Breaking barriers to academic freedom

In a recent article in the Boston Review, prominent Black historian and public intellectual Robin D.G. Kelley asks: What is the responsibility of intellectuals in the age of fascism and genocide? Historically, the answer to that question has been: To tell the truth. Not only that–Kelley also reminds us that truth-telling is not enough in itself: Intellectuals must get organized to defend our basic democratic rights and to fight racism, gender policing, the war on immigrants, and all forms of exploitation and oppression.

But as Kelley also notes, academics are facing increasing precarity and the pressure to be silent. Since October 7 two years ago, universities have been surveilling and disciplining faculty for pro-Palestine speech. The Trump administration has compelled universities—even Harvard—to undertake the punishment of faculty whose ideas and advocacy challenge the administration’s priorities. And legislation constraining what we can do and say on our campuses has hit hard.

Across the nation, academic freedom is imperiled. Freedom of speech and dissent among university professors have been and continue to be increasingly in question since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term in January. (Although academic speech has never gone unchallenged, and the Biden administration also escalated an attack, Trump has taken this crackdown to new levels.) Our approach to defending and extending our freedoms as teachers, scholars, and private citizens depends upon our understanding of why the purgation of liberal-left professors and legal restrictions on what we teach and research are happening. It is in this context that Kelley calls on us not only to tell the truth–but to choose sides and get organized.

According to Scholars Under Fire Database, there were 669 documented calls in the United States to punish individuals for their speech between 2020 and 2024. Scholars at Risk’s Free ToThink Report this year documented 395 attacks on higher education communities worldwide between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025.

Pro-Palestinian positions and speech, implementation of DEI principles, and gender-inclusive speech and concepts have been particular casualties of conservative assaults on academic speech. Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, detained and threatened with deportation for his Palestine activism, is one prominent case. But there are dozens of others. Texas A&M professor Melissa McCoul was fired for discussing gender identity in a class on children’s literature.

Such attacks have intensified after the assassination of right-wing thought-leader Charlie Kirk, the founder of the university watchdog group Turning Point USA. The death of Charlie Kirk has been a gift to conservatives everywhere looking for pretexts to discipline and remove university professors. The American Association of University Professors is aware of at least 60 instances of retaliation against professors and teachers in connection with critical comments made about Kirk. For example, Mississippi professor James Bowley was fired and ordered to leave campus after sending an email reading: No Class Today: Need time to mourn and protest this racist, fascist, country.” Jeffrey Harrison, emeritus law professor at the University of Florida, lost his emeritus status after calling Kirk’s movement fascist—and he is a scholar of the Holocaust. Ball State health advocate Suzanne Swierc posted on Facebook that she could not be friends with supporters of Kirk; she was fired, and she faced an enormous social media backlash and thousands of threats against her and her job. There is a new professor watchlist called Eyes on Education, which, in both primary and secondary educational contexts, asks students and parents to submit examples of “inappropriate materials” to a website. Suzanne Swierc’s name was the first submission there.

According to the AAUP, as of September 22, Faculty First Responders had reached out to 35 academic workers who were doxxed and harassed after making comments about Kirk. One could go on.

I am not going to level criticism at Charlie Kirk. I will only note that the purpose of his organization Turning Point USA—with an $80 million budget and 250,000 student members—was and remains to organize and professionally train conservative students to identify professors endorsing liberal or left points of view (pro-trans, anti-racist, pro-Palestine) in the classroom, report them to their administrations, and add their names to a list on a national website (the Professor Watchlist)–thereby opening them up to a national campaign of threat and harassment. It’s not a, hey, let’s hang around and talk about conservative ideas kind of organization. Turning Point is a spear at the end of a powerful conservative rod.

I would not have wished Charlie Kirk or anyone else dead. But we should be clear about what his purpose was while he was alive. Ta-Nehisi Coates has recently documented how Kirk used “debate” as a cover for racism, sexism, transphobia, antisemitism, islamophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry. He called George Floyd a “scumbag,” decried the Civil Rights Act, and accused Jews of exercising undue economic influence in U.S. politics. A recent article by Ashley Smith in Tempest Magazine provides many other examples of such positions.

I was once on Charlie Kirk’s hit list. I am still on a number of others. In 2006, I appeared in David Horowitz’s book naming the 101 most dangerous professors in America. Between 2001 and 2018, I was on the receiving end of three serious and systematic national right-wing campaigns threatening my life, safety, home, children, pets, and employment. I’ve spoken and published widely about these instances, and so I won’t go into much detail here. Notably, at Syracuse University, conservatives demanded that our chancellor fire me after remarks I made at a rally against the white supremacist right. You see, someone took an unrepresentative snippet from my remarks and circulated it across the right-wing mediasphere. The wave of intense harassment—and the realization that these people knew where I lived—necessitated my staying away from my home and moving about campus with an armed escort. I am not telling you this to complain. Indeed, there was a mass national defense campaign mounted on my behalf, which led eventually to the Syracuse Chancellor writing a statement on academic freedom that became a model for the AAUP. More about that campaign in a moment.

During those other waves of repression, one could number the professors facing serious sanction at under a dozen. One could name them in a relatively short list. Today, as noted a moment ago, the number of targeted professors is in the hundreds, and this number is rising each day. Texas State professor and historian Tom Alter’s case has become a prominent test case, and I urge academics everywhere to sign on. Tom was fired for giving a speech on his own time and without representing the university to a socialist conference. Another signal case today is that of Rutgers professor Mark Bray–ironically, a historian of fascism.

These attacks are not just about Charlie Kirk. They are about destroying institutions of higher education as sites of critical thinking, unfettered exploration, principled instruction, and public spaces of controversy. Fascism hates an educated population and a thriving creative culture. While the right has its own intellectuals (as Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci pointed out), conservative intellectuals are engaged in repressing diverse points of view in addition to producing ideas favorable to the ruling class. Charlie Kirk is an example of such a right-wing intellectual whose aim has been the suppression of diverse points of view. And the more ignorant of our history and social movements a generation of college students is, the better for consolidating authoritarian power.

It’s not just the targeting of individual professors for discipline. Nationally, the Trump administration has, as we know, put financial and political pressure on several prominent institutions of higher education, and the federal grant-making apparatus has started to pull funding from diversity-related topics—for example, grants studying the deployment of health care in BIPOC communities.

Earlier in October, President Donald Trump offered the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education to nine colleges. Seven have refused, but we can expect that this “offer” will be made to many more universities. This compact also promises preferential treatment for universities that comply with its provisions and imposes federal sanctions on universities that violate them. These provisions include a ban on DEI considerations in hiring, admissions, and financial aid; the requirement of standardized tests like the ACT and SAT for admissions; the abolition of academic units critical of conservative ideas; charging protesters with “incitements to violence”; the prohibition of partisan faculty speech; requiring “single-sex” bathrooms and locker rooms, banning transgender athletes from collegiate sports, and limiting the number of international students, among other things. Importantly, student-led movements against the compact at Dartmouth, Brown, and elsewhere pressured university administrators to decline. Students and faculty at the University of Texas are mounting a strong fight.

And, as we know, in several states, including Texas, Florida, Indiana, and Ohio, state legislation limits instruction related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and denies institutional support to any committees, offices, or organizations dedicated to the protection and inclusion of minority communities along lines of gender or race. This legislation prohibits colleges and universities from having diversity, equity, and inclusion offices or staff; bans diversity training; forbids the use of diversity as a criterion in hiring or admissions; and forbids diversity course requirements.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is keeping a “DEI Legislation Tracker” that notes that these laws spring from model state legislation produced by conservative legislation farms like the Goldwater and the Manhattan Institutes. As of August 22, 2025, 136 such laws have been introduced, and 29 have become law. The 29 states where such legislation is law include not only Texas, Florida, Indiana, and Ohio, but also New Hampshire, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Kansas, Utah, Iowa, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Idaho. State-funded universities and colleges in all of these states are cracking down on faculty, students, staff, spaces, curricula, offices, organizations, and programming—with the hatchet of state funding at their necks.

In Ohio, Senate Bill 1, otherwise known as the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, bans DEI offices, diversity statements, mandatory DEI training, and identity-based preferences, although it does not actually prohibit diversity course requirements. It’s not clear whether the legislation prohibits the university from supporting identity and cultural centers, mentoring networks, and other spaces and practices that welcome our diverse colleagues and students to campus. But in addition to undermining equity and inclusion efforts in place since the 1970s, the law effectively ends tenure and guts the union’s capacity to defend faculty, for example, in eliminating the right to strike, bargain over wages and benefits, and promotions. In fact, I think union-busting is what’s behind the curtain of attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Many universities, including the University of Cincinnati, have engaged in massive anticipatory overcompliance with the legislation. (I fully expect that UC will sign on to Trump’s compact if offered.) In February, in response to the passage of SB1 and the issuance of the Dear Colleague letter—defeated in court—the University of Cincinnati began purging our websites of diversity and social justice language, requirements, courses, and programs—before the legislation was actually law. They eliminated DEI and related offices. The University started to re-label gender inclusive bathrooms and to label gender-specific restrooms as either “biologically male” or “biologically female”—an incredibly crass and dehumanizing move to threaten and alienate transgender and nonbinary faculty, students, and staff. They started closing the identity and cultural centers. However, they were met with significant protest that successfully stalled these efforts.

This legislation is having an impact on visiting speakers and on our ability to recruit and hire faculty of color in particular—they are turning away.

But the University is still overcomplying and the administration has offered little guidance and no support to devastated faculty and students.

Higher education workers in Ohio and across the country know that everything we study and teach bears some connection to power relations in our society—including questions of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We cannot talk about something as seemingly innocuous as business communication without engaging diversity in the workplace. Public speaking is a craft of democratic engagement with controversy. We cannot teach courses in communication and sport without race and gender. We cannot teach communication and popular culture without issues of representation. Media making and criticism are always engaged with diverse communities–if we are doing it right. And we study and teach the history and rhetoric of social justice movements. If you are, as I am, in a unit that defines itself and its programs in terms of social justice, you are always on a tightrope. Faculty are understandably and rightly concerned about putting a foot out of place.

It is difficult, in this context, to even contemplate defending or recovering the right to academic freedom. But we must. Therefore, we need to know what exactly academic freedom is, where it came from, and how it was won.

An idea with its early history in 19th-century Germany, academic freedom in the United States was given expression most notably by the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP was founded in 1915 when it published its first declaration of principles. It articulated what has become the touchstone definition of academic freedom in a 1940 statement that teachers are entitled to full freedom in research, teaching, and as citizens. Notably, this statement appeared during fascism’s rise in Europe and in the context of support for fascism in the United States.

Tenure, or the guarantee (weakened though it is) that professors can give voice to their ideas without threat of job loss or other retribution, is also a key component of academic freedom. Increasingly, protecting the employment rights of faculty as a labor issue has become key to the preservation of this right. An article in Time magazine, of all places, explains that tenure is not only about academic freedom but also about labor protection. Attacks on academia are fundamentally about remaking the labor practices that define higher education, and state legislatures are pushing against our rights as scholars, teachers, and knowledge workers.

It is important to note that academic freedom was won through social movements demanding the right of intellectuals to research and teach not only established knowledge but also new and controversial ideas. It is a principle that also affirms the right of academics to speak out and protest on important questions of the day—extramural, in addition to intramural speech. This is an important part of the picture—we have and must defend the right to speak and act in public in support of social justice.

We must continue to understand and use the university—in spite of what it is becoming—as a profoundly democratic institution that needs to keep serving the vital functions of enlivening democracy. We have models for breathing back life into our colleges and universities, both recent and historical. During the civil rights movement, freedom schools created and delivered empowering knowledge by and to people oppressed by racism and poverty in the South. More recently, union struggles at universities have won big gains for faculty, graduate students, and staff at places like Rutgers. Unions make us strong against attacks on academic freedom as well.

At the individual level, we assert our rights up until the limits of the law—which, in fact, may not be as limiting as our administrators would like us to believe. Those of us in administrative roles should vow to have our faculty’s backs if they become targets of administrative or political sanction. And in addressing upper administration, the most effective ways to communicate our resistance to the implementation of barriers to our academic freedom include not only the channels of due process and faculty governance but also protests and union actions. At the University of Cincinnati, a small group of faculty formed “faculty in resistance,” and around members’ kitchen tables, it has planned events like funerals for academic freedom. These were performed at the Board of Trustees on the day that it adopted the provisions of SB1 and on campus in defense of our identity centers.

At that second event, students spoke about what the loss of the centers—including the African American Cultural Resource Center, the LGBTQ Center, and the Women’s Center — means to them. One student said, “I don’t know if I would have made it through my freshman year without the support these centers provided to me.” An alum who fought 35 years ago for the formation of the African American Cultural Resource Center explained how he felt erased as a human being by the closures. This group has put a letter of no confidence in our President in motion as well. Another group of faculty and staff are organizing both on and off campus. Forming or joining such groups sends a message to university administrators and the state: We will not be silent. Our AAUP chapters and unions are also places to explore outlets for faculty voice. I cannot stress the role of our unions enough—even though they are in a weakened state.

It was a massive protest in February on the University of Cincinnati campus that halted the premature overcompliance on the part of our administration with not-yet-realized state and federal law. In the face of two thousand students and faculty, some of whom banged on the doors and walls of the room where the Board of Trustees was meeting, that the Trustees vacated the premises, heads hung in shame. A Dean later commented that they were “visibly shaken.” That’s what we need to do: shake them up. On this note, we need to support and protect our student protesters and activists. Students have historically played a major role in changing society. And they can build support for targeted faculty as well.

At a national level, social movement campaigns are fighting for the reinstatement, rights, and protection of targeted faculty like Tom Alter and Mark Bray. There are and will be, unfortunately, many other such opportunities to come. It was this kind of campaign that saved my job and called off the right-wing mob in 2017 at Syracuse University. The administration would not have been won to support me without the voices and contributions of thousands of academics, students, and allies across the country. If you are targeted, reach out to organizations like the AAUP, Scholars Under Fire, and Scholars at Risk—heck, reach out to me—to get support in building momentum among your students and colleagues.

We have to think on a broader level as well. We must understand where this attack is ultimately coming from; this tells us where and how to fight it. Ultimately, the attack on academic freedom is part and parcel of a national and global authoritarian movement that benefits from our and our students’ living scared in the dark.

Attacks on academic freedom serve global capitalism and the intersection of racism and white supremacy, religious bigotry, sexism, misogyny, heterosexism, queerphobia and transphobia, anti-immigrant reaction, and global imperialism. Our oppression and struggle are connected to the sustainment of a global economic order in which a tiny layer of economic and political elites control the fates of the mass majority of humanity.

If we see the authoritarianism represented by but not limited to Donald Trump’s presidency as the ground from which the attacks on academic freedom springs—then a broad movement to defend women, queer people, transpeople, immigrants, Black and brown people, working people, and the poor is needed to get at the root cause of academic repression. We should return to Robin DG Kelley’s exhortation:

What is the responsibility of intellectuals committed to fighting fascism and genocide? How do we refuse and resist complicity when our own institutions are complicit? … [T]he responsibility of intellectuals is to choose a side and fight.

Many intellectuals put their faith in the electoral process—in this off-year election, the midterms, and in the national election in 2028. But two problems with that strategy come to mind. First, can we hold our breath and hold our tongues for that long? And second, I’m afraid that the Democratic Party and its politicians are not reliable defenders of academic freedom and free speech—for example, around the question of Palestine.

When any politician has done right by ordinary people, it was not because they were inherently good people with our best interests at heart. It was because ordinary people put mass pressure on them in the form of social movements. At the end of the day, it takes pressure from below on governments and leaders to defend ourselves and restore our rights.

We are living in a time of insurgent authoritarianism and a new McCarthyism that is punishing academics, activists, culture workers, and many others for speaking out against oppression, exploitation, and the violation of our basic democratic rights. Even though it is challenging at this moment, we need to remember that as intellectuals, we bear special responsibility to use even our constrained spheres of action to speak out against fascism and genocide. We play a crucial role as truth-tellers about war, poverty, and oppression. We stand in the tracks of public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Robin D.G. Kelley—and on the shoulders of thinkers like Antonio Gramsci, who during the 1930s, organized and educated against fascism in Italy while he was sick and in prison.

If he could do that, we can stand with our colleagues and students in persisting in telling the truth. We might be at some risk of censure when we speak out in defense of academic freedom, but  it remains our responsibility to be truth-tellers and organizers of resistance in fascist times. We must continue to serve our students, who depend upon us not to serve up what they already believe but to expand their ways of thinking as they enter the economic and political life of our society.

It may seem that we are at the nadir of our power—but collectively, we are more powerful than we often think we are. We are safer together. We can defend ourselves and our students together. We can build movements. Ultimately, we can remake the university into a new kind of space, one that honors academic freedom, free speech, and the right to protest. We can build power, expand governance, take the offensive, and recognize our responsibility to transform not just the university, but the world. We must; the Right’s alternative will bring disaster.