AIM Committee Negotiated Rulemaking: Faculty and Association Statements on Academic Freedom and Intellectual Diversity

The below are statements collected by the Alliance for Higher Education in response to potential proposals to limit academic freedom via the AIM Committee negotiated rulemaking process.

Association statements: 

Travis York, Ph.D., director, Center for STEMM Education & Workforce, American Association for the Advancement of Science:

"A federally codified definition of 'intellectual diversity' or academic freedom within accreditation policy would risk undermining the very principles it seeks to protect. Accreditation exists to ensure institutional quality, integrity, and student learning—not to impose a uniform federal view of faculty thought, curriculum, or scholarly inquiry.

"As articulated in the 2017 AAAS Statement on Scientific Freedom & Responsibility, 'Scientific freedom is the freedom to engage in scientific inquiry, pursue and apply knowledge, and communicate openly.' That freedom is essential to advancing the public good through scientific discovery, evidence-based scholarship, and the development of knowledge that benefits society.

"Academic freedom and scientific inquiry are strongest when institutions, disciplines, and scholarly communities define rigorous inquiry through evidence, peer review, and institutional mission—not through federal regulation of viewpoint or ideology. A federally imposed definition of 'intellectual diversity,' particularly if tied to accreditation or access to federal financial aid, risks politicizing accreditation and creating pressure on institutions to align teaching, research, and curricula with shifting political interpretations.

"Society, students, and faculty benefit most when higher education preserves the independence necessary for open inquiry, rigorous debate, and evidence-based scholarship; conditions that enable scientific advancement, informed civic participation, and innovation that serves the broader public interest."

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Julia Brookins, senior program analyst, American Historical Association:

“Academic disciplines are the wellspring of real intellectual diversity and academic and intellectual work takes different forms primarily based on the questions we ask and the methods and evidence we use to search for answers. The fundamental unit of intellectual diversity is not political or ideological, but disciplinary. Any definition of intellectual diversity which does not start from that premise is profoundly ignorant or dishonest, and it will lead policy-makers down altogether the wrong path. Specious definitions of intellectual diversity circulating from think tanks to legislatures around the country have already done tremendous and unnecessary damage to the knowledge enterprise in the United States. 

“If this initiative seeks real reform, begin with the core of intellectual work, not from where political activists would like to end up. As it is being deployed currently among many politicians, the term 'intellectual diversity' has become a mere euphemism for cultural grievance; would-be reformers are using it to demand intensifying ideological surveillance and political quotas for hiring across higher education. These policies distort both the pursuit of new knowledge and the teaching of existing knowledge.”

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‍Association of Governing Boards:

“AGB supports governing boards and institutional leaders in fostering environments where robust inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive dialogue can flourish in service of institutional mission and student success. Consistent with AGB’s Govern NOW initiative, effective governance depends on preserving the appropriate roles of boards, institutional leadership, faculty, and accreditors. Broad governmental mandates defining ‘intellectual diversity’ risk undermining institutional autonomy, shared governance, and the ability of colleges and universities to make mission-aligned academic decisions responsive to their students and communities. Accreditation standards are most effective when they focus on educational quality, institutional effectiveness, and accountability outcomes rather than prescribing specific curricular or ideological frameworks.”

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Bobbie Laur, president, Campus Compact (MD):

Increased regulation of academic freedom through the accreditation process undermines the flexibility, trust, and independence that allow colleges and universities to respond to real community and workforce needs. Many of the most impactful educational and research partnerships that we see across our membership emerge because faculty and students are free to explore locally grounded questions, engage across perspectives, and collaborate with community partners without political interference. At the University of Pittsburgh, medical students work in “community classrooms” through the Community Alliance Program to build trust and strengthen communication skills with patients—experiences that directly improve future healthcare outcomes and prepare students for an increasingly relationship-centered workforce. At the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, faculty at the Center on Aging partner with the Hawai‘i Public Health Institute and more than 150 organizations through the Kūpuna Collective to research elder care and improve the health of older adults. Efforts to regulate academic freedom through accreditation risk discouraging this kind of innovative, community-engaged teaching and research that strengthens local economies, develops workforce-ready graduates, and directly addresses complex social, healthcare, and economic challenges in our communities.”

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Rob Quinn, executive director, Scholars at Risk (NY):

“At Scholars at Risk, years of international experience make clear to us that when government gets substantively involved in the process of teaching, research, or recruitment—whether directly or through proxies—it is almost always harmful. That is because academic freedom is fundamentally about protecting the process of truth-seeking that’s at the heart of what universities do. Mandating that institutions maintain a particular ideological balance does the exact opposite: it insists on an outcome and works backward from there. Unbiased, methodologically rigorous inquiry and teaching cannot occur if professors, departments or institutions operate in fear that a particular result might upset an ideological balance they are required by external, not academic authorities, to achieve. These concerns apply across disciplines – to the sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. Ideological demands have led to the exile of scholars and broader brain drain in Turkey, Hungary, Brazil, Venezuela, and elsewhere, and they are a danger for the United States.”

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Faculty statements (alphabetical order by state):

Cecilia Orphan, associate professor, higher education, University of Denver (CO):

“Accreditation was never intended to serve as a political weapon to silence certain forms of scholarship or viewpoints. Redirecting it in this way risks undermining both research excellence and the student experience, while also weakening the broader economic and workforce advantages that flow from a robust, open, and high-quality higher education system.

“Students have been significantly affected by restrictions on academic freedom, most notably through a rise in self‑censorship that shapes how they participate in the classroom and approach their academic work. In my experience teaching graduate students, I have seen some students change or abandon dissertation topics that would have better positioned them for professional opportunities, simply because they perceived those topics as too sensitive or risky under current constraints. Faculty members who are leading scholars in their fields are choosing to leave academia altogether or relocate outside of the United States because of increasing concerns about attacks on academic freedom. This kind of talent loss has immediate and long-term consequences and can lead to a homogenization of scholarship and teaching, where controversial or emerging areas of study are avoided rather than explored. Such an environment undermines the very purpose of higher education: to foster rigorous inquiry, expose students to diverse perspectives, and prepare them to think critically about complex issues.”

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John Wesley White, professor of education, University of North Florida (FL):

“Ideas are not to be feared, and universities are not designed to protect students from ideas nor to discount ideas simply because state governments find them threatening. Our students deserve to critically, interpret and question major ideas, to value them against each other, and come to their own conclusions. Faculty at universities should help students discover new ideas, to question those ideas, and find where truths might lay. When faculty are prohibited from talking to their students about certain ideas, we are denying students the opportunity to move beyond their own limited paradigms and world views to see the greater nuances and truths of their world. We are doing students a grave disservice by withholding information from them simply because that information is untenable or unsavory to far right governors and state legislators. If our right policy makers are so fearful of specific ideas, that speaks more to their insecurity about their belief system than to the validity of the ideas they’re trying to censor.”

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Cliff Zimmerman, professor, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law (IL)

“We need to meet students where they are and help them to become their best selves. Restricting how that can be done alienates students and constrains key relationship development, all of which improves society.”

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Heidi Kitrosser, professor of law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law (IL)

“I research and teach about the First Amendment. Ample case law establishes that government may not condition benefits, such as licensing or subsidies, on viewpoint-based restrictions. More so, the Constitution prohibits vague restrictions on conduct, and that requirement is heightened in the context of speech and expression. The "intellectual diversity" proposal would give the government the power to micro-manage university faculties based on its assessment of a faculty's political make-up, of what constitutes sufficient "balance," of what types of views fall within the acceptable bounds of the intellectual spectrum (for example, must business schools hire Marxists? Must biology departments hire creationists?), and of what criteria are to be used to assess faculty viewpoints. In addition to directing political officials to interfere, based on viewpoint, with faculty hiring across universities, the proposal would have them do so pursuant to incredibly vague and manipulable standards.”

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Victor Ray, F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor, University of Iowa (IA):

“Restrictions on academic freedom result in lower quality experiences for students because they limit debate and create misinformation. For instance, at the University of Texas A&M, a professor was ordered to stop teaching Plato because the classic of Western thought violated strange and ill-defined state restrictions on ‘race and gender ideology.’ In my own state of Iowa, threatened bans on teaching about diversity have led to students being denied empirically verified information about diverse group problem solving (it's better). This will leave students unprepared for working successfully in an increasingly globalized world.

“America's system of higher education became the envy of the world because it allowed professors—who are experts in their subject area—free reign to explore ideas. America's rivals even recognized this unquestioned educational dominance, sending their kids (from more restrictive societies) to the United States in order for them to get the best education in the world. Restricting academic freedom will kill the innovation and dynamism of the American system, making it more like education under communism. Gutting the world's finest system of higher education ensures America's leading role in the global economy (and the related thought leadership) will wane.”

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Janelle Wong, professor and director, Asian American Studies, University of Maryland (MD):

“As a faculty member and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, I am deeply concerned about the Administration’s effort to weaken peer-review and to impose its ideological agenda on the educational experience of students and teaching expertise of faculty by using accreditation as a political weapon. This government overreach and meddling is not about student learning, but about weaponizing accreditation rules to insert an ideological agenda onto the public college campuses we all support with our tax dollars.”

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Ali Watts, assistant professor, Bowling Green State University (OH):

“I work on a campus frequently considered one of the most ‘military-friendly’ in the country— where veterans and active duty National Guard members are active and visible members of our community. Attacks on academic freedom—partnered as they often are with attacks on services and supports deemed ‘DEI’ centric—have imperiled some of the spaces that these students rely on most: TRIO offices, adult and continuing education programming, and identity-supportive scholarship initiatives. Additionally, many of our military-affiliated students pursue majors in areas like political science, international relations, psychology, and mental health counseling— all of which address ‘divisive topics’ placed under increased scrutiny, surveillance, and censorship.

“US higher education was the envy of the world for generations following World War II—in part because state and federal governments recognized the value of diverse institutional missions and structures that supported broad research agendas capable of challenging and imagining beyond the contemporary status quo. The threat of withheld accreditation is so heavy that attaching its processes to a single definition of ‘academic freedom’ or ‘intellectual diversity’ risks creating an environment where institutions rush to force their diverse and expansive forms into cookie-cutter models that avoid risk or experimentation.”

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Bradford Vivian, professor, Communication Arts and Sciences, Penn State University (PA):

“Government restrictions on academic freedom are, most directly, censorship. This alarming, historic rise in open government censorship of higher education has proceeded more quickly than, for comparison, similar measures during the early days of autocratic regimes in states like Hungary under President Orban. 

“The value of academic freedom to U.S. society is well documented: self-governing institutions of higher education that embrace the chosen, diverse, and innovative academic paths of students from all walks of life have been one of the most successful drivers of upward social mobility in U.S. history and one of the most effective ways of strengthening our democratic citizenry. We know what works: throughout the post-WW II period, U.S. universities increasingly embraced academic freedom, especially during the desegregation era. Volumes of research on these developments have shown that modern self-governing university systems were essential to creating a more tolerant society, scientific and technological innovation, greater shared prosperity, and even international leadership. Government restrictions on academic freedom not only threaten all of these gains. They also violate the educational policies that made U.S. higher education such a powerful modernizing and democratizing force—extant laws that still state the federal government cannot attach political conditions, for example, to public investments in higher education. The idea that government should set a uniform standard for ‘intellectual diversity’ directly goes against these longstanding policies.”

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Professor of Ethics & Leadership, University of Houston (TX):

“Students live in a political reality that is complex, and they are often working to understand their own values and perspectives. They crave spaces to talk about and better understand the politics that are impacting their lives in very real ways. In my state, where "anti-indoctrination" laws are now regularly enforced at the university level, it has become increasingly unclear what constitutes indoctrination versus the presentation of facts and patterns. When students raise questions related to gender, sexuality, and racial discrimination in policy, I am increasingly aware of the ways my answers to these questions may be recorded and decontextualized, or that in raising questions about how and why patterns of discrimination have been perpetuated and what might be done about it, this line of instruction might signal that I am indoctrinating students. This constitutes a hollowing out of the curriculum of any kind of complex content. In one interpretation of state law, some departments have required instructors to shut down any classroom conversation not present on the pre-approved syllabus, which effectively disallows any kind of spontaneous dialogue. In courses like mine, which aim to teach the ethics of public policy, removing or narrowing opportunities to discuss race, gender, or sexuality and the active policing of instructors and students in conversations leads to a one-dimensional educational experience.”

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Bethany Letiecq, professor, George Mason University (VA):

“When the academic freedom of faculty is constrained and eroded by political and ideological pressure campaigns, threats and fear-mongering, and the collapse of institutional autonomy, our ability to teach and conduct research--to pursue truth--is likewise constrained.  Students' education is diminished as is their courage to pursue the truth wherever it leads. In this moment of rising authoritarianism, we are losing the next generation of scholars who are exiting education or shifting their scholarly pursuits because they do not see opportunity or a pathway to succeed. They only see the closing down of academic freedom, intellectual curiosity, and the freedom to pursue knowledge for knowledge sake. The closing of American intellectualism and democracy.”

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Student statements:

Michelle Baretto, graduate assistant and PhD student at University of Maryland (MD):

“As a PhD student, I am concerned that university accreditation systems which attempt to operationalize "intellectual diversity" as an evaluative metric may conflict with core principles of academic freedom. These efforts to impose strict definitions of diversity risk narrowing the scope of scholarly inquiry and research. Such frameworks are overly restrictive and ideologically driven by the existing political administration, creating environments in which researchers feel constrained in the topics that they wish to pursue. Restrictions to academic freedom create a dynamic that may inadvertently pressure scholars to align their work with prevailing policy expectations or political priorities, rather than allowing research to emerge organically as part of scholarly exploration. Rigid interpretations of diversity also undermine the richness and plurality of academic thought, which is essential to the culture of higher education.”

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