BY EVE DARIAN-SMITH

Something is broken in our college and university systems. Professors are being declared “the enemy of the people” by J. D. Vance and other MAGA Republicans. Book bans, curriculum reviews, attacks on DEI programs, threats of defunding, and suspending faculty or removing their tenure are becoming widespread. Students engaged in peaceful assembly are being assaulted, criminalized, and locked up by riot police and accused of creating an atmosphere of campus hostility. Together these events sharply reveal that the higher education system, which many people take for granted, is fundamentally changing, if not shattered.

Against the full-scale assault by the far right on higher education, there is an urgent need to rebuild the infrastructure that supports academic freedom. Academic freedom is central to the core mission of education. It is both an individual and collective professional right to think, research, teach, and disseminate evidence-based knowledge free from political interference and threats of punishment. And it is essential in developing the capacity for students to think independently, including the ability to challenge the status quo and the far right’s authority to govern.

So, it’s not surprising that academic freedom is under a coordinated attack clearly laid out in the Republican Party platform and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second presidency. One of the most effective political strategies is to reduce the collective right of academic freedom to an individual’s right to free speech. Making highly trained scholars on campus equivalent to everyday citizens on public streets is now commonplace. More bizarrely, in states like Florida and Indiana, even a scholar’s basic First Amendment right to speak is denied with the state legislature declaring that what professors say is “government” speech.

This reductive move makes scholars and students vulnerable to attack. It quickly devolves into politically motivated and often disingenuous debate over whether one person’s perspective or opinion is more worthy than that of another person. More problematically, it enables scholars to be subjected to political coercion and legal prosecution as solo actors without the support of colleagues, institutions, and professional networks. Its effectiveness is enhanced by targeted cyberbullying and doxing that amplifies a culture of intimidation, self-censorship, and silencing on campus. In some cases, it even works as a “divide and conquer” strategy with university administrators complicit in the “control” of their campus communities, as was the case with Nemat Shafik, former president of Columbia University.

Rebuilding the infrastructure of academic freedom on two fronts offers a way to fight back. First, we need to reframe academic freedom to be legible to those inside and outside campus communities to marshal public support about attacks on academic freedom and why it matters to them in direct and material ways. Second, we need to build coalitions across all learning sectors, including K–12 through to elite universities, and then extend these coalitions to those outside educational communities. In short, building a more robust infrastructure for academic freedom calls for both definitional and relational restructuring.

What would this rebuilding look like? I suggest we should reframe academic freedom as a social responsibility to students, wider societies, and future generations. For instance, Scholars at Risk, which helps scholars fleeing political persecution around the world, states that one of the core values of higher education is social responsibility, defining this as a duty “to seek and impart truth, according to ethical and professional standards, and to respond to contemporary problems and needs of all members of society”. The report State of play of academic freedom in the EU Member States, issued by the European Parliament in March 2023, argues that academia’s responsibilities include “the handling of societal challenges and crises, such as climate change, growing inequality, or global pandemics”. The report goes on, “Overall, academia has the responsibility to use its higher education and research capacities to contribute… to the maintenance and enhancement of the democratic principles and institutions that form the political order of our societies”.

Reframing academic freedom as social responsibility central for developing inclusive multiracial societies helps build new allies and coalitions within and beyond educational communities. It means that all those involved in education from K-12 up, including librarians and educators in small rural colleges as well as elite research universities, need to work together as a united front against far-right attacks on the freedom to think. Tenured faculty at prominent universities hold responsibilities for all educators that apply all the way down to the poorly paid assistant kindergarten teacher. Professors must not be complacent and remember these are the people who are teaching their future students, as well as their own children and grandchildren.

Building educational alliances also speaks to coalition building beyond the campus. In recent years there has been renewed societal mobilization around racism, gender discrimination, LGBTQ+ concerns, and the environment, as well as a growing labor consciousness with high-profile strikes among auto workers, actors, writers, Starbucks employees, and various health, transportation, and hospitality sectors.

What these various grassroots mobilizations underscore is a broader conversation around the idea of social responsibility for building more equitable and inclusive societies. This is a message of hope and solidarity that clearly resonates across large swathes of the population, suggesting a way to make the concept of academic freedom more accessible to people inside and outside the academy.

Eve Darian-Smith is a distinguished professor and chair in the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of the forthcoming book Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters (May 2025), and a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.