Through a decade of political innovations, shifting alliances, and emerging coalitions within American conservatism, few stances have remained as consistent as the right’s antipathy to the censoriousness and ideological uniformity of higher education. At the heart of that stance is what seems to me to be a characteristic fusionist mantra: an amalgamation of Aristotelian instincts about functions, purposes, and natures with the utilitarian argument for free speech in John Stuart Mill’s classical liberalism. The mantra goes like this: A good university is a university that serves its purpose. The purpose of a university is to produce knowledge, or perhaps to find and speak the truth. The policies that best support the mission of knowledge production are policies of academic freedom. Therefore, a university ought to have policies of academic freedom.
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