BY MICHAEL FERGUSON

Following is the editor’s introduction to the fall 2025 issue of Academe, “Defending Academic Values,” out this week. The full issue and table of contents can be found here. 

Sather Gate, pictured on this issue’s cover, marks the entrance to the heart of the University of Califor­nia’s Berkeley campus. With Sproul Plaza on one side and academic buildings on the other, it calls to mind both the quintessentially American value of free speech and the academic values central to the AAUP’s mission.

The fate of these values hangs in the balance today. Indeed, the UC system is among the latest group of universities threatened by a federal govern­ment that has no qualms about forcing institutions to choose between the bottom line and the principles upon which their integrity depends. The Trump administration’s campaign against higher education is unrelenting, but the AAUP and its allies are fighting back. In response to the threat to withhold funding from UC, the AAUP has filed a lawsuit against the government, as it has in numerous other cases involv­ing actions targeting higher education. In two of these cases, the national AAUP and AAUP chapters have already won victories for academic freedom, free speech, and other faculty and student rights.

Against this backdrop, contributors to this issue of Academe consider what is at stake when core values are traded away. The authors of the opening articles shine a light on the strategies conservative activists have devel­oped to seize control of colleges and universities. Lisa Siraganian offers a wide-ranging critique of “viewpoint diversity,” which has long been used to circumvent academic governance in the creation of campus centers for conservative thought and is now being wielded as a bludgeon by the Trump administration. Antoinette Flores examines how Southern states are pioneering tactics that could undermine the accreditation system and give politicians the ability “to influence everything from curricula to faculty appointments.” And Jennifer Ruth analyzes the unmaking of the nonpartisan civil service and the subversion of US civil rights law, reveal­ing a long-term plan “to strong-arm higher education into internally reorganizing itself” in accordance with the president’s vision. Rounding out the features section are articles discussing the role of the faculty in uphold­ing academic values, whether by seeking to establish mutual academic defense compacts (Shawn Gilmore), pushing back against efforts to bar speech by academic units (Ajay Skaria), or reasserting the principles of shared governance at a time when executive search firms have assumed outsize influence in an increasingly corporatized academy (Judith A. Wilde and James H. Finkelstein).

The peril is deepening. Shortly before this issue went to press, news broke of yet another Trumpian assault: the introduction of a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that would provide favored treatment to universities that ideologically align themselves with the president’s agenda—and, in so doing, abandon the principles of academic freedom and shared governance. What is to be done? As lead­ers of the Harvard University AAUP chapter wrote in a Harvard Crimson editorial about one of the AAUP’s recent legal victories, the onslaught will be thwarted “only if all who understand, care about, and seek to defend the core values of higher education come together to make clear to each other, to our leaders, and to the broader public why those values need safe­guarding.” The time to unite in defense of our values is now.