Intellectual Freedom in an Authoritarian Age

My Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture at the University of Michigan

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On Thursday, November 6, I gave the David, Markert, Nickerson lecture. This is an annual lecture on academic and intellectual freedom at the University of Michigan, but I was present virtually. The lecture series’ origins go back to the McCarthy era. In 1954 the University of Michigan suspended three faculty members for their refusal to give testimony to the U.S. House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Professors H. Chandler Davis (mathematics) and Mark Nickerson (pharmacology) were fired. The third faculty member, Clement L. Markert (biology), was retained but censured, and left the university soon afterwards.

Here is an excerpt of that lecture. I have changed a few things for clarity of exposition. I hope you enjoy reading it.

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I am honored to be delivering this year’s Davis, Markert, Nickerson lecture. This is the nation’s longest-running lecture series devoted to academic and intellectual freedom, and as such it is a bellwether of the changing concerns of academics, from the McCarthy era onward, and the changing intellectual and political climate in which they practice their profession.

This year it feels precious to have this lecture. Right now, an authoritarian state is taking shape in the United States at a pace normally seen after a coup. We have military in the streets of American cities, and people rounded up by masked members of state security forces and disappeared into domestic and foreign prisons. Government agencies, and the Republican Party, have become personal tools of a leader who seems intent on consolidating power at home and promoting the interests of his foreign autocrat allies.

This same president is engaging in shakedowns of businesses, media outlets, and universities to create a climate of subordination to his will, generate income, and transform society quickly by standardizing government talking points throughout society and silencing threatening information.

Authoritarians have always gone after the education system and educators as they seek to change the political culture, indoctrinate new generations with their own worldview, and eradicate critical thinking. As I wrote in my book Strongmen, “Propaganda may seem to be all about noise, but silence and absence are equally important to its operation. Strongmen disappear people, and they also disappear knowledge that conflicts with their ideologies and goals.”

Far from being “ivory towers” closed off from society, educational institutions are often front-line targets of those who seek to destroy democracy. What happens on campus reflects, and often anticipates, transformations of societies in an authoritarian direction.

For authoritarianism to be durable as a system, you need a shift in morals and values, including the value of upholding the truth. You have to recondition people –in Communist systems this is called re-education—to create a climate conducive to people accepting lying, corruption, and violence as normal.

Propaganda is not just about getting people to believe this or that individual lie, but also changing the way people think and feel and how they view others and the world.

The War on Facts and Education

Demonizing and delegitimizing intellectuals and all those who work with fact-based research protocols and democratic models of pedagogy is part of this effort. Researchers, scientists, journalists, academics, and others in any field become threats when political leaders seek to manufacture an alternate reality based on lies and conspiracy theories.

In an authoritarian system, you express loyalty by circulating these false versions of reality. Performing the lies in public, whether in the classroom, at a party congress, or on television or social media, is key.

Autocrats also go after universities because they train the next generation of leaders. Elite formation is why they don’t only shut down intellectual freedom and change the content of learning, but also remake higher education institutions into places that reward intolerance, conformism, and other values and behaviors authoritarians require.

The purpose of education, as well as the content of education, changes in an autocratic system, and so the values inculcated in those spaces must change as well.

Italian Fascism provided a template. Since most universities were public, professors and researchers were civil servants and could be pressured through bureaucratic means. First came a 1931 loyalty oath to the King and Fascism. Financial need and fear of reprisals meant that only 12 out of 1,250 refused to sign. Among the dissenters was the literary scholar Giuseppe Borgese, who resigned from the University of Milan and left for America. From his new perch at Smith College, Borgese judged the oath a success for the regime, noting that those who acquiesced “became interested in the permanent triumph of fascism, seeking in it the justification of their behavior.”

In 1932 came a requirement to join the Fascist Party to apply for jobs or promotions, and an obligation to wear a black shirt on official occasions. Student informers monitored their peers and their teachers, recording any critical remarks or anti-regime jokes, and new university student organizations inculcated Fascist values through extra-curricular activities.

Young University Fascist organization meeting, Ascoli Piceno, 1941. Note the squadrist dagger, symbol of Fascist violence, raised by a student in the back. Wikimedia Commons.

No wonder the Nazis made a similar oath for German professors after they took over in 1933. It efficiently revealed which individuals would take themselves out of the game and which could be “worked on” to coopt and corrupt.

Educational Institutions as Sites of Peaceful Resistance

Autocrats also go after educational institutions because schools and universities have been an important part of nonviolent resistance to autocracy. They are often among the first places protests take place in societies where freedom has been vanquished.

“Dictatorships put people to sleep, and the only ones brave enough to fight it are youth,” said taxi driver Renato Gomez, a witness to years of Chilean protests in Santiago. Students and their faculty mentors have always deployed the rule of using all the tools and spaces at your disposal.

Chilean students at Catholic universities sung protest hymns to counter Pinochet, German students of the White Rose group left flyers and sent letters, Italian students used a meeting of the Fascist University Youth film club to show the pacifist masterpiece La grande illusion (1937) by Jean Renoir. In 2022, Iranian and Chinese students were among the most active participants in the protests that took those regimes by surprise. In China, 79 universities held demonstrations against dehumanizing lockdown policies.

In the United States, students have led sit-ins, read-ins, walkouts, and other forms of protest against book bans and censorship in red states and nationally. In recent years, the activism of young people on and off line has also shifted our consciousness more broadly about genocide, plunder of the environment and the labor force, and the costs of institutionalized lying.

I am the last person to underestimate the gravity of what we face, and I know that each victory for our democracy can spark a repressive reaction. But one of my maxims is Never Underestimate the American People, and I believe that the United States has the potential to defeat this nascent autocracy and come out of it with a stronger, more just, and more democratic democracy.

Civic education and instruction in traditional sites of learning will be key to this action. As educators, we can model the values we want to see in the world, both for our students and also through civic communications that counter disinformation and establish bonds of solidarity with the greater public. We all have something we can contribute.

Michael Roth, the President of Wesleyan University, stated “I believe that higher education should be a repository of the ‘seeds’ of democracy. We should protect those seeds during times of authoritarianism, and we should help them grow in ways that enhance the ability of our citizens to flourish.”

I thank you for having this lecture series, which for years has planted seeds of democratic activism and has enlightened so many on the subject of intellectual and academic freedom in times of tyranny. I am honored to be part of it.