience on the ground, and the policies that shape that culture. Recent political actions from the federal government, however, suggest that the culture of open inquiry is being critically compromised on campuses around the country. These actions have narrowed inquiry in research, threatened expression with sanctions, and incentivized political compliance. The chill is pervasive.

Last month, interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin told Georgetown law school officials that he would not hire, as fellows or interns, students or others “affiliated with a law school or university” that “continues to teach and utilize DEI.” He asked, “If DEI is found in your courses or teaching in anyway [sic], will you move swiftly to remove it?” in a clear violation to the legal and normative case for academic freedom.

While HxA has been a consistent critic of the use of DEI statements as ideological litmus tests in hiring and promotion of faculty and has applauded when they are removed from hiring practices, we’re also staunch opponents of government bans on ideas in the classroom. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), the Supreme Court warned against the government trying to cast a “pall of orthodoxy” over the classroom. In response to Martin’s letter, Georgetown Law School Dean William Treanor, defended his institution’s exercise of its academic freedom, writing,

The First Amendment, however, guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it. The Supreme Court has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university’s First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.

Earlier that week, the U.S. Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) threatening institutions with deep funding cuts.. The letter claimed that “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia.” In support of this claim, it asserted that “colleges, universities, and K-12 schools have routinely used race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming.”

The inclusion of “institutional programming” caught our attention because it is a phrase so broad that it could include collegiate classrooms or academic conferences. It caught others’ attention, too, since the Trump administration subsequently issued an “FAQ” to clarify that, in fact, federal law prohibits the Department of Education (ED) “from exercising control over the content of school curricula.” Indeed, another federal law prohibits any part of the federal government from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction.”

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.

There is also chilling occurring in research, with significant funding freezes, cuts, and censorship leaving research stalled and researchers on eggshells about how to continue work labeled as “woke” or “DEI” by the Trump administration. As HxA’s Alice Dreger recently detailed, federal research grants are being cut for misalignment with the Trump administration’s agenda. The chill is so pervasive that some universities are removing words like “woman” from their websites in a preemptive, fear-driven move to avoid federal retaliation. If these preemptive redactions aren’t literal self-censorship, what is?

Academic collaborators with government scientists have been ordered to withdraw papers that include disfavored words. Researchers conducting medical research on cancer and asthma have been put on blast by the White House for “waste, fraud, and abuse” after administrative staff have misunderstood research terminology and study applications. Another scholar’s “upcoming paper on the effects of fentanyl on HIV and Hepatitis C epidemics has been put on hold by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because it contains the word gender.”

Such actions have narrowed the acceptable scope of research permissible. In a recent guide for researchers on how to navigate the current environment, researchers are advised to “frame their findings strategically” if their work is on “politically sensitive topics.” It is deeply troubling that scientific work will either thrive or die on whether scientists can describe their work carefully enough to avoid clashing with the federal government over blacklisted keywords taken out of context.

But perhaps the most talked about stories in recent weeks center on Columbia, a testing ground for how new federal oversight from the Trump administration could play out in universities across the country.

In a move to clamp down on antisemitism on campus, the Trump administration has taken a number of actions. HxA is deeply troubled with institutions like Columbia’s inability to produce a campus climate free of antisemitic harassment. Jewish students and faculty — like everyone else — are entitled to an educational environment where harassment is not tolerated, but they do not have the right to be shielded from ideas they don’t want to hear. With the latest rounds of buildings being occupied, the ED’s focus on Columbia seems appropriate. HxA agrees with the federal government enforcing Title VI, but believes that its enforcement should not be so overly broad as to compromise open inquiry.

Unfortunately, several of the Trump administration’s actions at Columbia are overly broad.

In a move that is sure to reverberate throughout institutions nationwide, the ED cut $400 million of Columbia’s federal funding, and on March 13 issued a letter with a list of demands that Columbia must follow to “open a conversation” about long-term reforms. Some of the demands would be positive steps to address antisemitism at Columbia; for example, HxA agrees that the university should consistently and fairly enforce time, place, and manner restrictions so that protesters cannot occupy buildings and prevent others in the community from pursuing their studies.

“If Columbia were to do what the March 13 letter asks, it would be waving the white flag of surrender to any pretense that it will respect and protect academic freedom, the most prized and essential aspect of teaching and research in higher education,” writes Austin Sarat in a recent Inside Higher Ed piece.

On March 18, Columbia University said it would "engage in constructive dialogue with our federal regulators" in an effort to restore federal funding. On March 21, Columbia released a letter outlining the key parts of their “comprehensive strategy to make our campus safer, more welcoming, and respectful of the rights of all.”

Some of these commitments mark positive changes for a culture of open inquiry, including the promise to expand intellectual diversity on campus, adoption of an institutional statement neutrality policy, and the “creation of additional opportunities for constructive dialogue programming,” to name a few.

Other promises are too general to evaluate — for example, the promise to clarify, time, place, and manner policies. If the clarification results in policies consistent with promoting free speech and preventing substantial disruptions, this will also be an important positive development.

Unfortunately, some of the promises are outright inconsistent with open inquiry, for example the promise to adopt a definition of antisemitism that amounts to a clear example of a hate speech regulation incompatible with open inquiry.

In another potentially problematic move, federal immigration officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, who had organized pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, and initiated removal proceedings against him. As stated above, HxA objects to protests that substantially disrupt the functioning of institutions as those are not lawful and undermine the culture of open inquiry necessary for our institutions to thrive. But if the government arrests foreign members of the campus community for their expression, every noncitizen in the U.S. will have to watch what they say.

Accordingly, in order for Khalil’s arrest and removal to be consistent with the value of open inquiry, the government must produce sufficient evidence that he engaged in unlawful activity or specifically organized others to do so. To date, the Trump administration’s communications indicate that he was targeted for his speech. For example, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Khalil faces deportation because he was “siding with terrorists” and “distributed pro-Hamas propaganda flyers with the logo of Hamas.”

And finally, several foreign scholars legally working in the U.S. — most recently, Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested by masked federal immigration agents and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana — are being detained, deported, or blocked from entering the U.S. due to viewpoints misaligned with the Trump administration. Details of each of these cases continue to surface daily. It may well turn out that in some of these cases, there are justifications that have nothing to do with the targets’ protected speech. But for each case, unless there is evidence of actual criminal activity, such actions cripple open inquiry in global research.

There is little doubt that on so many fronts, from ideological screening of faculty hires, to the lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty, to campus climates stained with antisemitic harassment, institutions are in serious need of reforms. That the federal government is thinking about these issues is a good thing. But we must not tackle institutional threats to open inquiry with government threats to open inquiry. Reforms must be carefully crafted to hit their mark without collateral damage to the core values that serve as the foundation of academia.

The bottom line is that, as a collective, this political environment is critically compromising the foundations of open inquiry on our campuses, both the actual freedom of inquiry and the reasonable feeling that one is free to inquire.