How should politicians respond if public hospitals decided to stop treating injuries and illnesses? A version of this scenario is playing out in higher education across the English-speaking world. 

Universities have two core missions. One is to produce and test knowledge. The other is to teach students to think using the methods of rigorous disciplines like science and history. Both require environments in which ideas can be freely expressed and contested.  

In recent years, though, universities have become political monocultures. Dissent is often suppressed. On certain hot-button topics, ideology has replaced debate. Anyone challenging prevailing views on equity and narrow definitions of identity is at risk. 

In 2024, a New Zealand Initiative report cited surveys showing that many academics and students feel intimidated into silence on these kinds of issues. Similar data are available across the Anglosphere.  

At the tip of the iceberg, dissident academics have been censored and sacked. Invited speakers have been deplatformed. Beneath the surface is a culture of censoriousness and ideological capture.  

Politicians have belatedly noticed that universities aren’t always doing what they’re funded to do. In the UK, legislation has been enacted to penalise universities financially if they allow free speech to be infringed on their campuses. The New Zealand government has signalled similar legislation, to be introduced in March. 

Legislation may not fully address what is ultimately a cultural problem. Scholar and free speech advocate Peter Boghossian favours a more radical approach. Boghossian believes public universities should be defunded, enabling new institutions to fulfil the roles they have abandoned. 

In the US, green shoots are already sprouting. In 2021, historian Niall Ferguson, entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, and journalist Bari Weiss conceived the University of Austin (UATX).  

UATX is founded on traditional university values of free speech and open enquiry. With hundreds of millions of dollars raised, a who’s-who of affiliated public intellectuals, and an inaugural cohort enrolled in 2024, it is off to a very promising start. 

New Zealand universities are established by statute, making an equivalent of UATX difficult to establish here. Furthermore, our small population may mean that such an institution would not be viable. 

Even so, there would be no harm in trying. Taxpayers should not have to support institutions that refuse to fulfil their key roles. If the government’s academic freedom legislation fails to refocus universities on their core missions, defunding and deregulation might be the way to go.