Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually made the statement — “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is a common and apt refrain when discussing the connection between historical perspectives and current events. By drawing on knowledge of what happened in the past, and why, we are better able to understand the flow and direction of the history collectively created in each new day.
“Past Rhymes With Present Times” is a series by Lloyd S. Kramer exploring historical context and frameworks, and how the foundations of the past affect the building of the future.
The current attacks on key institutions in America’s democratic society express a widespread hostility for traditional expertise and the knowledge of well-trained experts.
Dismissing carefully developed expertise as a threat to national values, the authoritarian assaults on long-serving experts in military affairs, government agencies, environmental management, judicial systems, immigrant rights, historical museums, public education, and medical research profoundly endanger the expanding knowledge and transnational exchanges that have shaped America’s global influence over the last 80 years.
The Specific Vulnerability of Universities
This destructive purge of experts affects people in every community, but attacks on expertise carry specific threats for cities that have flourished because of their great private and public research universities.
Our state’s universities now face major challenges that flow from government cutbacks in research funding, restrictions on foreign scholars and students, conservative campaigns to abolish faculty tenure, and the Trump Administration’s new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”
This “Compact” could bring more threats to North Carolina’s universities by demanding a five-year tuition freeze, capping international student enrollments, and calling for the abolition of departmental units that “punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
Present-day attacks on academic freedom and institutional autonomy may seem like arcane scholarly problems, yet the costs of losing such traditions extend far beyond universities because authoritarian movements and regimes are always hostile to independent-minded experts who defend fact-based expertise against the ideological claims of the governing power. Experts make mistakes, of course, and they are never infallible; but errors and misinterpretations should be corrected or revised through careful, evidence-based analysis rather than through the distorting anger of political purges.
The concepts of academic freedom and academic tenure thus emerged as institutional safeguards against political groups and powerful leaders whose campaigns to replace independent experts with ideologically “safe” political allies inevitably reduced the quality of public institutions and undermined the vitality of intellectual life.
The Struggle to Define and Defend Academic Freedom
There were few explanations before the 20th century for the social value of academic freedom or free expression within universities. Professors could be easily removed from their institutions whenever they were suspected of promoting dangerous or unconventional beliefs, but the rise of modern scientific research created a new rationale for the autonomy and protection of carefully trained teachers and scholars.
Faculty members came to be viewed as experts whose long years of study shaped evidence-based truth claims that might include new ideas like biological evolution or sociological explanations for economic inequality.
University professors began to claim that they should not be punished for espousing information or ideas that challenged the views of university administrators, prominent donors, or public officials. In one famous case at Stanford University, an economist was fired because the university’s most important donor objected to his public criticisms of the ways in which the Stanford family had built its railroad wealth with the labor of Chinese immigrants.
This high-profile firing at Stanford exemplified how governing boards could effectively remove controversial faculty members, but the expanding patterns of outside intervention eventually provoked a group of well-trained academic leaders to found the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915.
The AAUP soon issued a “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” that emphasized how the expertise of faculty departments justified their autonomous decisions about who should be hired or promoted within their own disciplinary fields.
Comparing professors to well-informed judges who make independent rulings after their appointments to judicial positions, the AAUP argued that unfettered faculty research served broader national interests because “the first condition of [intellectual] progress is complete and unlimited freedom to pursue inquiry and publish its results.” The social benefits of human progress, in short, gave universities their unique role as cultural institutions “where new ideas may germinate and where their fruit, though still distasteful to the community as a whole, may be allowed to ripen.”
Academic freedom therefore differed from the broader First Amendment rights of free speech in that academic researchers and teachers had to make accurate, truthful statements about the subjects they discussed, whereas anyone could make pronouncements in the public sphere without the research-based evidence that academic discourse requires.
Professors might also speak about public issues outside the university, but these forms of “free expression” went somewhat beyond the usual expertise-based arguments for academic freedom. This difference remains important for legal scholars such as David M. Rabban, whose recent book on Academic Freedom (2024) argues that the AAUP went too far in claiming that the public speech of faculty members should have the same institutional protection as their academic expertise.
The most intense conflicts, however, have often emerged when academic experts participate in public debates, which suggests why the AAUP clarified its defense of free speech in 1940 with the assertion that “University teachers are [also] citizens” who have the right to “speak or write as citizens” and who should “be free from institutional censorship or discipline” while seeking “at all times [to] be accurate” and making “every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.”
Free Speech and Academic Freedom at UNC
Debates about academic freedom and free speech have also affected the University of North Carolina over most of its history. The pervasive fear of anti-slavery statements in the 1850s, for example, generated one of the most famous political interventions after a chemistry professor named Benjamin Hedrick told some of his students (outside of class) that he wanted to vote for the Republican “free-soil” candidate in the presidential election of 1856.
“Benjamin S. Hedrick (1827-1886),” Carolina Story: Virtual Museum of University History
This information reached political critics in Raleigh, where an angry newspaper editor wrote that “the expression of black Republican opinions in our midst is incompatible with our honor and safety as people” and also published an article from “an alumnus” who argued that Hedrick’s “poisonous influence” must be removed to protect the “safety” of the “University and the state.”
Hedrick defended his views in a public letter, but he was immediately fired by the University’s Board of Trustees. Professors at UNC therefore long worked within a political framework that restricted their rights to free expression and academic freedom, but they were also legally blocked from enrolling Black students or hiring Black professors throughout the era of Jim Crow segregation.
When the Civil Rights movement and legal reforms finally forced UNC to accept racial integration, the state legislature intervened again in the early 1960s with a new law that banned communists or anyone with communist sympathies (which legislators attributed to those who advocated Black equality) from speaking at the university.
The speaker ban was later declared unconstitutional during the era when UNC’s faculty were gaining wider control over hiring processes, tenure reviews, and curriculum decisions that confirmed a growing respect for faculty expertise. Faculty management of hiring and tenure has nevertheless remained a contentious political issue, as North Carolinians saw again after 2020 when a key donor and members of UNC’s Board of Trustees opposed the appointment of Nikole Hannah-Jones to a faculty-recommended position in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Although professors continue to argue that they have the expertise to decide who merits tenure and academic promotions, they are responding again to outside campaigns that seek to eliminate tenure, to suspend faculty members for statements or actions beyond the classroom, and to place new controls on student admissions.
Academic Freedom and the New Assault on Expertise
Despite the renewed assaults on academic freedom and free expression, UNC’s enduring commitment to these principles is summarized in a statement on the UNC provost’s website; and the university’s Faculty Council has approved a resolution to reiterate that “public expression on matters of local, regional, national, and international importance is a core component of the jobs of many members of the faculty and must not be suppressed.”
Suspicions of well-qualified experts are meanwhile spreading across the United States in the attacks on vaccine research and in recent efforts to abolish faculty tenure. Recommendations for tenure may be particularly “suspect” because they typically come from autonomous faculty committees that recognize the distinguished achievements of specialized graduate training, examine student responses to diverse courses across years of classroom teaching, and solicit external evaluations of exceptional research expertise in a complex field of knowledge.
This national hostility for hard-earned expertise has also become influential within North Carolina, where the Board of Trustees at UNC-Chapel Hill has questioned the financial expertise of the athletics department, hired an unqualified, overpaid football coach who has no expertise in college sports, and created a School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) that ignored and drove away faculty experts who originally sought to collaborate with the School’s “all-controlling” dean.
The dangers of this anti-expertise ideology are described in a lawsuit that the former provost Chris Clemens filed against UNC’s Board of Trustees. Drawing on his own administrative experiences, Clemens alleges that Board members avoided open-meeting discussions about “whether tenure should exist at UNC-Chapel Hill” and that his own attempt to discuss the Board’s internal “debate on the existential value and global costs of tenure” with university deans led to his immediate dismissal.
Recent developments at UNC’s flagship university therefore overlap with broader national assaults on the academic freedom, research expertise, and free expression that are essential for the civic health of a modern democracy.
You don’t have to love places like UNC — or even feel connected to other universities — to see that the rejection of academic expertise and the decline of academic freedom threaten your own freedom to know and use evidence-based truths in a democratic society.
Photo via Lindsay Metivier
Lloyd Kramer is a professor emeritus of History at UNC, Chapel Hill, who believes the humanities provide essential knowledge for both personal and public lives. His most recent book is titled “Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood,” but his historical interest in cross-cultural exchanges also shaped earlier books such as “Nationalism In Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities Since 1775” and “Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions.”
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