What is going on at American Universities that are supposed to be bastions of civility, free inquiry, and free speech? In Indiana, a judge paused Indiana University’s recently altered protest policy, stating that it likely violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment right to free speech. Recently, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology banned the senior class president from graduation because she gave an earlier speech accusing the school of having “aided and abetted” Israel with its “assault on the Palestinian people,” after which Jewish students walked out.   

Many have compared the level and intensity of recent campus conflict to the campus protests about the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The demonstrations called for stopping US involvement in the Vietnam War and an end to the draft. They also polarized the American public between those who questioned the war’s morality and purpose and those who supported the fight against Communism.   

We recently reread a 1970 post-mortem on the Vietnam protests, a short book titled “Academia in Anarchy: An Economic Diagnosis” by future Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan and his colleague Nicos Devletoglu, who experienced “first-hand” the student-led disturbances typical of the time. The book makes many points but decries what the authors saw as an unfortunate shift in the university’s purpose. In the “halcyon days,” universities were “voluntary associations…for the reasoned exploration and advancement of knowledge.”  

 Universities offered “academic freedom, which meant the freedom to teach and freedom to learn within an ordered framework of natural Socratic authority.” They went on to say that in this “golden age, direct university participation in society’s current political or social turmoil was seldom viewed as an appropriate and certainly not a necessary activity.” Neither students nor faculty felt that the “learning process would stand to benefit by moral commitment to this or that social or political cause.” It was understood by all involved that “only by remaining apolitical houses of study” could the university serve, first, man’s natural impulse to go on improving his individual knowledge and ameliorating his judgment and, second, society’s long-term process via the systematic increase in the number of those whose actions might be governed by reason.”   

They saw this shift in purpose as the cause of the turmoil at the time. We believe this shift has metastasized and transformed universities so that many have become hotbeds of activism, as described above. Focusing on activism chills and ultimately quashes universities’ capacity for open and reasoned inquiry. Fifty-five years later, Buchanan and Devletoglu’s analysis rings as true as ever.