When Academics want to Bring Down the Academy — a Princeton Example

By Tal Fortgang ‘17

With students returning to campus for the start of the new academic year, and demonstrations from radical groups sure to crop up on quads once again, one question universities face is how to balance robust academic freedom with universities’ competing interests. Schools cannot live on academic freedom alone; the functioning of a university requires standards, rules, and regulations to allow students and faculty to flourish. Yet university leadership, especially at elite schools where abstract thinking is prized and questions are regularly left unanswered as matters of mere intellectual exercise, has not even begun to articulate a principled way of weighing these matters. They can begin to do so by considering an unlikely – and unwitting – source of wisdom: Princeton professor Lorgia García Peña’s recent address to the Socialism 2025 conference, on using one’s academic perch to dismantle the academy. 

The most striking aspect of Peña’s presentation, which conference organizers deemed important enough to merit its own panel, was not its radicalism. Many professors are radical. What stood out was its honesty. Standing before an audience of fellow academics, she openly described her strategy to “abolish the university as it is” while drawing resources from “the colonizing racial capitalist white supremacist institution that pays my salary, which I very much need.” Her candid admission that she uses institutional funds to “dismantle the university from within” will lead some – maybe even Princeton leadership – to reconsider whether she is worthy recipient of that salary. But that is not the point. (Nor is it the point that modeling ingratitude is among the worst characteristics a professor could embody.) Peña is personally trivial, a nonentity. Her admission, and her comfort sharing it in plain terms, though, should prompt serious reflection about the academic culture that has made such a view not only possible but professionally rewarding.

García Peña’s case matters precisely because she is not an outlier. As she takes pains to explain, her academic department encourages her abolitionism. Ethnic studies represents a “site within the university where I have found a tradition of intentionally centering the collective — even in defiance of power, meaning sometimes in defiance of our own employers.” This is not the confession of a rogue academic but the description of an entire field that has explicitly organized itself around undermining its host institution. Her comfort saying so publicly suggests she operates within a professional community where such views are not controversial but commonplace.

This presents American higher education with a profound systemic problem. Universities have traditionally functioned as communities of scholars bound together by shared commitments to rigorous inquiry, intellectual honesty, and advancing knowledge that will be useful to fellow citizens, and indeed to all humanity. If doing so is worthwhile, universities must reject inquiries that fray those binds. When significant segments of the faculty define their mission in opposition to these institutional purposes — when they use the very platform of the university to undermine it in favor of tribal allegiances — that is a threat to the university’s capacity to function coherently.

The professor’s strategic approach reveals the sophistication of the threat. She speaks of exploiting “student turnover cycles” to maintain radical movements, coordinating with “faculty and staff across all levels,” and establishing what amounts to campus-based support networks for ideological organizing. Her advice to activists includes creating “cheat sheets” with approved political language and patiently converting faculty in STEM fields who might initially resist political mobilization. It is a blueprint for systematic institutional capture.

García Peña’s background provides additional context for understanding how such approaches have become normalized within academic culture. Her pride in co-founding Freedom University — an underground school that operated “in defiance of law and public oversight” — suggests a career built around rejecting institutional norms. That this experience apparently enhanced rather than hindered her academic prospects speaks to a broader shift in how universities evaluate scholarly credentials. 

The transformation García Peña describes in ethnic studies reflects a larger evolution across much of the humanities and social sciences. Fields that once understood themselves as investigating human societies, cultures, and experiences have increasingly redefined their missions around political activism and ideological formation. When Peña states that her “loyalties and my commitment are with Latinx people, with Black Latinx people — not with the university, not with the publisher... not with the funders,” she articulates a view of scholarship as fundamentally tribal rather than universal — a rejection of the principles on which modern universities were founded. Even if professors’ “loyalties” are not with their particular universities, they should be geared towards the academy’s highest aspirations. Principles, in other words, and not particular groups of people. 

As recent whistleblowers have attested, changes in academic evaluation and reward systems have facilitated this shift. Search committees prioritize candidates’ political commitments over their scholarly contributions, which is how we ended up with the phenomenon of “diversity statements.” Tenure reviews reward activism and advocacy alongside, or sometimes instead of, rigorous research. University administrators, often lacking strong convictions about institutional mission, have proven remarkably accommodating to faculty who reject that mission, sometimes quite openly.

The result is a growing disconnect between universities’ stated purposes and their actual operations. Institutions that claim to pursue truth through open inquiry increasingly house faculty members who view such claims as naive at best, oppressive at worst. Peña knows this, and knows that universities are attuned to it but unlikely to act on it. “Hopefully I won’t end up in court for saying this on the mic,” she says, feigning a kind of bravery, as if her job were actually at risk. 

This institutional contradiction cannot be sustained indefinitely. Academic leaders must be willing to draw the line somewhere, to articulate and defend coherent visions of university purpose. This means acknowledging that not all intellectual approaches are equally compatible with the university’s mission, certainly not the version of the mission that makes universities a matter of public interest and investment. It means recognizing that academic freedom is a creation of the university, and the university can and must set its boundaries. Such freedom protects scholarly inquiry and is not a license to abuse one’s position for organizing. It certainly does not cover concerted efforts to destroy the very institution that gives it life. 

Contemporary debates over academic freedom often focus on how to balance scholarly inquiry with concerns about discriminatory harassment, hate speech, and campus climate. These are genuinely difficult questions, albeit not always as hard as hand-wringing analysts worry. But Peña’s case offers an opportunity to articulate a more fundamental principle: academic freedom cannot coherently extend so far as to protect efforts that explicitly seek to undermine the institutional conditions that make academic freedom possible in the first place.

This principle echoes Justice Robert Jackson’s famous observation that the Constitution is not “a suicide pact.” Constitutional protections cannot be interpreted in ways that destroy the constitutional system itself. Similarly, academic freedom, however broadly conceived, cannot logically protect activities designed to eliminate the institutions and commitments that make academic freedom possible. 

Such institutional clarity need not require ideological uniformity among faculty. To the contrary, it is brought to life by competing ideologies operating within the realm of a few minimal commitments: to abide by certain rules of logic, standards of behavior, and assumptions about the role of debate within the greater academic pursuit. Universities can and should include scholars with diverse political views and methodological approaches. But they cannot indefinitely accommodate faculty whose explicit mission involves institutional destruction. 

Peña’s case ultimately illuminates a choice that American universities can no longer avoid. They can continue accommodating faculty who define their work in opposition to institutional purposes, gradually transforming themselves into something other than universities and suffering the consequences. Or they can reassert institutional missions centered on scholarly inquiry and knowledge advancement, accepting that this may require difficult conversations about academic purpose and professional responsibility. Put more positively, it offers a real-life example for university leadership to point to as an example of how not to conceive of academic freedom. That freedom is not fettered by much, but at least it must not sow the seeds of its own demise.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.