American academia has been captured & corrupted for propagandistic purposes for well over a century now:

"In World War I American academic intellectuals committed themselves to serving the needs of the state. The role they played committed them to priorities that fettered their critical intelligence and warped their judgment; the work they produced in the service of the state seriously departed from responsible scholarship...

"...[T]he state of academic freedom depends largely on the professoriate itself, for they reveal the extent to which professors themselves were involved in wartime violations of academic freedom. The crisis of war exposed the repressive underside of majority sentiment on the campus; it exposed a lack of commitment to academic freedom within the profession at large and a willingness even of its chief defenders to bend the principle to the pressures of the moment..."

-Carol Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America

Things haven't changed at all in the last century; if anything, they've only gotten worse. The biggest obstacle to intellectual freedom in academia comes via horizontal enforcement from the professors themselves.