In universities and other truth-seeking institutions, free inquiry is under threat.
The practice of free inquiry rests on tolerating dissent and promoting data and logical argument over feelings, status, party rule, or group affiliation. Many of the most noted successes of the West are the fruits of free inquiry, but this legacy is now at risk. Furthermore, our education system is failing to teach the values of free inquiry and free speech, which are vital to preparing citizens to work alongside those with differing opinions.
In The Free Inquiry Papers, an impressive array of academics come together to address this urgent problem. Across 20 chapters, the authors lay out the arguments for free inquiry, document the current threats, and offer solutions to protect and advance free inquiry. The authors represent a range of academic and political backgrounds, but they agree on three fundamental perspectives. First, the current higher education regime now prioritizes activism and status over the search for truth, especially in the social sciences and humanities. This is neither politically nor scientifically sustainable. Second, institutional improvements are possible and would enhance the institutions' validity and credibility. Third, no one has all the answers.
The erosion of support for free inquiry matters for everyone, but it is especially dangerous for the institutions whose mission is the production of ideas and knowledge. If we lose our ability to debate and discuss ideas openly and honestly, then both science and democracy will yield to a new dark age.
Robert Maranto is a political scientist serving as the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. He researches administrative reform generally and education reform in particular while editing the Journal of School Choice. He has served on his local school board and in other public posts and is a founding member of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science. With others, he has produced over 100 refereed publications and 16 scholarly books, including COVID-19 and Schools: Policymakers, Stakeholders, and School Choice (2024); Educating Believers: Religion and School Choice (2021); President Obama and Education Reform (2012); and The Politically Correct University (2009). Maranto has also penned more than 200 commentaries for venues including the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and National Review. He is now working on a book about his experiences as an education reformer serving on his local school board, tentatively titled School Board Confidential.
Catherine Salmon received a BSc in biology in 1992 and a PhD in evolutionary psychology in 1997 from McMaster University in Canada. After several years as a postdoctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, she joined the faculty at the University of Redlands in Southern California, where she is currently a professor in the psychology department and the director of the human-animal studies program. She is the coauthor of The Secret Power of Middle Children (2012) and Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality (2003). Her primary research interests include parental investment and sibling conflict; male and female sexuality, particularly as expressed in pornography and other erotic genres; and human-animal interactions. She chaired her university's institutional review board for 10 years and was the editor in chief of the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences from 2017 through 2023. She is a founding member of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science.
Lee Jussim is a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University, where he recently completed his second term as department chair and is currently serving as acting chair for the anthropology department. He has published over 100 articles and chapters and seven books. His scholarship addresses stereotypes, prejudice, expectancy effects, and accuracy; how dysfunctional academic norms, including in peer review, methods, and political biases, threaten the validity of much work produced by the social sciences; and, more recently, radicalization in academia and the wider society. His book, Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (2012), contested the psychological canon that social perception was mostly bias, and he received the Association of American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence for best book in psychology in 2012. He is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, which aspires to be an antidote to the denunciatory, censorious turn in academia. He also writes essays on social science and academia at Unsafe Science on Substack.
