This blog post originally appeared on Academic Freedom on the Line, the Substack newsletter of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF). We are republishing it here with the author’s permission.

BY JOHN WARNER

I want to believe at this point that I am immune to shocks to the system when it comes to the current threats against academic freedom—after all, what could be worse than a major university (Columbia) agreeing to be overseen by a government minder in response to overt extortion—but a recent classroom incident at Texas A&M gave me pause and is an indicator of a problem that goes far deeper than a single authoritarian-minded president.

As reported by local station KBTX, at the order of A&M President Mark Welsh, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the chair of the English department were removed after supporting the autonomy of the instructor in response to a student complaint regarding the content of a gender studies course. In a subsequent communication, Welsh said the instructor (who was non-tenure track) was also fired.

There is a video of the student’s exchange with the instructor. I encourage everyone to watch the full two minutes and twenty-five seconds.

I notice a few things:

• The student argues that the course is “illegal” because it is inconsistent with a Trump administration executive order declaring that there are only two genders.
• The instructor does nothing wrong, and, in fact, handles the situation with clear professionalism and grace.
• The student has, in my view, engineered the confrontation as they report that they already have a meeting scheduled with the president to discuss the course.

This is not an atmosphere in which anyone can feel free to learn. It is literally poisoned.

As reported by the Texas Tribune, working from another video, “Welsh can be heard asking the student, What do you expect us to do? Fire her?’ When the student replies, ‘Yes,’ Welsh responds, ‘Well, that’s not happening.’

Following pressure from the system chancellor and other state-level politicians, Welsh ended up removing the dean and chair while the instructor remains under some kind of investigation. In a statement announcing the actions, Welsh offers a transparently pretextual rationale that the actions are happening because of inconsistencies between the course catalog description and the class content.

New America’s Kevin Carey puts things pretty plainly.

Carey is correct. What has happened at Texas A&M is not consistent in any way with the values we claim for higher education in this country.

This may have been the case at A&M for quite some time. In 2017, a Redding News Review radio segment by Professor Tommy Curry discussing contemporary Black political movements was deliberately distorted by right-wing conservative groups, leading to donor and alumni backlash that resulted in a reprimand of Curry from then-president Michael K. Young. Prof. Curry ultimately left Texas A&M.

In a 2019 piece by CDAF director Isaac Kamola, which highlights what happened to Tommy Curry and others who were similarly attacked, he made the case that it was all part of a well-funded, coordinated attack to sow public distrust in higher education, a campaign that has borne considerable fruit for those who would like to put institutions under ideological control from the right. There are many not on the right who have been useful to the people prosecuting that campaign, but I’m going to set that aside for now to try to focus on the most urgent matter at hand.

As we consider how to “defend” academic freedom, I think it is important to admit when it has been lost. Perhaps one day it may return, but at least for now, academic freedom is no longer present at one of the largest public institutions in the country.

This is terrible, but it is not unprecedented, and we can see the seeds of this successful student op to take down a faculty member (and dean and chair) as part of a much longer campaign.

A 2021 AAUP study1 quantified the deliberate, targeted harassment of faculty by Campus Reform, which routinely relied on these sorts of student reports—primarily about extracurricular faculty speech—and then amplified them to their partisan audience.

In 2023, the University of Chicago allowed a seminar titled “The Problem of Whiteness” to be cancelled after a conservative activist tweeted his objections and the instructor was inundated with threats. When the instructor petitioned the institution to address the harassment, they denied the request because there was no evidence that the student personally harassed the instructor. Calling down a mob was apparently A-OK. As I argued at Inside Higher Ed at the time, the University of Chicago allowed itself to be hijacked by a bad faith attack that had nothing to do with substantive issues of academic freedom.

With the incident at Texas A&M, we see the confluence of two vectors of attack that have extended from these earlier forays: weaponized harassment and the increasing push for regulation of professor speech by state governments requiring a political litmus test, an approach first pioneered in Florida, and now spreading elsewhere.

Texas A&M president Welsh declared, “This isn’t about academic freedom; it’s about academic responsibility,” but this this doublespeak can’t cover for what happened here.

So what is the proper response to these events? An obvious one for those not directly involved is a quick and clear condemnation. I think declaring Texas A&M is not a real university is nicely on target.

But ultimately, this is not going to be enough. There is no one and nothing coming to debate or adjudicate a way out of this confrontation. This is a battle over essential rights.

Either those rights are asserted or they’re lost. Academic freedom isn’t just an idea; it’s a way of doing things, and where that way has been abandoned, it must be restored.

A Texas Tribune story from last week reporting on a survey of southern faculty found that one-quarter of faculty working in Texas are actively looking for work elsewhere, but it should be clear by now that individuals leaving is not going to solve this problem which will continue to spread state-to-state, institution-to-institution until we have something like two systems: one that respects the rights and freedoms of faculty and students and another that operates according to the authoritarian, ideological demands of the state (meaning both federal and state governments).

In a world where a significant portion of funding flows through the state, this creates an untenable system for everyone.

The best way forward is to organize in groups that are 100% oriented around protecting faculty rights, a cause which is increasingly at odds with some higher ed administrations.

An under-appreciated aspect of the recent legal victory for Harvard over the Trump administration is that there were not one, but two lawsuits won that day. One was from the entity Harvard University, but another was filed by Harvard faculty in conjunction with the AAUP. In an opinion piece at the Harvard Crimson, Harvard AAUP chapter president Kristen Weld and chapter counsel Andrew Crespo explain why it is so important for faculty to directly assert their own rights:

Because even if the University were to abandon its case, the entire judicial order blocking the Trump administration’s unlawful actions would remain fully and completely in effect, and enforceable by us — the teachers, researchers, and students who make this University work and who are central to fulfilling its educational mission.

No one is coming to preserve the conditions that allow the work of teaching, learning, and research to continue to happen for us. It’s a dark time, but the needs of the moment seem quite clear.

John Warner is a fellow of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and a writer, editor, and speaker. He is a long-time columnist for Inside Higher Ed and the author of nine books, including, most recently, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.