BY LOUISE PAY Understanding the strategy behind ideological attacks on university employees is the only way to counter them effectively. It’s easy to dismiss cases like the recent incident at the University of Oklahoma (OU), where a graduate instructor’s grading decision was amplified into a public controversy on X (formerly Twitter) by the OU chapter…
BY DON ERON The AAUP’s recent statement On Title VI, Discrimination, and Academic Freedom is a potentially useful report that self-destructs with the use of a single quote, on which the report—and the organization as a whole—wages its credibility. As a result, nobody who doesn’t already agree with everything the report says is likely to take it, or…
BY JACKIE STEVENS Northwestern University’s Interim President Henry Bienen announced on Friday the university had violated commitments to its faculty and students in order to appease an autocrat. Bienen claimed the agreement was signed to restore federal funding but has withheld the appendices indicating the affected grants and contracts. The scope of restored funding and…
BY SIBESO LISULO What happens when a university, the very institution tasked with speaking truth to power, cannot afford the cost of its own voice? This is not a theoretical question but a lived reality for a lot of academics in the Global South. I explore this grim reality in “Navigating Fiscal Precarity and the…
BY DANIEL SEGAL It is the rare faculty member who today is unaware of the significant increase in attacks on speech rights and academic freedom protections on U.S. campuses over the past two years. A recently released joint report from the AAUP and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) provides an important and illuminating framework…
BY BILL MULLEN Can you identify yourself and explain what happened at Texas State? My name is Tom Alter. Until being recently fired in violation of my free speech rights, I was a tenured associate professor of history at Texas State University in San Marcos, specializing in labor and working class forms of organizing and…
BY AMY LAI Academic freedom is generally defined as the freedom to engage in activities involved in the production of knowledge, without unreasonable interference or restriction from law, institutional regulations, or public pressure. Interferences with academic freedom can come from within the academy, such as in the form of institutional pressures, but may also come…
BY SHAWN GILMORE It’s now been a few weeks since the second Trump administration offered its “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” first to nine institutions, then to the rest of us. Containing a range of provisions, the agreement would limit the autonomy of any institution that signed on in exchange for continued access…
BY MAX WEISS “I am anti-Israel, I am anti-Zionist also, but I am NOT anti-Jewish.” So said Palestinian intellectual Fayez A. Sayegh in 1956. I was reminded of this statement, a sentiment I personally share, on October 2, when members of the Princeton community received an email from Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity…
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…