Academic Freedom in the Age of Polarisation:

Recent debates about academic freedom have often been framed as disputes over free speech, cancel culture, or ideological polarisation. Yet these debates point to a deeper problem: the growing difficulty of sustaining epistemic diversity in institutions increasingly shaped by managerial governance, securitisation, and inherited colonial hierarchies. Universities have historically presented themselves as spaces where competing conceptions of truth can be debated, tested, and refined. Today, however, many scholars, journalists, and artists experience growing pressures to conform to dominant narratives or risk professional sanctions.

In a recent book, Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology (2025), I diagnose a deepening crisis within contemporary academia: the rise of “Symbolic Liberalism”—a stance that is classically liberal on cultural markers but politically illiberal in practice—coupled with intensifying societal polarization. This crisis manifests acutely in the suppression of academic freedom, where both left and right engage in forms of “cancel culture.” In this article, I extract five interconnected dynamics: (1) the fraught relationship between academic freedom and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); (2) the interplay of securitization and managerial logics; (3) the unequal hierarchy of voices; (4) the enduring role of colonial legacies in academic life; and (5) the shared fate of academic, journalistic, and artistic freedoms within liberal democracy.

One of the most contentious debates on campuses today is whether DEI principles complement or constrain academic freedom. Dina Kiwan’s Academic Freedom and the Transnational Production of Knowledge (2023) argues that inclusivity is not an external limit on academic freedom but a “precondition” for it, drawing on philosophers of education such as Eamonn Callan and Sigal Ben-Porath, as well as Judith Butler. In other words, for marginalized groups to participate fully in the life of the university, they must first feel safe and included. Without that threshold condition, academic freedom remains a privilege of the dominant group. This view seeks to resolve the politicized standoff between right-wing defenses of free speech (often weaponized against inclusive knowledge) and left-wing demands for protection from harm.

However, in the current chilling climate of polarization, this equation becomes unstable. The very same logic that sees inclusion as a precondition can be used to shut down dissent. For instance, protests against the genocidal war on Gaza have been recast as antisemitic, relying on a “psychologizing literature on harm and trauma.” Scholars like the American philosopher Ann Cudd (who is currently President of Portland State University) argue that “toxic and oppressive speech” shatters students’ assumptions about the world being benevolent and meaningful, thereby justifying restrictions. I am, like Uwe Steinhoff, skeptical: a legal system that restricts speech based on “experiences that shatter our assumptions” is dangerously vague. While the social responsibility principle of academic freedom allows us to denounce hurtful speech, it should not lead to wholesale legal restriction. Thus, genuine epistemic DEI requires critical dialogue, not legal pre-emption—a dialogical sociology that keeps renegotiating the border between inclusion and open debate.

Academic freedom is threatened not only by ideological polarization but also by two overlapping administrative logics: securitization and managerialism. The example of the United Kingdom’s “Prevent” policy is instructive. Designed to counter extremism, Prevent has in practice politicized religious identity, conflating perceived social conservatism with radicalism. Muslim staff and students report a chilling effect, where open discussion of difficult issues is replaced by silencing and delegitimization. This securitization comes mainly from populist conservatives who claim that universities have become platforms for radical Islamists, even though evidence suggests that less than 2% of student union events were judged “extreme.” In France, those who are critical of French politics are pejoratively labeled by many from the left and the right as “Islamo-leftists” and faced intense attacks orchestrated by the government and amplified by the mainstream media.

Simultaneously, while a neoliberal managerial logic operates, university administrators—often no longer academics themselves—deliver hasty punishments to professors for quoting literary works without “trigger warnings” or for failing to pre-empt student sensitivities. This “culture of safetyism” is reinforced by the commodification of higher education: administrators invest in fundraising from billionaires, shrink tenured faculty, outsource services, and close “unprofitable” departments. In this environment, donors exert disproportionate influence. The 2023 case of Bard College, which defended a course on “Apartheid in Israel-Palestine” only to face a donor-led campaign, included a board member’s resignation. More recently a tenured art professor was put on leave for assigning a case study that mentions Palestinians, as the provost (Vice president for academic affairs) claims that the professor’s actions “threaten immediate harm” to students. The fusion of securitization (state surveillance of ideas) and managerialism (market-driven risk aversion) produces a university that is simultaneously overcautious and politically conformist.

A recurring theme that many scholars have highlighted is the hierarchical inequality of voices: who gets to speak, who gets heard, and who is silenced. Data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) shows that disinvitation incidents in US universities increased from 4 in 2001 to 65 in 2020. While 68% of protests come from the political left of the targeted speaker, the right also engages in cancel culture. Yet my deeper point is structural: some forms of critique are systematically delegitimized particularly on religion, migration, nationalism, colonialism, gender, or foreign policy.

The genocidal war on Gaza provides a stark illustration. It is interesting to note first that while several international and Israeli organizations and human rights groups have characterized Israel’s military actions in Gaza as genocide—notably Amnesty International (5 December 2024), United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, in her March 2024 report titled “Anatomy of a Genocide”, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) (19 December 2024), International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) (12 December 2024), the Israeli human rights organizations (B’tselem and Physicians for Human Rights) as well—, many conferences I attended in sociology by many Western academia often refer to it as simply “the war on Gaza” or worse “the crisis in the Middle East”. Scholars critical of Israeli policy face professional death, except in countries such as Ireland, Slovenia or Spain. Ghassan Hage, a renowned anthropologist, was sacked from the Max Planck Institute in Germany following a defamatory newspaper article. In France, nearly 350 institutional and legal investigations were launched between October and December 2023 for complaints linked to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Meanwhile, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism—non-legally binding but used at times in a legal way—conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Some voices are indeed more equal than others: Palestinian and anti-colonial academics are often presumed to be motivated by hatred, not by human rights commitments. The media often reproduces this hierarchy: during the war on Gaza, French and German outlets rarely included Palestinian, Muslim or anti-colonial voices. Dina Kiwan’s interviewees even before 7 October 2023 describe a “hostile working environment” for anyone producing knowledge on Palestine. Thus, formal free speech coexists with a deep epistemic inequality, where certain critical perspectives become “forbidden knowledge” (knowable but too dangerous to produce).

Current academic orthodoxies cannot be understood without reckoning with Euro-American colonial legacies. This legacy operates at multiple levels: organizational, curricular, and everyday academic life.

Organizationally, the modern university is shaped by colonial and corporate interests. Knowledge has become a “fictitious commodity,” driven by the same logics that extracted wealth from colonies. Donors who profited from imperial networks now shape campus speech policies. Curricularly, European philosophy and social science have historically rendered non-Western peoples as “metaphysical menace” rather than co-producers of knowledge. As Hamid Dabashi puts it: “Arabs, Iranians and Muslims … do not have any ontological reality for European philosophers.” Yet and in the line of Gisele Sapiro, I reject the simplistic solution of purging canonical thinkers. Instead, I propose a three-part justification: (1) conceptual isolation of a scholar’s flawed views from their useful contributions; (2) division of intellectual labor (some focus on positive contributions, others on critique); and (3) historical awareness that today’s ethics may be seen as flawed tomorrow. I will, therefore, engage with Habermas’s dialogical communicative theory even if I disagree with his political position on Palestine. Also, I prefer the approach of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Amsterdam—adding contextual labels about slavery to paintings—to renaming David Hume’s tower at the University of Edinburgh. Similarly, I argue against dropping Durkheim (to his complete silence on French colonialism in Algeria) for W.E.B. Du Bois. The goal is not to cancel but to “provincialize Europe”—treating Western knowledge as necessary but not sufficient.

In everyday academic life, colonial legacies manifest in who is listened to. When Alain Touraine praised Israel’s absorption of Russian Jews as a “miracle,” he ignored that most were settled illegally on occupied land. Touraine’s response—“those migrants are secular, they will support peace”—reveals a secularist bias that cannot see colonial reality. This is not merely an individual failing; it is a structural feature of a knowledge system that naturalizes Western moves and pathologizes non-Western resistance.

There are close links between the fate of academic freedom to that of journalistic and artistic freedom. All three are under pressure from the same forces: symbolic liberalism, cancel culture, and the political instrumentalization of “harm.” The letter signed by Noam Chomsky, Salman Rushdie, and Margaret Atwood in Harper’s Magazine (2020) defined cancel culture as “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” This applies equally to a professor losing tenure, a journalist being investigated for “apology for terrorism,” or an artist having a prize withdrawn.

The case of Masha Gessen is exemplary. Awarded the Hannah Arendt prize, Gessen had it canceled for comparing Gaza before October 7 to Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe. Arendt herself—a critic of the nation-state of Israel from its founding—would not qualify for that same prize in Germany today. Similarly, the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli had a prize canceled. Thus, artistic and journalistic freedoms rise and fall with academic freedom; they are part of a single epistemic ecosystem.

Crucially, this ecosystem is foundational for liberal democracy itself. Liberal democracy requires not just elections but a vibrant public sphere where citizens can deliberate. When universities, media, and arts become sites of risk-averse conformity, democracy decays into either symbolic liberalism (performative tolerance without real pluralism) or populist authoritarianism. The new generation, however, is challenging this. Student encampments for Gaza have destabilized the old elite. These students rely on social media precisely because they mistrust mainstream media. This is a dangerous but also promising development: it shows that the crisis of academic and journalistic freedom is also a crisis of legitimacy of liberal institutions.

My remedy is not more legal restrictions but a “dialogical sociology”—one that refuses to label the other, that engages with power asymmetries without abandoning dialogue, and that renegotiates the tension between academic freedom and DEI through conversation rather than legal action. Neither commitment can be absolute; each must be qualified by the other. The goal is to avoid both the spiral of silence (where fear of isolation suppresses dissent) and the spiral of exclusion (where dichotomous thinking—angel or demon—ends all debate).

In the end, the health of liberal democracy can be measured by how it treats its most uncomfortable voices. If universities, newsrooms, and artists’ studios become places only for the already-convinced, then polarization will deepen, and democracy will be hollowed out from within. Dialogical sociology, by insisting on listening across difference, offers a fragile but essential promise: that we can be critical of power without becoming dogmatic, and inclusive without becoming silent.