FREEDOM IS THE FREEDOM TO SAY TWO AND TWO MAKE FOUR.

Cato's Neal McCluskey questions the political economy of higher education.

Fundamentally, academic freedom – the grounds on which it is argued that only university faculty should make academic decisions – is incompatible with forced funding of an institution. There is good reason that academics should be able to pursue ideas as they see fit – progress comes when untested and sometimes unpopular ideas can be explored – but academics must not be more free than everyone else; their freedom cannot mean others are forced to fund them.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed objects, correctly, that freedom of inquiry comes with obligations.  "Academic freedom isn’t license to spout whatever you want. It’s a hunting license for truth. It’s a suspension of disbelief in the name of discovering or confronting truth. Sometimes the truth is unpopular, or in conflict with powerful interests."  Yes, and sometimes those "powerful interests" are within the academy, and they're exceeding the agency their principals (taxpayers, acting through legislators) have entrusted to them.  Dean Dad continues,

Academic freedom is based on the recognition that the truth is independent of the whims of the powerful, and that we, as a society, are better off knowing the truth. Academic freedom is freedom to do the work. And it’s important not because one group of people is special -- nobody is -- but because the truth matters. The unique burden on academics -- the payback for subsidizing inquiry, if you want to look at it that way -- is that academics are professionally obligated to share what they find. In exchange for being granted the room to explore, they’re obliged to report back on what’s there. Because we don’t know what will be found until it’s found, we can’t rely on the price system. Scholarship is inherently public; public funding is a perfectly rational response to what would otherwise be a market failure. Putting scholarship out in the public helps move discovery forward; paywalling all scholarship would desiccate inquiry.

Unfortunately, there's too much deconstruction of truth going on these days, too much rent-seeking, and too often the agents are not honoring that obligation to seek truth.

Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.”

This is consistent with everything we know from the sociology of science. With the centralisation and bureaucratisation of scientific funding, defection from a well-institutionalised consensus is even more costly now than it was when Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He showed that it is almost always from outside a research community that challenges arise. Progress happens when a prevailing scientific consensus is revealed to rest on the loyalties and intellectual affinities of an established research milieu, and not simply on correspondence with reality.

Something is left unexplained in the consensus view, and to focus on this lacuna is to be an outsider. Reliably, such challenges are fought tooth and nail by the research empire built on the encrusted consensus.

I leave the generalization to prestige journalism and "genius grants" as an exercise.  Matt and I are likely to agree that turning legislators and trustees loose to question each tenure decision and each hire is likely to have bad consequences.  I repeat from last week, "That ship might already have sailed, as explicit or implicit political litmus tests have made their way into hiring and tenure deliberations.  A countervailing exercise of power by trustees or legislators, though, is not likely to turn out well."  We're not going to agree on his "Reducing academic freedom to a job perk held by people of the opposite party misses the point."  In the same way that taxpayers might object to telephone excise taxes initially enacted to finance the Spanish-American War, taxpayers might object to being taxed for institutions of higher education that aren't delivering on the truth, that aren't holding up their end of the social contract, that are indulging in bad history in support of a journalistic consensus that rests on loyalties and intellectual affinities.