Key Points
- Free inquiry is essential for democracy, science, and individual justice.
- Free inquiry in the United States is under threat.
- Today’s taboos are developed and enforced not by outsiders but students, professors, and bureaucracies within higher education.
- Rapid, ongoing changes in higher education bear close examination with regard to their influence on free inquiry in academia.
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State legislators and others should encourage and possibly fund campus debates on a broad array of issues and, most importantly for our purposes, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices. These often oppose free inquiry and have become deeply entrenched in universities. Campus debates are rare, as George R. La Noue documents in Chapter 14 (“Can Intellectual Diversity Be Recovered in Academia?”). To its credit, however, Florida now requires public campuses to hold debates.
We also recommend developing a national database of debates and debate cancellations, created by a free speech nonprofit such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).1 To draw attention to the issue, one could expand existing FIRE polls to measure the degree to which secondary and college students are exposed to debates at their educational institutions. If at many institutions the result is rarely or never, then we need to ask whether such institutions should receive public funding from our ideologically diverse taxpayers.