Disciplines have been central to the organization of academic life since the dawn of the modern university. They serve as communities for organizing the interrogation of knowledge, each making claims to expertise in a distinct approach or subject matter.

Yet many disciplines now seem to be destabilizing. The complexity of the world never fit into neat boxes, and there is an increasing recognition that major problems require interdisciplinary collaboration to tackle. Disciplinary coherence is also being challenged by constantly shifting border claims in knowledge production.

At the same time—and of chief concern for this essay as well as for those who value scholarship—some disciplines have become highly ideological, creating echo chambers that stall progress. This in turn has diminished the image of universities in the eyes of the general public, posing a profound political threat. Some disciplines have become, one might say, undisciplined—freely pronouncing on matters outside their putative field of expertise, or expanding their claims of special knowledge to match political exigencies.

This situation has put great pressure on academic freedom. The problem is not simply that universities are under political attack because of purported left-wing bias within otherwise well-functioning disciplines. It is that undisciplined disciplines have weakened the claims to expertise on which academic freedom depends. In an era in which all kinds of elite claims to special treatment are under broad attack, this puts the rest of the academy at risk.

Disciplines as Gatekeepers

In the United States, disciplines consolidated around the same time as ideas of academic freedom crystallized in the late 19th and early 20th century. This is when scholarly associations emerged to organize and govern different fields, typically demarcated by specific scientific methods.

But disciplinary knowledge has always been in motion and subject to internal contestation. Boundaries were never static, and new disciplines continued to arise. The 1960s and 1970s saw an explosion of new disciplines focused on the claims of groups that had been excluded from mainstream opportunities in American society (women, LGBT people, ethnic minority groups, persons with disabilities). These new disciplines adopted more interdisciplinary methods, which were already emerging as forms of knowledge production. Interdisciplinarity developed in recognition of the fact that traditional lines were imperfect and that progress on some problems could not be achieved without tools and methods drawn from other disciplines. There are now many scholarly associations for interdisciplinary studies and journals focused on transdisciplinary research.

One effect of all this contestation and blending has been to muddle the boundaries of what is and is not outside disciplinary expertise. This trend is not simply relevant to questions of internal allocation of resources within universities, but goes to the core of claims to expertise in the production of knowledge and the protection of open inquiry.

Some disciplines have become, one might say, undisciplined—freely pronouncing on matters outside their putative field of expertise, or expanding their claims of special knowledge to match political exigencies.

Academic freedom is centrally dependent on claims of professional expertise. Within a field, academics have freedom of teaching and research. (In the United States, at least, academics are also allowed broad extramural speech.) But academics can be punished for failure to observe disciplinary standards.

One of our great scholars of academic freedom, Robert Post, has focused on what he calls the paradox of disciplines: “Disciplines are committed to progress, which means they must have dissent, but … they have dissent that is constantly evaluated by the rules already existing within the community of knowledge that constitutes the disciplines.” This means that, for example, when a public health scholar takes a dissident position on COVID-19, they can seek to defend themselves by reference to established techniques of statistical evaluation used within the field, but cannot rely on their “sense” of how viruses spread.

In my own case, I cannot go into my constitutional law course and instead teach the laws of physics or advertise the latest brand of detergent; the reason this is true is that no legal academic would in good faith recognize those speech acts as within the domain of constitutional law. While I cannot be fired for the way I teach constitutional law, I can be punished for failing to do the job for which I was hired.

Disciplines are thus important gatekeepers. But if disciplines are a necessary locus of governance, one must then ask the standard questions of all governance institutions: Who guards the guardians? Who is to ensure that disciplines make their collective judgements in a principled way?

The question is particularly salient in light of the variable stances of disciplines with regard to core governance questions. Disciplines are not uniformly disciplined in exercising their role as gatekeepers of good scholarship, nor are they all equally tolerant of dissent. Some of them purport to speak via collective associations about issues of the day, a major trend in our era. And many are not content with knowledge formation as the sole or primary mission of academia, but instead seek to advance versions of activism.

Undisciplined Disciplines

The idea that science should serve society is a powerful one and underpins the professional claims of academics to govern themselves. The progressive-era version of this argument was rooted in notions of technocratic neutrality: as a popular slogan of the day put it, there is no Democratic or Republican way to pave a street. Scientists pursuing scientific questions with scientific methods could uniquely improve the world.

American society, however, began to doubt such claims of neutrality with the crisis of the 1960s. Many of the academic disciplines created in that period were born under a political star and rejected claims of technocratic neutrality in favor of promoting perspectives that had theretofore been excluded. It is hardly surprising they saw their mission as integrating scholarship with a particular set of definitions of social change.

Unfortunately, these fields also became active agents of social construction and political mobilization, sometimes on an ethnic basis. Scholarly associations of these new inter-disciplinary fields do not hide these goals. The Chicana and Chicano Studies Association begins its mission statement by saying it will “advance the interest and needs of the Chicana and Chicano community.” The Association of Asian American Studies mission statement includes as an objective “advocating and representing the interests and welfare of Asian American Studies and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.”

If disciplines are a necessary locus of governance, one must then ask the standard questions of all governance institutions: Who guards the guardians?

Presumably scholars in these fields are evaluated not only by their scholarship but by their advocacy of particular interest groups. We can understand why histories of exclusion encouraged scholars to blur the lines between scholarship and advocacy, but doing so draws on the social capital of the scholarly enterprise for unabashedly political purposes. (Interestingly, Black Studies may have done a better job of transforming into a stable scholarly inter-discipline.)

Among older disciplines, anthropology has led the way in insisting that cultural advocacy must be at the heart of scholarship. In a 1999 statement on human rights, the American Anthropology Association pronounced that it had "an ethical duty to protest” when any culture or society denies the right of people and peoples to the “full realization of their humanity.” But in 2020, it refined this commitment to include a cultural relativism, stating that “No one jurisdiction ought to impose its own interpretation of how to recognize and protect these rights on any other jurisdiction.” (See note 1.) Reflecting on its own tainted history, the AAA leadership went on to demand “forms of research and engagement that contribute to decolonization and help redress histories of oppression and exploitation.”

When one’s scholarship is designed to include advocacy—what Tarunabh Khaitan has called “scholactivism” (see note 2)—risks are obvious. Advocates may reject or downplay inconvenient results, distorting academic debates. More deeply, they violate the role morality of scholarship, which is the very basis for social tolerance of academic freedom in the first place. While of course there is always a deep politics of scholarship, for example in the selection of topics for inquiry or methods for approaching them, these biases ought to be examined and minimized in genuine inquiry, not celebrated. This requires a humility about the limits of one’s own perspective.

The horrors of the Gaza war have provided a litmus test for whether disciplines are committed to genuine inquiry or instead to “scholactivism.” Several associations have debated or passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire. With the tacit support of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), several scholarly associations have signed onto a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. These include the Association for Asian American Studies, the African Literature Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

While the promoters of the boycott emphasize that it is not to be directed at individual scholars, it has in fact led to hundreds if not thousands of individual-level cancellations of scholarly engagements and collaborations. Such a collective boycott arguably undermines the academic freedom of scholars at both targeted and targeting institutions, who should be free to collaborate with whom they choose. Advocates of academic freedom should oppose this kind of boycott vigorously.

Notably, disciplines and individuals will often defend such political actions by returning to claims of scholarly expertise. A recent incident involving academic freedom illustrates the phenomenon. Maura Finkelstein, a tenured professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, was fired in September 2024 for what seems to be her extramural speech on social media, in which she virulently criticized Zionists. Her firing for extramural speech seems to be a clear violation of academic freedom norms.

But what is interesting for our purposes is Finkelstein’s own claim that she was fired in part for “using [her] academic expertise as an anthropologist to draw attention to how power operates.” She thus made a disciplinary claim. Surely one need not have a PhD to criticize Zionism, and a claim that one’s domain of study is something as capacious as “power” admits of no limit. Nothing in her extramural comments about not “normalizing” Zionists depended on her professional knowledge creation. Instead, she seemed to be speaking as what Robert Post calls a “sage amateur…communicating the views of alert citizens.” This is precisely the kind of overreach that undermines disciplinary claims to knowledge.

Can anything be done?

When a discipline erodes its engagement in genuine inquiry, what is the mechanism of correction? Central administrators obviously play a role in incentivizing better gatekeeping by disciplines. But their mechanisms are clumsy and slow: refraining from authorizing new lines, cutting budgets, appointing outsiders to run departments, and, in extreme cases, closing academic departments.

In practice, decision-making is concentrated in the leadership ranks of academic institutions, especially the provost and president, who are both distant from the action and not always incentivized to be bold. Rigorous gatekeeping is difficult enough even within departments, and much more so at the central administration, even as administrators become more important in assessing which disciplines are strong and weak. And it is important to note that we are unfortunately in an era in which departmental closures are hitting even established disciplines, making such decisions susceptible to influence from donors and legislators.

The internal progress of science depends on tolerating dissidents, and does not proceed by majority rule.

Self-correction—one might say self-discipline—is the better route. In a society still stratified by race and gender, scholars in the various interdisciplines focused on these topics should emphasize knowledge creation. It may also be up to the rest of us to call out disciplines that become undisciplined, and to criticize tendentious claims of expertise by scholars of all political persuasions.

We should, for example, call into question the general practice of scholarly associations making pronouncements by majority rule. The internal progress of science depends on tolerating dissidents, and does not proceed by majority rule. Why should things be different when the discipline is speaking as a whole? A small step of self-correction would be to use collective statements only in extreme circumstances, perhaps only with super-majoritarian rather than majoritarian mechanisms.

More broadly, we ought to celebrate and promote internal pluralism, rewarding academics whose work exemplifies inquiry over scholactivism. This will require, in some cases, using external standards of excellence, and not simply relying on what those inside undisciplined disciplines think is good work.

Politicization and Alienation

In a prescient observation in 2001, Clark Kerr noted that there was a conflict between the traditional view of the university that flowed from the enlightenment, embodied in a vision of seeking truth and objectivity, and a postmodern vision in which all discourse is political, with university resources to be deployed in ways that were liberatory and not repressive. He thought the conflict might further deepen, and noted that “any further politicization of the university will, of course, alienate much of the public at large.”

As we stand at a moment of deep alienation, stepping back from the further politicization of scholarship is an existential step.

The author thanks Tony Banout, Brad Roth, and Rick Shweder for helpful discussions.