First he was involved in the Trump Administration’s document calling for a massive violation of academic freedom, and now he intends to take the war on academic freedom to every department at Hopkins by pushing for “a shift in the recruitment of faculty,” partnering with the conservative American Enterprise Institute in order “to move with dispatch” to hire “conservative” professors.

As I wrote in the earlier post,”Academic freedom defers judgments about which perspectives are ‘relevant’ (and whether ‘intellectual pluralism’ is relevant) to experts in the various disciplines. That’s how universities that respect academic freedom deal with these issues, full stop.” That’s why behaviorism ruled in psychology departments for decades, and the failed empirical research program of neoclassical macroeconomics rules in economics departments. Those are costs of academic freedom, but over time, there tend to be corrections (e.g., behaviorism was displaced from the center of American psychology departments).

Political “viewpoint diversity” is not an academic value, and requiring it is inconsistent with academic freedom. President Daniels, who does not have a PhD in a scholarly discipline, may not know this (he is a lawyer, and law as an academic discipline is fairly politicized, perhaps unavoidably). On the other hand, as the CHE interview linked above suggests, the real issue here is that the cutbacks in NIH funding are really hurting Hopkins, whose academic medical and public health operations are huge, and hugely dependent on federal funding. My suspicion is that President Daniels hopes to move Hopkins to the head of the line for federal monies with these various attacks on the academic freedom of faculty and departments.