SUMMARY: 'The unholy alliance of academic elites and government bureaucrats threatens free speech everywhere'

In his recent Fox News op-ed, Campus Reform Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano discusses the “unholy alliance” forming between government bureaucrats and the academic elites. 

Citing President Dwight Eisenhower’s concern for the ties between government funding and higher education, Giordano writes that the fear “has become a reality.”

“[T]hroughout the country, professors on college campuses have been recruited to develop tools for monitoring and restricting discourse, betraying the values of free speech,” Giordano writes, pointing to an example from Wisconsin.   

[RELATED: WATCH: Holding the ‘crybullies’ at Stanford Law accountable]

“[T]he University of Wisconsin has been awarded a $5 million grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF),” Giordano explains, “to develop a system that can detect and ‘strategically correct’ what the government perceives as misinformation relating to COVID, elections, and vaccines.”

He goes on to elaborate:

These powerful monitoring tools go against the core principles of the Constitution and can easily be abused to push political agendas. By closely collaborating with the government to regulate speech, the autonomy of higher education institutions as knowledge and research hubs is compromised, eroding public trust in these institutions.

Giordano concludes by pointing out the irony of the collaboration between the government and higher education. 

The collaboration between these two entities forces each to depart from the values each is to uphold: that government should protect free expression and that universities “should be more skeptical” of the government. 

“The irony is that individuals in academia were once known to champion nonconformity and intellectual diversity. Now, they are the ones who have succumbed to, and push for, conformity to the government’s demands,” Giordano claims. 

Read the article here.