There’s a lot of conflicting information about the impact of marijuana, and it’s not accidental. It’s the result of the federal prohibition on the study of the demon weed. Whether it belongs on Schedule I is a huge issue, but the fact that we’re bereft of sound, scientific scholarship is a problem that smacked states legalizing weed in the face. How much better off would we have been had pot been studied? But alas, it couldn’t be and it wasn’t.

So let’s do it again, but this time with people.

In the wake of the protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, some faculty published an open letter of demands to overcome “anti-Blackness racism” at Princeton. Like many such letters, it included good and bad proposals. Most distinctive and disturbing, however, was the demand for the creation of a faculty committee empowered to “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of the faculty.”

As Princeton’s Keith Whittington notes, what these words mean seems to change with the wind. Racist behaviors? That doesn’t narrow it down to anything cognizable these days. But it would appear to elite scholars at Princeton a sufficient reason to prohibit scholarship and, perhaps, march the heretic scholar to the pyre.

Make no mistake: this is a proposal to create a loophole in academic freedom through which one could drive a truck. As one of the authors of the letter subsequently explained, “anti-Black research” should be regarded as a form of research misconduct—like, say, falsifying data—and treated as “unethical,” since it could presumptively do harm to “communities of color.”

This new directive does not target the kind of behavior already excluded from the protections of academic freedom—it does not limit itself to instances of a researcher falsifying results or a teacher harassing a student or yelling racial slurs at a colleague. It is not even limited to overheated political hyperbole that a professor might resort to on social media. It targets,  rather, the substantive content of scholarly teaching and research, and—if a committee of faculty believe it to be antithetical to the political interests of favored racial groups—declares it to be evidence of misconduct and thus beyond the protections of academic freedom.

It’s not merely a prohibition on research and scholarship that some might call conservative, as in why students should no longer need to learn standard English, read classic novels written by white European authors or be able to add two plus two and arrive at an objectively correct solution. If political ideology dictates not only the outcomes, but the inputs, of scholarship, then it’s all rather pointless. While it will confirm whatever outcome it’s intended to confirm, that helps no one.

What if scholarship shows that having two parents raising a child makes it 82% more likely that the child will succeed, will not commit a crime, will not go to jail, and will enjoy a happy life? Aren’t these good things? But would research like this be allowed, or does it attack the narrative that no one should be made to feel badly about not being part of a “normal” family?

Of course, any given piece of research on such topics might be flawed or wrong. If so, it should be criticized and refuted by additional research or ignored as idiosyncratic and an intellectual dead-end. If we instead treat research that reaches conclusions that we find distressing as a reason to sanction the researcher, we will severely truncate the scope of scholarly debate. Some questions will become off limits and some arguments will be censored because they might raise politically unpalatable truths and because they might subject the researcher, not merely to withering criticism, but to termination and banishment.

I don’t doubt the good intentions of the Committee of Scholarly Inquisitors, but “politically unpalatable truths” are still truths. We can deny gravity all we want because it keeps people down, but it’s still going to apply.

And of course, the low-hanging fruit argument still applies, that when scholarship and research are constrained by political fiat, whoever holds the biggest bludgeon gets to dictate the outcome. While the woke are in charge at the moment, they weren’t before and might not always be in the future, despite the assumption that we’ve achieved the apex of truth and it cannot be disputed.

Imposing such limits on scholarly research, no matter how well-intentioned—and no matter how unpopular the target—puts unhealthy constraints on freedom of thought. These limitations hamper us as we work our way toward the truth, and they give tools to the powerful to silence the marginalized. We should be asking scholars to put forward the best arguments and evidence that they can for the claims that they think are true, and we should expect the scholarly community to be willing to hear and evaluate those arguments.

For those of us who want to find answers to problems, to actually help people even if it means that some feelings will get hurt in the process, the constraint on thought, on research and scholarship, is the kiss of death. Denying reality doesn’t make it go away, but merely means we ask the wrong questions and get the wrong answers. They may be the answers people want to hear, the ones that confirm their beliefs and make them feel good, but that won’t put food on people’s plates or give them decent jobs. Or even more harshly, it won’t keep that bridge from falling down because the engineer can’t do the calculations necessary to keep it up.

Whatever the facts are, whatever the hard questions may be, the failure to ask them and then do our best to find real answers doesn’t help anyone. If scholars are precluded from asking and answering, then it’s left to “experts” on twitter to come up with solutions, and whoever gets the most “likes” must be right. Is that really going to save anyone?