In these two cases, the correlation between the loss of a job opportunity and the publication of the paper was made explicit by people in the hiring committee, but I suspect there have been many other cases in which we lost good jobs opportunities because people disagreed with us. For instance, an anonymous blog post I found online told the story of junior female scholar who was not hired because of a controversial publication tackling abortion. As reported in the blog post, someone in the job committee raised the issue of academic freedom, and the answer was: ‘let her practice her academic freedom somewhere else.’ I suspect they were talking about me.

I can’t possibly know how many times I was refused a job because of my controversial views, whether it’s only the ones I have mentioned, or many more, but for a junior academic without a permanent job like myself, every lost job opportunity can make the difference between surviving or perishing in such a highly competitive profession. So far, I have been very lucky to get research grants, but I don’t know for how long I will keep being lucky, and this uncertainty doesn’t contribute to my wellbeing.

Given what I had been through, it shouldn’t be too surprising that I took an interest in academic freedom and threats thereto. At first, I thought the main problem was the over-simplistic representation of academic work by clickbait news media, paired with a general human tendency to react prematurely and aggressively to any remotely polarising content shared on social media. I thought that academics would start self-censoring themselves in order to avoid to get death threats, and that this fear would, in turn, have a negative impact on the quality of their research. But over time, I realised that social media were not the only threat to academic freedom, and that new threats were growing from within academia itself.

Over the past few years, some academics have started signing letters expressing disagreement and disapproval toward ideas published by their colleagues in peer-reviewed journals. In at least in one case I am aware of, a junior academic ended up losing their post-doctoral fellowship at a prestigious university after an “investigation” prompted by one of these letters. I expect this kind of outcome to become more common in the future, since not many people seem to appreciate the seriousness of this episode and its likely negative impact on academic freedom.

So, we are now living at a time when people have to think twice before publishing their research, because they fear that a controversial claim could cause negative reactions in the public or among their colleagues and that such reactions could eventually cost them their job.

Expressing disagreement is, of course, an essential component of the academic work. But there must surely be more constructive ways of expressing disagreement—public debates in good faith, say, or writing a reply to a given article—than to sign a letter of philosophical disapproval. Signing a letter knowing (or even worse, hoping) that a colleague could be fired or forced to retract a paper is a completely different way of expressing disagreement, and one I consider to be harmful not only toward colleagues, but especially toward academia itself, in its capacity as an institution for advancing knowledge and promoting the truth.

In order to produce high quality research, people need to feel protected by their right to academic freedom to a much higher degree than they currently are. If by academic freedom we understand “the absence of, or protection from, such restraints or pressures (…) as are designed to create in minds of academic scholars (…) fears and anxieties that may inhibit them from freely studying and investigating whatever they are interested in, and from freely discussing, teaching or publishing whatever opinions they have reached’ (Machlup 1955, p. 753) then it’s easy to see how that the current situation is not ideal at all. Sometimes people try to downplay the seriousness of recent events saying that history is full of examples of researchers that were fired, persecuted and even executed because of their controversial ideas. While losing an academic job is obviously less bad than being killed, “it’s better than death” isn’t exactly a standard to which we should aspire.

The problem with lack of academic freedom is that it not only has a significant negative impact on people targeted by it, but that it also has major negative impact on academia as a whole, ultimately making it less likely to produce good research.