Abstract
This paper offers an account of the relationship between free speech and academic freedom. It argues that these principles, properly understood, sometimes cut against one another in practice. It then canvasses two sets of threats to academic freedom in the Trump-era United States: left-wing ‘political correctness’ or ‘cancel culture’ and right-wing legislative and executive incursions on university autonomy. The former threat long predates Donald Trump’s presidency; the latter emerged in its midst and is deeply tied to broader dynamics of democratic backsliding. The paper unpacks the conflicting accounts of free speech and academic freedom that have been advanced in public debates regarding these two threats, and it concludes by highlighting the unavoidable tradeoff between individual free speech rights and the institutional autonomy of academic institutions.
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