On Which Side Your Bread Is Buttered
Academic freedom and the future of U.S. research quality
This is a newsletter about a thrilling fight over dairy policy in wartime Iowa and what it can tell us about the stakes of academic freedom.
Last week, on Bluesky, I was discussing academic freedom and its origin story. Academic freedom, if you’re joining the conversation just now, is the idea that academics—professors, mostly—should be able to pursue research questions and state their findings without fear of dismissal and reprisal. It’s not absolute—no, really, it’s not!—and it only relates, strictly speaking, to what academics say and do in their field.
The idea is bandied around a lot right now. Discourse flattens distinctions like glaciers flatten mountains, or maybe like steamrollers flatten cartoon characters. Some key differences between what academic freedom means for students and professors, for instance, tend to be glossed over (read more here if you want to grasp the difference between Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit). As I mentioned earlier, though, real core pertains to professional guarantees for academics as long as they are working as academics. I have the freedom to advance hypotheses and judgments in my classroom, but I shouldn’t be haranguing my students to vote a certain way (and wouldn’t be protected by academic freedom if I did).
The importance of this outside the academy, after all, is a key consideration in why anyone who’s not employed at or managing a university should care about what otherwise seems like just another egghead perk. The basic idea is this: if you care about whether information and arguments are reliable at all—if you would like for there to at least be a possibility of independent expertise provided at scale—you should find the case for academic freedom to be relatively strong. That is, even if you don’t intrinsically care about the value of learning or humanistic knowledge or whatever, you should care whether you can trust a university to hire people who will give you what they think straight.
To illustrate this, let’s talk about the Iowa dairy fight of 1943.
On Bluesky, someone (sorry! I lost the thread!) brought up a relatively late fight in the development of the idea, one which helps clarify why any of this matters. It’s told in an article by David Seim, a history professor, published in The Annals of Iowa. And it’s about how dairy interests sought to break the Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) department of economics in retaliation for suggesting that margarine might be a good idea sometimes.
The Iowa story is pretty straightforward. During the Second World War, rationing meant that a lot of foodstuffs were in short supply, even in the United States. A Rockefeller Foundation grant sought to help the college’s economists analyze national food policy to help the US Department of Agriculture cope with wartime stresses. The project resulted in several publications, including Pamphlet No. 5:
O. H. Brownlee’s 35-page pamphlet, “Putting Dairying on a War Footing,” passed through the review process and into print the first week of April 1943. The author, a doctoral student in economics, advocated making more milk products available to soldiers, generally by rationing and shifting milk to its most productive uses. One specific proposal was that American households use more margarine instead of butter.
Then as now, social scientists were, at least sporadically, interested in making a difference by providing the public with facts and arguments. The Iowa State group of sociologists and economists were particularly interested in helping to shape public debate—and the USDA had even invited them to do this. (In fact, USDA was thrilled by the pamphlet as a way to get advice without special interest slants.) But bridging the gap risks someone trying to blow up the bridge.
Iowa, as you may know, has a big dairy industry. And dairy folks like when people buy butter and hate when they substitute margarine. Like any interest group, dairy producers reacted to the introduction of margarine in the late nineteenth century by trying to block its sale or make it unattractive to consumers. For decades, margarine couldn’t be colored yellow, a step that made it harder for consumers to see as a butter substitute. This was a lobby with teeth.
In that context, the idea that a state university—a land-grant and agricultural extension institution, no less—would argue for domestic substitution of margarine for butter sparked a reaction from Iowa’s dairy lobby. They complained to the university president and went public when they couldn’t have the pamphlet squelched. The Des Moines Register and other outlets pondered whether social science research could help the public decide, and whether that was worth the potential damage to an industry critical to the state.
The debate pitted the college’s president against the researchers and eventually social scientists against physical scientists. Not only did the latter believe that there was no need for science to offer policy prescriptions (that was, the college president stated, “entirely a governmental function”), but they combined with the college president to argue that truths in the social sciences needed to be as firm and uncontested as truths in the physical sciences.
These debates, however, were mostly (in my view) cover for the fact that the social scientists had gored the ox…of the dairy industry, a lobby with lots of friends in the state capital of Des Moines. Regardless of ontological commitments, it was clear that the administration was more interested in what organized dairy interests thought than what scientific conclusions could be reached or the platonic relationship between policy and knowledge. As one dean wrote, the college needed to “get faced in the same direction with the dairymen of the state in order to carry forward satisfactorily our programs of research and education.” The pamphlet would be retracted.
Academic freedom wasn’t an abstract value of freedom for nerds and radicals.
One critic of the school’s action put the stakes squarely. “If the pressure groups like the dairymen in Iowa get research conclusions revised merely by putting the squeeze on the college president and threatening to have the legislature cut the college’s appropriations, why should anyone believe that any of the college’s future research publications are impartial and not written with an eye to catering to the prejudices of the producers around the state?” Academic freedom wasn’t an abstract value of freedom for nerds and radicals. Rather, without academic freedom, any research would be inherently suspect. You can only sell your virtue once.
Such arguments did not carry the day. Iowa State College further reduced the scope of its social scientists’ ability to communicate with the public. A series of resignations followed, eventually including more than half of the economists and sociologists at the school. (Two future Nobel Memorial Prize winners were among the departed.)
The reorganized program set up in the wake of the controversy was less controversial; Seim records “its only known recommendation…was a four-page pamphlet for dairy farmers with an ‘8-point Dairy Program’ and a narrowly targeted slogan, ‘Get that Extra Squirt at Every Milking.’” It took generations for social science to recover at Iowa State.
Why dwell on this instance? Partly because it’s an interesting story, sure, and also because it fits squarely within this newsletter’s ambit of looking at the systematic organization of hatreds. But mostly I think this episode is interesting because it shows the political economy of academic freedom in an unusually direct way—and because it highlights the risks to such freedoms, not just at the state level but from the federal government as well.
History, by itself, isn’t a theory. Knowing what happened doesn’t tell you why events took place or what will happen in the future. Yet knowing history can broaden your imagination about what sorts of causal paths are possible and what the range of possible outcomes are.
In this case, for instance, I had become so habituated to thinking about academic freedom as part of our current culture war that I hadn’t really considered how it could interact with direct economic interests. Yet if we think our research is worth anything, then we should consider that it could be worth something to other people—and that means they’ll have an interest not only in supporting it but in undermining it. Academic freedom, by protecting the livelihood of academics, protects against the most severe versions of this retribution. Notably, though, the Iowa State researchers were not fired—they left of their own accord.
Once you introduce interests and politics, though, you also introduce questions of power. How powerful are the relevant interest groups? In Iowa, on this issue, dairy reigned supreme—even though outside groups like the AAUP and the USDA (and the national media) raised substantial concerns about reputational effects. That suggests that academic freedom is not a naturally occurring equilibrium—it requires some form of organization and advocacy to counteract narrow interests.
Similarly, the range of topics that could prompt attacks on researchers could be rather larger than even what we see today. If those interests have political or economic influence over university administrators, it could take a substantial degree of spine to withstand those attacks—and, of course, there are recent examples of administrators buckling. Weaker economic periods for universities could thus cause a retrenchment in more than refreshments for faculty meetings.
Finally, the core distinguishing element about the Iowa case was how narrow it was. The threats over the next several years, particularly if Trump wins, are much bigger. If the federal government were to turn against academic freedom, then things would get very dire very fast. That doesn’t require open hostility, but that is a possibility. In a prior Iowa State case, the US Postal Service ruled that pamphlets with policy conclusions were not eligible for reduced rates since they exceeded the scope of the extension school’s portfolio. Now imagine those sorts of decisions being made by a much wider array of actors with strings to pull on federal dollars. If there’s no escape hatch—if it’s not just one or another state—there won’t even be much recourse in this country for researchers.
I think this matters. Despite quite a few flaws, having a vibrant university system makes for a better public sphere than having higher education being cowed to silence. That’s ultimately true, again, not just for those of us who have a professional interest. If you want to live in a society where truth is valued, you have to think about some protections for people to speak the truth. Even if reality falls short of perfection, it’s good to allow for the chance of success rather than guaranteeing failure.
Sources
Seim, David L. "The Butter-Margarine Controversy and" Two Cultures" at Iowa State College." The Annals of Iowa 67.1 (2008).