The work of scientists often produces facts that are uncomfortable and inconvenient to the interests of those in power. That’s why we should all be concerned that, recently, politicians are testing new tactics in their attempts to strip scientific inquiry of its independence. Nowhere is this more on display than in Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker and the Wisconsin legislature have joined forces to gut statutory guarantees of tenure and shared governance – the twin pillars protecting academic freedom and the integrity of scientific research – in the University of Wisconsin system.

Tenure – earned by a researcher after many years of work, original contributions to the body of knowledge that constitutes his or her discipline and extensive vetting by his or her institutional and disciplinary colleagues – protects academic freedom and scientific integrity by making it so that the researcher can’t be fired for investigating awkward questions or reaching conclusions powerful people don’t like. Shared governance is the means by which academics shape their institutions’ academic programs – through the development of curriculum and the hiring of faculty - to meet the highest standards in the production and dissemination of knowledge.

In Wisconsin, legislators have just lowered the high bar for dismissing tenured faculty at the direct demand of Scott Walker and the state Republican regime. Shared governance, in which the Wisconsin university system once led the world, has been reduced to a mere advisory process. In practice, this means that decisions about academic programs – and the faculty who work on them – will be made by administrators who are either themselves political appointees or who serve at the leisure of these appointees.

The consequences of these changes are likely to be immediate, concrete and negative both for the state of Wisconsin and for the community that depends on the knowledge the state’s university researchers create. As the author of the scientific work that undergirds the “hockey stick” graph illustrating the unprecedented nature of human-caused climate change, Michael Mann, co-author of this article and Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, has been the subject of baseless politically motivated attacks, as he has detailed in his book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.

He and his colleagues have been able to continue communicating vital climate science because of the protection of academic freedom through tenure and shared governance – climate science that could, for example, help prevent New York City being inundated by rising oceans and numerous other calamities.

Organizations across the political spectrum have expressed concerns about the profound erosion of fundamental protections for science that are taking place in Wisconsin. They also fear that this development is part of a larger trend.

In discussions about climate change, for example, ‘think tanks’ like Wisconsin’s Heartland Institute use their well-financed public relations machines to create the impression that the scientific evidence for human-caused climate change is still debated. And in Florida, the governor has forbidden state employees from discussing climate change in their work. These restrictions aren’t just happening on a state level. In late 2014 the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill preventing the staff of the Environmental Protection Agency from consulting with outside experts in their fields. This was aimed at making the EPA’s ability to justify regulations on carbon emissions more difficult.

Our world faces social, economic and environmental challenges which require honest, rigorous inquiry and clear-eyed reasoning to solve. This reasoning is impossible when the institutions and people charged with conducting it must be more concerned with currying political favor than searching for truth. In Wisconsin, the remaining protection for academic freedom already eroded for decades by an increasing reliance on teaching and research faculty – who are excluded from the tenure system – has been shredded by Governor Walker and his allies. When public universities become citadels of political patronage, the consequences are dire. The line between science and politics becomes fatally compromised, and with it disappears the ability of citizens to both understand and act.