ACADEMIA Letters Academic Inquisition: Are Universities centres of Higher Education or Higher Indoctrination? Alaric Naudé Introduction In the Western World, Universities have been held in high regard as institutes of higher learn- ing where complex and at times highly controversial ideas could be openly critiqued and stud- ied from the vantage point of neutrality. Yet, proud traditions of open discourse are slowly being eroded by those who do not desire open inquiry and who insist that academia bow to a narrow, pseudoscientific and flawed view of the world, all without the ability to even dare question its validity. Even once proud Universities have begun to succumb to this intellectual rot, the giants of education, the University of Oxford which dates to at least 1167 (Oxford, 2018), and University of Cambridge have discarded their traditions of open inquiry and lay prostrate before destructive ideologies that pit men and women against each other, and drive a wedge deeper between already unstable race relations (Cambridge Equality & Diversity, 2020). Across the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK, universities have slowly but surely begun to bow to the intellectually immature rather than uphold freedom of speech, open inquiry and freedom of thought. The history of open inquiry and free speech in academia has been a centuries long battle, a battle between those who desire to think and those who desire to tell others what to think. For centuries those who would censor academic inquiry have recycled the same methodologies to intimidate and de-platform those who would not follow the narrative. Today, large swathes of academia have already succumbed to the re- lentless tide of Philistinism. Academia has become the proverbial canary in the coal mine and what happens in universities is of great importance as they are a microcosm of what wider Academia Letters, January 2021 Corresponding Author: Alaric Naudé, dr.alaricnaude@outlook.com Citation: Naudé, A. (2021). Academic Inquisition: Are Universities centres of Higher Education or Higher Indoctrination? Academia Letters, Article 130. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL130. 1 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0