BY HANK REICHMAN
I’m old enough to remember when the venerable business magazine Forbes used to identify itself as a “capitalist tool.” The publication, now run by former flat-tax presidential candidate Steve Forbes, is unsurprisingly conservative and Republican in its editorial policies. Forbes endorsed Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2024. And while Forbes the magazine has long been open to a variety of opinions, it’s still both surprising and encouraging to read this on its site:
The federal government’s coercive meddling in higher education—freezing funding, revoking student visas, dictating what can be taught, and pressuring university presidents to resign—is dismantling the very system that has ensured America’s economic dynamism for 80 years.
Highly visible attacks against elite universities send an unambiguous message about all of America’s universities: ambitious engineers, mathematicians, and scientists in Shanghai, Berlin, and Mumbai need not apply.
These actions also deliver a chilling message to CEOs: Your enterprise could be targeted next—if you don’t conform to shifting political pressures. And they have signaled to foreign investors and multinational companies that the U.S. no longer demonstrates an ironclad commitment to institutional integrity and the rule of the law.
This comes from “The Business And Economic Case For Academic Freedom,” by contributing writer Ian Simmons, published on July 21. The article goes on to expound the benefits of higher education for American business, the economy, and technology. Simmons stresses the positive role of international students and immigrants, and he warns, “we have recruited globally. But we no longer have a monopoly on this approach.”
And here’s where the article turns to the importance of academic freedom. “If we erode academic freedom or make universities inhospitable to certain nationalities or ideas, we risk losing future founders, discoveries, and jobs to competitor countries,” Simmons argues.
[W]hen funding becomes contingent on political compliance—when billions in research dollars are held hostage to arbitrary demands about curriculum and hiring, or subject to capricious threats of withdrawal—the entire system becomes unstable. Just as markets need predictability, researchers need to feel confident that they will be able to see their ideas through without facing visa challenges directed at themselves or their loved ones.
The article concludes with a call to action:
We can protect the foundations of freedom that have made American higher education the envy of the world, or we can allow short-term political pressures to chip away at a competitive edge built over generations.
Investors and CEOs must speak out—because the ability to explore, question, and discover isn’t just essential to academia. It’s the engine of innovation, the foundation of markets, and the key to our long-term growth.
Welcoming top global talent and safeguarding institutional independence aren’t lofty principles. They are economic imperatives.
Now is the time to defend academic freedom in America.
I don’t know how many conservative business people Simmons speaks for, or how many are even paying attention, but his argument is an essential one. As the AAUP has posited since 1915, academic freedom serves the common good. American universities have never been the bastions of Marxist socialism and “woke” ideology of MAGA imagination. Indeed, American universities have always been “capitalist tools” in the best (and also sometimes the worst) sense of that term, even if it seems our supposed “capitalists” too often do their best to blow up this toolbox. Hopefully, however, more will realize the accuracy of Simmons’s point before it’s too late.
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March.
