Something has gone badly wrong in the American university. The stories are numerous, but two examples give a sense of where we find ourselves. First, a lecturer at the University of California’s Berkeley campus finds himself suspended for discussing politics after class ends. And at Cornell University, when a law professor complains that a colleague’s course on Gaza is antisemitic, the interim president publicly criticizes the course—prompting the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors to condemn “an egregious threat to academic freedom.”
Meanwhile, six states ban diversity offices at public universities, Florida’s governor stacks college boards with ideological allies, and Texas prohibits faculty from teaching concepts such as “allyship” and “antiracism.” The battle over academic freedom now rages from both sides, with progressives enforcing conformity through institutional or disciplinary requirements and conservatives wielding state power and politically appointed boards to ban offices and dictate curricula.
What unites these assaults is a seemingly shared conviction that universities now exist to produce correct opinions rather than pursue truth. Academic freedom—the scholar’s right to follow inquiry wherever it leads—becomes, in this environment, an obstacle to overcome. In this moment of crisis, I have found myself returning to Catholic social teaching for guidance. Its resources may surprise us, cutting across the political divide and exposing the shared error that is poisoning academia from left and right alike.
The Unity of Truth
At the heart of the Catholic intellectual tradition lies a conviction that mandates, rather than restricts, academic freedom: Pope John Paul II’s apostolic constitution “Ex Corde Ecclesiae” guarantees the “institutional autonomy necessary to perform its functions effectively and guarantees its members academic freedom, so long as the rights of the individual person and of the community are preserved within the confines of the truth and the common good.” Pursuing truth for the common good and the recognition of all human dignity are at the core of academic freedom. This flows not from accommodation to modern sensibilities but from deep theological conviction. If all truth ultimately derives from God, then truths discovered through science, history, philosophy, and theology cannot ultimately be contradictory.
This liberates the scholar. As St. John Henry Newman argues in The Idea of a University, knowledge forms an interconnected whole. No genuine inquiry can be forbidden without impoverishing the entire enterprise. The Catholic university, therefore, embraces all branches of knowledge, confident that patient inquiry will reveal coherence.
Contrast this with today’s university, where disciplines sometimes drift toward ideological pre-commitment on contested questions—conclusions established before inquiry rather than arising from it. This is not orthodoxy in its proper Catholic sense, the fruit of centuries of faithful discernment and communal reflection on revealed truth. It is something else entirely: a manufactured consensus that forecloses debate as a condition of professional belonging.
A sociologist studying criminal justice who privileges class analysis over race-based frameworks may face resistance in tenure review. A climate scientist in a red state may self-censor findings about global warming. A historian whose research complicates narratives of American exceptionalism—whether by emphasizing persistent racial injustice or by highlighting genuine moral development—risks having courses targeted by legislators, depending on which complexity offends local politics.
The result is not truth’s unity but its fragmentation—a university where departments inhabit different epistemic universes, each enforcing its own pre-commitments. A recent Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey found that 35 percent of all faculty admit to self-censoring their written work—nearly four times the rate found in 1958, near the end of the McCarthy era.
Human Dignity and Intellectual Freedom
Catholic social teaching grounds freedom in human dignity. While Vatican II’s “Dignitatis Humanae” addresses religious freedom, its logic extends naturally to intellectual freedom. If human beings possess inherent dignity as rational creatures made in God’s image, that dignity encompasses their obligation to seek truth through God-given reason.
Pope Benedict XVI developed this insight in the address he planned to give at the Sapienza University of Rome in 2008, writing that universities must maintain “freedom from political and ecclesiastical authorities.” The university serves society precisely through its independence. When universities become instruments of political agendas or ecclesiastical control, they cease fulfilling their purpose.
I write this as a dean of a Catholic, Jesuit liberal arts college. The tension is real and daily: How do we cultivate genuine diversity and inclusion—values central to our mission—without creating the ideological conformity that undermines the very intellectual diversity we seek? How do we defend our institutional autonomy against state interference while remaining accountable to our educational mission and the communities we serve?
The principle of subsidiarity holds that decisions should be made at the lowest competent level. Universities constitute genuine communities with proper autonomy. As “Ex Corde Ecclesiae” acknowledges, “A Catholic University possesses the autonomy necessary to develop its distinctive identity and pursue its proper mission.”
Today’s assault on university autonomy violates subsidiarity from multiple directions. Federal agencies have long investigated universities for discrimination. But what seems unique here is the investigation seems to be a pretext to pressure institutions to limit broader political speech. The Trump administration has also withheld research funding from institutions it deemed oppositional to its policies. State legislatures dictate curricula down to specific prohibited terms. University administrators are forced to cave to this political pressure, sacrificing faculty autonomy. All of these represent failures to respect the self-governance of the academic community.
Subsidiarity suggests that curricular decisions belong to faculty and departments, not to administrators responding to outside pressure or legislators responding to constituent outrage. This does not mean universities are unaccountable—but accountability should flow through appropriate channels: accreditation, professional standards, peer review and governance structures that respect academic expertise.
Confidence in Truth
Perhaps Catholic tradition’s most distinctive contribution is its confidence that faith has nothing to fear from honest inquiry. This rests on the Thomistic conviction that truth cannot contradict Truth. Since reason and revelation both derive from God, any apparent conflict must result from faulty reasoning or misunderstanding.
Benedict XVI expressed this in his Regensburg address in 2006: “The scientific ethos is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit.”
This confidence offers a model for all academics, regardless of faith commitment. Scholars genuinely committed to truth should be able to engage with challenging ideas without panic. If our conclusions are correct, they will withstand scrutiny; if wrong, we should want to know. This is how knowledge moves forward. The defensiveness characterizing contemporary discourse—the rush to silence dissent, cancel speakers, punish nonconformity—suggests a greater danger of stifling knowledge creation and the pursuit of truth. It forces scholars to assume the risks regardless of uncertainty about whether their positions can withstand debate. The Catholic tradition’s serene confidence in the knowability of truth is precisely what the fearful university needs to recover.
Catholic teaching also emphasizes that rights come paired with responsibilities. “Ex Corde Ecclesiae” states: “Freedom in research and teaching is recognized and respected…so long as the rights of the individual and of the community are preserved within the confines of the truth and the common good.”
Academic freedom is not unlimited license but freedom exercised within obligations to truth, students, colleagues and society. Newman was clear: The church “fears no knowledge, but she purifies all…her principle is one and the same throughout: not to prohibit truth of any kind, but to see that no doctrines pass under the name of Truth but those which claim it rightfully.”
This speaks to contemporary challenges on all sides. When universities abandon rigorous standards in favor of ideological conformity—whether progressive or conservative—they betray their mission. Academic freedom protects the pursuit of controversial conclusions, but it does not exempt scholars from pursuing them through rigorous methods and honest engagement with evidence. A scholar who reaches conclusions offensive to the political right through careful research deserves protection. So does a scholar whose findings trouble progressive assumptions. Both are doing what universities exist to enable.
The Case for Prudential Neutrality
One response to politicization has been renewed interest in institutional neutrality—the principle that universities should not take positions on contested political questions. Since 2024’s campus protests, more than 25 institutions have adopted neutrality policies based on the University of Chicago’s 1967 “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action,” known colloquially as the Kalven Report, stating that “the university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”
Prudential neutrality resonates with Catholic principles—not as a substantive judgment that truth is unknowable or that the university lacks convictions, but as a practical judgment about institutional posture. The university refrains from official pronouncements on contested political questions not because it doubts that truth exists but because it recognizes that its mission is best served by protecting the conditions under which truth can be freely pursued. This is a matter of discernment, not indifference.
When universities take official positions on contested questions, they inevitably pressure dissenters into silence. The Kalven insight—that neutrality arises “not from lack of courage…but rather out of respect for free inquiry”—echoes Catholic teaching that truth has nothing to fear from honest debate.
Yet prudential neutrality is not simple, particularly for Catholic institutions whose mission is never reducible to mere procedural fairness. Catholic universities do not simply host inquiry—they are animated by a positive vision of the human person and of truth’s ultimate coherence. The challenge lies in distinguishing threats to the university’s core mission from contested political questions where the institution should remain silent.
When external actors threaten academic freedom itself—through funding cuts, legislative interference or donor pressure—institutional silence may constitute abdication rather than neutrality. Threading this needle requires not just principle but wisdom, the very kind of practical discernment the Ignatian tradition commends.
A Way Forward
What would taking this vision seriously mean for today’s university? It would mean resisting instrumentalization from all sides—defending academic communities against intrusion by legislatures, agencies, donors and our own administrative overreach. It would mean cultivating genuine viewpoint diversity rather than enforcing any kind of uniformity. It would mean protecting scholars who reach unpopular conclusions through rigorous methods, even when those conclusions offend powerful constituencies.
Here, the very word catholic—in the sense of universal—offers a resource often overlooked. A university animated by the Catholic tradition claims no corner of human knowledge as foreign territory. Its catholicity demands intellectual breadth: an embrace of diverse perspectives, methods and traditions of inquiry not as concessions to pluralism but as expressions of the church’s universal vision. If truth is one, then every discipline, every culture, every honest mode of inquiry has something to contribute to its discovery. The intellectual parochialism that now afflicts universities of every stripe—where scholars in one department cannot speak the language of the next, and where entire fields are rendered off-limits by political fashion—is a failure of catholicity before it is a failure of policy.
Most fundamentally, this vision would mean recovering the conviction that truth is unified, that patient inquiry will reveal coherence, and that genuine knowledge has nothing to fear from open debate. These are not partisan principles. A professor fired for questioning the ideological pre-commitments of a D.E.I. agenda and a professor fired for criticizing Israeli policy are both victims of the same instrumentalist logic—both treated as threats because universities have forgotten they exist for truth rather than for political outcomes.
As “Gaudium et Spes” reminds us, the Catholic tradition understands human beings as created for truth and understands the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling requiring freedom. In defending academic freedom, the church affirms something central to its understanding of human dignity.
In our time, when universities face unprecedented pressures to conform, when scholars across the political spectrum self-censor for fear of consequences, when the very possibility of objective truth is questioned by some and weaponized by others, the Catholic tradition’s voice deserves a hearing. It reminds us that academic freedom is not a luxury but a necessity—not merely for the flourishing of universities but for the flourishing of human beings.
Benedict XVI warned that when “reason becomes deaf to the great message that comes to it from Christian faith and wisdom, then it withers like a tree whose roots can no longer reach the waters that give it life.” But equally, when faith suppresses reason or ideology silences inquiry, the human spirit is diminished.
The Catholic intellectual tradition points toward a better way: the fearless, disciplined, communal pursuit of truth in all its forms, confident that this pursuit ultimately leads to God, who is himself Truth. In an age when both the political left and right seek to capture the university for their agendas, this ancient wisdom offers not a middle way but a higher way—one that takes truth more seriously than either side currently does.
For those of us working in Catholic and Jesuit higher education, this is not abstract philosophy but daily practice. We encounter these tensions in faculty meetings, hiring decisions, curriculum debates and responses to external pressure.
The Catholic intellectual tradition and Catholic social teaching do not provide easy answers, but they do provide the right questions and the confidence that pursuing them honestly serves both the academy and the faith—and, through both, the common good. That confidence, more than any policy, procedure, or stance, is what the contemporary university most desperately needs.
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