I vehemently agree that philosophy should be open to utterly unfettered explorations of the (secular) abstract realm. (For the religious realm,we have theology.) [Please forgive a degree of pedantry; I am writing as well for people less familiar with these matters.]

Governance within academia, or any branch within it, to include issues of speech, is an issue of justice. The same idea of justice that would hold for the broadest community (society as a whole) seemingly must apply to smaller communities such as academia — or the philosophy department. Justice for society as a whole has been my focus.

One problem with seeking to separate philosophy from ideology in the area of justice is that both ideologies, which are specific formulations for governing governance, and broader philosophical ruminations concerning justice, the ultimate concern of which must necessarily be the governance of governance, have (so far) involved secular beliefs. They therefore cannot be separated as being different in ‘kind’. (I submit that any postulation of an a priori or ‘transcendent’ anything can only be a belief.)

John Locke was ‘philosophizing’ about justice using a belief in human equality and a belief in the existence of a priori “Natural Rights” and in the process invented Liberalism (the meta-ideology that has spawned the narrower political ideologies of libertarianism, conservatism, liberalism, and ‘democratic’, non-Marxist, socialism — with inevitable variations within each of them). Immanuel Kant, who, unlike Locke, was strictly secular in his philosophizing, postulated the existence of a transcendent, “noumenal” realm of existence that affects the issue of justice in the phenomenal (material) realm. Following Kant, G.W.F. Hegel postulated the existence of a secular “Spirit” that apparently ‘guides’ the development of the dialectic of knowing, including our knowledge of what justice must be. [Neo-Hegelians, among them Richard Dien Winfield, have gotten “Spirit” out of the dialectical process, but without that “guide” the process is only the meandering of human intellects, which cannot be supposed to be unerring in their abstract, therefore untestable outputs.] Karl Marx sought to apply the dialectic ‘scientifically’ to the material realm alone, but the intrusion of morality in the form of an (atheistic) belief in equality cannot be denied: without moral equality economic “exploitation” is not a problem in need of a remedy and the return to communism, in the form of civilization without exploitation, cannot be a prescriptive apotheosis, the culmination of a process of development towards reclaiming the lost, morally superior social relations that preceded civilization in the context of an ‘improved’ material existence. Even postmodernists have not abandoned a belief in equality; it can be the only basis for their insistence on the recognition of ‘the other’ in human relations.

As it happens, I have developed an approach to justice that does not involve any belief; rather, its determiners and its referents are contained within material existence. It is therefore testable. If it ‘passes’’ it is undeniably universal in its applicability (within its established domain) and legitimately de-legitimates going outside material existence, to any kind of belief, to justify violating that ethic of justice — an ethic that can be applied on any scale. If curious: “Real Justice (summarized for a ‘5 min read’)” here in Medium.