Higher education is under siege, and not just from the outside.
In recent years, colleges and universities have faced increasing external pressure on academic freedom from lawmakers seeking to ban certain books, restrict curricula and refund programs deemed intellectually wrong. These threats are real and well-documented and must be met with strong defenses. But in the heated conversation about who is attacking the school from the outside, we have been largely silent about another threat at work from the inside: the gap between what educators say they believe about teaching and what actually happens when the classroom door closes.
My research suggests that this internal failure does as much damage to the promise of a free investigation as any law enforcement. And unlike political pressure, it’s something we can actually fix—if we’re honest enough to name it.
The Prophecy Principle
Let’s start with what almost everyone in higher education agrees on, at least in theory: Free inquiry—the right and responsibility to rigorously test ideas, to follow the evidence where it leads, to entertain uncomfortable questions and to engage diverse perspectives without fear—is the lifeblood of the university. It is not just institutional policy to protect. It is a teaching practice that requires strong implementation in the way we create learning environments.
This is not a politically contentious claim. Conservatives and progressives alike ask for free questions when it helps them. Authorizing bodies await you. Mission statements everywhere promise their loyalty. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in its 2017 Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, clearly called for higher education to move beyond the delivery of content and toward helping students develop the skills and mindsets needed for social life in a democracy.
For those of us who have taught philosophy in the Socratic tradition, free inquiry is not mysterious. It is the belief that intellectual growth occurs only when students are challenged to step outside the familiar confines of their own “cave”—to confront assumptions, to test prejudices and to put comfortable beliefs to the test of rational discussion. Understanding that true openness requires distinguishing dialogue from debate: In dialogue, participants cooperate in a shared understanding rather than competing for victory.
That’s the principle. Now for the habit.
A Problem We Rarely Talk About
A statewide faculty survey I conducted of 198 graduate faculty across disciplines revealed a surprising and largely unwelcome finding: Faculty strongly believe in dialogic, student-centered pedagogy—but very few practice it.
Eighty-four percent of the faculty in my research believe in integrating experiential learning. Sixty-nine percent identified Socratic dialogue as an effective way to promote meaningful student learning. Eighty-five percent endorsed collaborative, student-centered approaches. These are not the minds of the anti-free inquiry wing. In contrast, intellectuals embrace the Socratic philosophy of education—the idea that academic content should be a form of thinking, that students should take intellectual risks, that real-world application is essential.
But when the same faculty described their actual classroom methods, large gaps emerged. The belief-practice difference in experiential learning was 30 percent. For Socratic discussion, it was 29 points. For cooperative work, 23 points. On average, this belief-practice gap was between 20 and 25 percent across all Socratic teaching methods.
In short: the faculty preaches free inquiry but in their classrooms, on average, they do something very delayed.
Why This Happened: The Legacy Problem
We need to resist the temptation to treat this gap as evidence of professional hypocrisy. It is not. What my research reveals is something structured and highly forgivable – therefore portable.
Most students learn to teach the way most people learn from their parents: by repeating the models they have inherited. Only 9.45 percent of the faculty in my study reported receiving any formal graduate school training in teaching older students. Others learn by doing—and by watching. What they were watching, in most cases, was the speeches. What they assumed was a hierarchical classroom structure where the professor had authority, the students acquired knowledge and were graded on tests instead of thinking.
These inherited mindsets and pedagogies persist not because intelligence intellectually allows them to, but because they operate subconsciously. As Mackenzie Stephens and Jessica Santangelo have noted, there is a surprising lack of research on faculty metacognition—how faculty think carefully about how they think about their teaching. Without formal training in andragogy, faculty lack the conceptual vocabulary necessary to critically examine their practice. They can’t point out contradictions they don’t know exist.
The result is a legacy of teaching that has been passed down, mostly untested, from one generation of intellectuals to another. And when that legacy depends on complexity—on the subject, on slow answers, on questions with precise answers—it quietly undermines the very spirit of open inquiry that the same profession would best defend when questioned.
The Threat From Outside—And How It Compounds the Problem Inside
External pressures on higher education are unrelated to this internal failure. They put it together.
When legislators threaten to subsidize course content, when administrators expand definitions of harassment in ways that stifle controversial discussion, when institutional responses to student grievances systematically narrow the scope of permissible speech—each policy may seem defensible in its own right. Together, they create a situation where rigorous investigation becomes impossible. Faculty already unsure of how to conduct a difficult dialogue receive an unspoken institutional message: Don’t try.
And the teachers who try—creating what I call “connective spaces,” where students from different backgrounds freely discuss controversial topics including political events, religious conflicts, questions of racial equality and cultural diversity—often do so without institutional support, without pedagogical training and against a cultural storm that includes challenge and harm.
External attacks on academic freedom are real. But we cannot defend free inquiry in our mission statements while failing to emphasize it in our classrooms. Higher education’s mandate to resist political interference depends, in part, on whether it actually practices what it preaches.
What We Should Do: Start with the Faculty
The good news included in my research is that it reframes the problem—and therefore the solution.
Faculty are not obstacles to Socrates’ teaching. They are allies and lack support. The question is not how to persuade the faculty to value free inquiry; they already do. The question is how to build structures, professional development experiences and communities of practice that help faculty bridge the gap between their values and their practice.
This restructuring is critical to how institutions approach intellectual development. Too often, pedagogical reform programs are designed as corrective—implicitly implying that faculty are doing something wrong. This causes defensiveness and resistance, which is understandable and counterintuitive. A better way starts with alignment: you already believe in this. Let’s find out together why the classroom doesn’t always show that belief, and what support can help.
Three principles can guide this work:
- Make the invisible visible. Faculty cannot fill a gap they do not see. Institutions should invest in structured self-assessment tools—video reviews, peer observations and honest assessment rubrics—that help faculty identify unconscious contradictions between their stated beliefs and actual practices. My 20 years of self-study, which included reviewing 50 instructional videos throughout my career, was truly transformative because it forced me to face the times when I was teaching when I believed in conversations, when I had the authority that I claimed to share.
- Treat professional development as a signature experience, not a workshop. In short, professional development of the piece rarely changes practice. What works are sustainable communities of inquiry where faculty explore pedagogy collaboratively over time, build trust and gain permission to be vulnerable about the gap between desire and reality. The goal is not compliance but real thinking.
- Separate the teaching challenge from injury—and prevent it. Administrators are responsible for creating environments where faculty can exercise true instructional autonomy. When pressure mounts—from students uncomfortable with hardship, from advocates hostile to certain ideas, from institutional risk aversion—leadership must consistently demonstrate why psychological discomfort is a sign that minds are working, not an injury to be repaired.
Civic Poles
This is not just an educational discussion. It is a democracy.
We are approaching a time of great crisis in the life of American society. Polarization has made productive disagreements across differences rare. The mental habits that underpin democratic participation—the ability to evaluate evidence, engage with dissenting opinions, hold convictions, and be genuinely open to being wrong—are the very habits that Socrates teaches.
Colleges and universities are uniquely positioned to be places where young people develop these skills. The research is clear that the faculty already believe that this is their job. All that’s left is the hard, menial work of making sure that in their classrooms they actually do.
We cannot protect free inquiry effectively by confining it to news articles and policy statements alone. We protect it—and advance it—by doing patient-centered, reflective, ethics-based work that we call self-education.
External threats to academic freedom deserve our strongest resistance. And so is the silent threat of never fully living up to the ideals we strive to protect.
