Keynote Speech Michael Ignatieff Opening Academic Year 2024-2025

“Academic Freedom: What’s At Stake? (And Who Cares?)”

Address to the Opening of the Academic Year, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Amsterdam, September 4, 2024

When I was a young man, academic freedom, when I thought about it at all, was just the privilege of tenured professors. Recently in the last five years, it’s become a battleground – in the United States, in Britain, in Holland. And it’s centrally at stake in the ideological competition within our societies, but also in the ideological competition between societies; between authoritarian regimes and liberal democratic regimes. And suddenly, academic freedom is front and center in our effort to define ourselves, and to defend ourselves.

Why has it suddenly acquired this salience? Why is it that three US college presidents lost their jobs in 2024? Three of them, one after another, have fallen for failing to uphold academic freedom, either because they fell foul of Republican politicians, or Jewish or Palestinian organizations, or because – most seriously of all – they fell foul of their own faculty. Why is it that in the United States, Republican governors like De Santis of Florida, are using their authority to overturn the tenure rules that used to protect academic freedom? Why are they sacking boards of trustees and replacing them with political appointees?

Why are Dutch universities suddenly being accused of complicity in the Israeli assault on Gaza? We’ve just heard from the NIAS director who has been struggling to find a position about these issues and has spoken out against the destruction of Palestinian educational institutions, that have suffered terribly in Gaza. NIAS has taken the decision to suspend relations with the Israeli state, with officials, and then the question is, will NIAS continue to remain as open and welcoming to Israeli academics? From my experience, Israeli academic institutions are among the most genuinely free and pluralist in the world.

Let me raise another site where academic freedom issues are raised, and that’s the strategic competition between China and the United States. Here are two powerhouse societies in science. China has some world class universities. During the period of China’s rise, the United States and China had a very close intellectual collaboration. 200,000 Chinese students a year still currently study in the United States, but suddenly the geostrategic competition between the two societies is putting this academic collaboration and this mutual learning at risk. National security considerations may well shut down academic interchange between these two great scientific cultures, and we should do what we can as academics to avoid being dragged into a civilizational conflict. Such a conflict can only be avoided if we’re constantly in touch with each other, interacting with each other across the geostrategic divide.

Some of the reasons why academic freedom is suddenly a visceral political issue are pretty obvious, but they need to be stated. One of them is: universities are very powerful. We train the next generation. We curate the knowledge that our societies value and respect, and we create new knowledge. Since Francis Bacon we have known that knowledge is power. Those who have political power in any society, both authoritarian and democratic, have an interest in controlling the institutions that create and curate knowledge. So that’s the first consideration: universities matter. They’re at the center of the creation and legitimation of knowledge, power and authority, and that makes them the site of our most bitter ideological battles.

Academic freedom is not simply threatened by right wing parties and authoritarian regimes, like Victor Orbán’s in Hungary, outside the walls of the university. Academic freedom is also being undermined from inside the walls of academe. We need to understand the dynamic interaction between external negative forces and some internal negative forces we need to confront ourselves. I disagree with conservatives on many issues, but when they tell me that liberal progressives have achieved a hegemony inside the university that is hostile to academic freedom, it’s time to listen respectfully. They contend that liberal progressives control recruitment, selection, admission, curriculum, and they violate academic freedom in the name of imposing a culture of apparently self-evident liberal progressiveness. Liberals contend, on the other hand, that universities have been a crucial instrument in one of the most dramatic phenomena of our lifetime, which is the revolution of inclusion. When I was under undergraduate at the University of Toronto in 1965, everybody looked like me. Flash forward to 2024: a white person like me is a minority in the graduating class. Women, people of color, people from every culture and religion and faith are in the room now, and in 1965 they weren’t. Liberal progressives, quite rightly, are proud of that revolution and we believe that opening up the doors of the university has been a crucial enabler of that revolution of inclusion.

But there are some costs that we are beginning to pay in the curriculum of the liberal progressive university. There is the right to struggle to rid our societies of the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. That is a battle in our hearts and souls that needs to continue. We need a battle against racism and sexism. But should our curricula be so entirely dominated by these priorities that we end up – without intending it – creating a pedagogy of indoctrination, or a pedagogy that simply lost the distinction between pedagogy and ideology?

Conservatives argue that this revolution of inclusion has produced a society that is ceaselessly asked to apologize for imperialism, the racism and sexism that remain. This has made it impossible for people to take pride in their societies. Any society that thinks about pride has to understand it requires intellectual honesty to take pride in achievements, while looking absolutely squarely at what we got wrong. Painful heritages need to be confronted. We need a pedagogy that stops indoctrinating and begins to ask questions about how we combine pride with truth.

These conflicts over pedagogy are centered in the United States, but they’re echoed throughout Europe, and our external enemies have seized upon the internal debate to their own advantage. Victor Orbán threw Central European University out of Budapest, and we led the fight against him, but please notice what he’s done since then. He began by making George Soros the chief target of his electoral campaign in 2017, but since then has mounted a massive ideological campaign against liberal cosmopolitanism, secularism and the liberal revolution of inclusion. He’s made himself the avatar of a global counterattack against the things that liberal progressives take most pride in, and so he’s made common cause with American and European hard right conservatives, including your Mr. Wilders.

There is a conservative internationale at work here, using academic freedom as a central element of engagement. Victor Orbán is telling the world liberalism is in its death throes, it is a pathology of a secular civilization that has lost its way. If you don’t think people are listening to that, you’re not hearing the mood music out there. A substantial part of Chinese intellectual opinion believes the same thing: the West is weak, decadent, permissive, doesn’t know what it stands for. It is slipping and sliding into an internal battle about its own values that it will never escape, and so it’s in a death slide. Campus conflicts about academic freedom play into this narrative.

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Now let me let me step right into controversy and say a few things about Israel-Gaza, because the conflict has triggered a battle on campuses around the world, not just over the policy of Israel, but over who belongs in the university community, who the university should speak for and to, and how a university maintains its identity as a community in the face of polarization of identities. Since identities are at stake, these conflicts are visceral and deeply painful. The pedagogical revolution I referred to a minute ago, that accompanied the inclusion revolution, has extended its general denunciation of colonialism and imperialism to categorize Israel as a settler colonial apartheid state. This purports to be a piece of academic social science but is actually a political and moral anathema. It’s a social science categorization that pronounces anathema on a whole people, a whole society and their national project. In my view, this categorization is mischievous in its long-term impact on truth and understanding of what’s at stake in the unfolding catastrophe in the Middle East.

The Gaza controversy makes it especially important for us to distinguish between academic freedom and free speech. Academic freedom is the freedom that members of the academic community have to write, teach and publish, free of interference by their own colleagues, the university administration and censorship or repression from external political authorities. Critically, academic freedom is not an unlimited right. It is a right co-equal with a responsibility. You don’t get tenure at any academic institution unless you’ve met certain academic standards. The speech, writing and teaching that you do is dependent on your respect for, and furtherance of, the standards of academic discourse. It’s not an unlimited free speech right.

I’ve been a teacher all my life. I don’t get up in a classroom and say anything that comes into my head, and I don’t use my classroom to tell them what they ought to believe. It is not my job to tell my students what to believe about political matters. I know a little bit about international humanitarian law, for example. I know what genocide is as a legal concept – so my job is to explain what the actual meaning of the word is, so that students use it properly. My job is not to wear my heart on my sleeve. I’m also in the classroom to maintain an environment in which, what must be said is said and nobody feels silenced, humiliated or excluded. My job is to make a conversation possible, so truth can be expressed across divides of race and color and class and national origin. So that’s how I see academic freedom: as a right to speak freely, that is conditional on the discharge of very substantial responsibility.

The other aspect of academic freedom, equally important, is the collective right of a community to govern itself. The two are related. You can’t have academic freedom for individuals unless the institution has autonomy. Autonomy is a complicated concept in state funded universities. In Holland, the taxpayer pays for universities, but the government that pays for higher education allows universities the freedom to determine their academic program, academic standards and research objectives. In a modern liberal democracy, he who pays the piper does not get to call the tune. It’s the condition on which academic freedom in the Netherlands reposes. In private universities that are heavily dependent on private donations and private help, Harvard for example, we’ve seen some pernicious examples where big donors have said they didn’t like what they were hearing on campus and withdrew or paused substantial gifts. That’s a danger to academic freedom.

The Gaza catastrophe also raises the question of whether academic institutions should take collective positions on the political issues of the day. Your director has struggled with this. Moral partiality is part of the problem. Which conscience shocking events do you condemn, and which do you ignore? There’s another problem. A university is, or ought to be, a pluralist community. We don’t all agree. We don’t all see eye to eye. If the university gets up and denounces what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, those inside that community who believe in the right of Israel to defend itself are then being told: ‘you’re not really a member of this community because the community has said what it believes as a collective statement’. So, a pluralist community has an enormous difficulty about speaking on these issues. Because if it speaks, it silences those who don’t agree with its position. Having been a president of a university, I’ve concluded that the university should not take public positions on matters of public controversy. The one place where we have to speak, and this occurred when our university was attacked, is when academic freedom itself is attacked. We must speak as one voice to defend the freedoms that make anything we do possible. We should take collective positions only when we face a collective threat to our existence, as we did when Orbán attacked us in March 2017. We should also speak out when academic freedom is endangered elsewhere, for example, when Palestinian institutions of higher learnings are threatened, targeted or destroyed.

And that gets us, I think, to rethinking what a university is for. And I think we need to think about that clearly and calmly. We’re not a government. We’re not the church. We’re a particular institution created historically to train students, to curate the knowledge that has come down to us from the centuries and do that filtration process that separates out the transient from the permanent. To certify what knowledge we think to be true is our crucial function in a modern society where new knowledge is arriving every moment. Through peer review, university teachers winnow the wheat of scientific truth from the chaff of supposition, opinion and belief. It’s crucial for a university to take this role seriously. It involves moral risk since we are tempted to decertify knowledge we morally dislike, and we must have the firmness and courage to certify knowledge as true, however disagreeable it may be to our prejudices and preconceptions. To do this work, we need to maintain our corporate and collective independence from both government, private corporations, and the immense power of the media. In this way we can become a guarantor of intellectual freedom, not just for us but for society at large.

In conclusion, let me say a few words about the place of universities in liberal democracy. We need to realize how impoverished our conception of democracy has become. We think of it as majority rule, as a ritual that occurs every four years in which people put a ballot in a ballot box. That’s not what democracy is. It’s a way of life, a way of being. We’re practicing democracy in this room at this moment, we’re listening to each other (I hope). I’m trying to persuade you of something. I can’t force you to believe anything, but I’m trying to persuade you and then you’ll go into the night and make up your own minds. That’s the democratic experience. But there’s something else about democracy that doesn’t get the attention it needs. Democracy is not just majority rule balanced by minority rights and constitutional limitations on executive power. It’s a particular vision of freedom: power checking power to keep the people free. And one of the institutions that checks power is the independent corporate body. One of the first thinkers to point out the importance of independent institutions was Montesquieu, the Great French jurist and philosopher, who wrote about the corps intermédiaires that protect the citizen and the citizenry from the state. That’s what the university is; it’s a corps intermédiaire.

Universities figure, in other words, as crucial countervailing mechanisms of the whole fabric of a democracy. They govern themselves, they set their own priorities. They continually bite the hand that feeds, but they also respect, ultimately, the rule of law. But by maintaining their independence from state institutions, from corporate interests, by virtue of their independence, they guarantee the freedom both of those who work inside them, but also help to guarantee the freedom of citizens outside. And so anybody’s vision of a free society is a society in which the state does not have all the power, the majority does not have all the power. Power is distributed through free self-governing institutions of all kinds: community groups, unions, church groups, and universities – and the revival of that free self-governing civil society is central to the defense of democracy itself and central to the issue of how we create alliances with other free institutions to defend ourselves, but above all, to defend this vision of democracy as power checking power to keep the people free.

Universities are among the oldest self-governing institutions in the world. Think of Padua, Bologna, the Sorbonne, Leiden, founded in 1572. These places have been a long time. They’ve been guarantors of the freedom of thinking men and women for centuries. Governments come and go, Geert Wilders comes and goes, but universities will still be here in 500 years if we have the wit and wisdom and courage to defend them.

I was once asked by Leiden University to speak in memory of Dean Cleveringa. He was the Dean of the Law school in Leiden, in September 1940, when the German occupation authorities dismissed a Jewish colleague and friend. And Dean Cleveringa got up, and protested, and said that this was a disgrace. He wasn’t just standing up against fascism or against anti-Semitism, though that is obvious. He was standing up for the autonomy and independence of his university. In so doing, he was defending Dutch freedom. So you have great examples in your academic culture of people who understood what academic freedom was and is, and always will be. Let’s live by his example.