Following calls by over 100 Duke faculty members for the University to adopt an official stance of institutional neutrality, The Chronicle spoke to several professors to gauge their views on academic freedom on campus. Many found the current policy sufficient, but identified a larger cultural problem of lopsided discourse.
Since the early 1900s, “academic freedom” has stood as a flagship of American higher education. The concept protects faculty and students from institutional censorship and enables the free expression of academic ideas.
Since 1976, Duke’s academic freedom policy has remained largely untouched and uncontested. Yet in April, the Academic Council, along with Duke’s President’s and Provost’s Offices, formed a committee on Academic Freedom, Responsibility, Free Expression and Engagement following the escalation of protests on college campuses across the country in response to the Israel-Hamas war.
The committee’s aim is to examine Duke’s policies, compare them with peer institutions and issue a report by the end of the 2024-25 academic year. According to Committee Chair Charlotte Sussman, professor of English, during the Academic Council’s Sept. 20 meeting, the committee has not yet decided whether institutional neutrality is within its purview.
In an Oct. 23 email to The Chronicle, Committee Chair Charlotte Sussman, professor of English, emphasized that while benchmarking Duke with peer institutions is a focus of their work, the goal is not conformity but rather “recommendations that fit Duke’s unique history and culture.”
University administration did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment on the faculty opinions expressed throughout the article.
Overall satisfaction with Duke’s policy
Faculty across the political spectrum voiced relatively few concerns about Duke’s academic freedom policy, noting that the University has generally done a good job of protecting speech that lies within its domain.
“Without academic freedom, I wouldn't be able to teach what I teach, assign what I assign, summarize the sort of arguments I summarize and play devil's advocate for the kind of views I'm willing to defend in theory,” said Visiting Professor John Rose, formerly the associate director of Duke’s Civil Discourse Project.
The policy in Duke’s faculty handbook has remained unchanged since 1976 and contains three clauses: “To teach and to discuss in their classes any aspect of a topic pertinent to the understanding of the subject matter of the course being taught,” “To carry on research and publish the results subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties” and “To act and to speak in their capacity as a citizen without institutional censorship or discipline.”
Michael Hardt, professor of literature and interim chair of the literature program, described being highly impressed by Duke’s commitment to academic freedom in defending a book he co-wrote with political philosopher Antonio Negri.
The book, “Empire,” was published in 2000 and received criticism from the press, as well as alumni and donors for being “anti-semitic and pro-Islamic fundamentalist.” Backlash intensified after the 9/11 attacks, with some donors and alumni writing letters to then-President Keohane asking that Hardt be fired.
“I was very impressed with [Keohane’s] responses to them, which she copied me on, in which she quite calmly — and maybe even absolutely — defended the academic freedom of the faculty,” Hardt said. “… It's important for a university like ours to have faculty with different views and that, even if you disagree with those views, they are still appropriate at our university.”
However, “academic freedom,” by definition, does not protect all instances of free speech. “Freedom of speech” is protected under the First Amendment, while speech under “academic freedom” for private institutions is subject to institutional discretion and lacks a universal definition or guiding policy.
Duke has reprimanded faculty in the past for statements that are protected under the First Amendment’s definition of freedom of speech but not necessarily the University-specific policy.
In 2017, Paul Griffiths, former Warren chair of Catholic theology in the Divinity School, resigned after University administration began disciplinary proceedings against him for sending a mass email urging Divinity School faculty not to attend a racial and equity training. He sent the email “in the interests of free exchange,” calling the training “intellectually flaccid” and having “illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies.”
Per Griffiths, he was faced with allegations of “harassment” and “unprofessional conduct” related to the emails, and he resigned after expressing his view that the Divinity School was “a place in which too many thoughts can’t be spoken and too many disagreements remain veiled because of fear.”
Faculty thoughts on the new committee
According to Sussman, the committee will be seeking faculty input on academic freedom and will produce a report for the Academic Council, President Vincent Price and Provost Alec Gallimore by the end of this academic year. She stressed that no changes would be implemented without the “usual process of approval,” noting that “no one … wants to see a new policy imposed from the top down.”
Faculty voiced skepticism toward the current effort to revise Duke’s academic freedom policy, with many wanting it to remain largely free of content restrictions.
“I have no hopes for [the committee],” said Michael Munger, Pfizer, Inc./Edmund T. Pratt, Jr. university distinguished professor of political science. “It's a group of people that are going to argue. What faculty do is argue about things and then write a really long report with a bunch of caveats.”
Munger defined a policy of academic freedom as giving community members the right to “create small, safe spaces,” within which members can be insulated from criticism. However, groups do not have the right to impose their views on others.
“If I don't like Charles Murray, and I hear the political science department is having Charles Murray in to give a speech, I can go to it and listen, or I can not go to it,” Munger said. “I don't get to go to it and disrupt, and I don't get to protest and say they're not allowed to have that, because the entire University doesn't belong to me.”
Yet, Munger does believe that protesting University-wide events — as long as there is minimal disruption — falls within the protections of academic freedom. He lauded the response of student protesters to commencement speaker Jerry Seinfeld as “perfect.”
“That’s not really disruptive,” he said. “They are allowed to express their view that this person shouldn’t be here. They’re not allowed to stand up, heckle [or] laugh in groups.”
Concerns over campus culture
Hardt, Munger and Rose agreed that the best way to uphold academic freedom is through public discourse.
“There should be passionate disagreement,” Hardt said, criticizing other universities’ tendencies to restrict speakers over safety concerns, which he feels are often “red herrings.”
However, both Rose and Munger claimed that Duke’s campus culture surrounding academic freedom — not the policy itself — limits some voices from being heard.
“I think that people perceive there to be a social or potential professional penalty to expressing views that run contrary to, let's say, more progressive views,” Rose said.
Rose cited The Chronicle’s inaugural faculty survey, which found that nearly 50% of faculty believe the University is overemphasizing DEI efforts. But despite this high proportion, Rose could only recall one example of a colleague who had outwardly expressed that view, asserting that “otherwise, you would never hear it said — not in a meeting, not publicly.”
Rose described his approach to his civil discourse class, where he “artificially inflate[s] the number of conservative students using permission numbers,” observing that this adjustment encouraged moderate students to speak up more freely.
“That suggests to me that in a school which, in my view, does protect academic freedom, that people are unwilling or afraid to exercise it,” he added.
Rose and Munger argued that campus discourse tends to be one-sided because of the lack of political diversity among faculty and students, with most leaning liberal.
“I worry that diversity has taken the form of a variety of hues, but not of views,” Munger said. “So, we have a bunch of people who look different that all have exactly the same opinions that range from the left to the far left. That’s not diversity, particularly at a university.”
Munger expressed concern that this ideological uniformity limits liberal students’ exposure to diverse viewpoints, leaving them to graduate without ever talking to “a smart person they disagreed with.” On a campus where conservative beliefs are constantly challenged, he thinks “conservative students are all playing against the first team, [but] it’s the liberal students that ought to sue.”
“Duke is not fulfilling its contractual obligations to teach them how to think critically,” Munger said. “[Duke] just pats them on the head. ‘Here, you're a good liberal. Here's a cookie.’”
The Chronicle’s faculty survey also collected data in April on the political leanings of Duke faculty, revealing that 61.73% identified as very liberal or somewhat liberal, while only 13.79% identified as very conservative or somewhat conservative. Duke faculty’s political leanings closely track those of peer institutions, highlighting the broader trend of a leftward skew in higher education that has been increasing since the turn of the century.
“Having more viewpoint diversity in the faculty would make it more likely — not less likely — that faculty would exercise their academic freedom,” Rose said.
The argument of too little political diversity among faculty is not new.
The Duke Conservative Union voiced a similar concern in 2004 after conducting an independent review of faculty voter registration data, which showed few registered Republicans. The group brought up their concerns of lack of political diversity to former President Nannerl Keohane, who issued an official statement denying that party affiliation had anything meaningful to do with intellectual diversity on campus.
“The issue, therefore, is not whether a faculty member belongs to one or another party, or where in the political spectrum his or her views are, but whether the faculty member provides a classroom environment that supports learning across a wide range of views,” she wrote.
But hiring faculty to achieve a diversity of political views might be a difficult process.
At Duke and peer institutions, current faculty are involved in the hiring process for new members. This process could potentially lead to an ideological bias if faculty are more inclined to select applicants who espouse similar views to their own, though there are safeguards in place meant to prevent this from occurring.
“Our political views [are] something that, in hiring, there is a prohibition of asking,” Hardt said. “… That’s certainly the goal — to judge quality of scholarship without bias towards political [views].”
Hardt also explained that he believes students’ political ideologies are influenced by a range of factors, not solely by faculty input.
“The worst case scenario, which is usually the fear of others, is that somehow students are … being converted or proselytized or something like that,” he said. “My experience at Duke is that’s not what happens … students come with their own political views, they develop their own political views, but what they're generally taught is critical thought.”
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Ana Despa is a Pratt sophomore and an associate news editor for the news department.