BY MADELINE ROWE Madeline Rowe, a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, is conducting a dissertation research study on how early career faculty members (tenure-track, but not yet tenured) perceive academic freedom in their teaching. Current faculty members of any rank and teaching in any discipline are invited to complete a brief survey…
BY MIKE STEVE COLLINS The Trump administration is waging a highly successful war on knowledge and its pursuit and dissemination, disguised as a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); antisemitism; and lack of viewpoint diversity. This war on knowledge has dealt potentially crippling blows to Harvard University and has enabled the brushing aside of…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the winter 2025 issue of Academe, which I guest-edited, exiled Russian scholars Ilya Matveev and Evgeny Roshchin surveyed the state of academic freedom in that country in the aftermath of the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. (The issue also includes essays by Ukrainian scholars.) Unsurprisingly, they reported that Security agencies and…
BY DAVID MOSHMAN Readers of this blog may be interested in three new intellectual freedom case repositories that are now available on the MetaCat Foundation website. Feel free to take a look at them before reading on. The first repository is the Academic Freedom Gaza Case Repository, which is connected to my book-in-progress, Gaza, Genocide,…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Jay Bhattacharya, appointed by President Trump to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH), first gained national notoriety as a principal author of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration of 2020, which condemned the NIH for ignoring calls to mostly cease pandemic-related precautions. Now over 300 NIH staff have published the Bethesda…
BY CONCERNED FACULTY AT COLUMBIA, BARNARD, AND TEACHERS COLLEGE We are publishing this letter at the request of several AAUP members from Columbia, Barnard, and Teachers College. The letter was drafted on May 13, 2025, in response to recent events on their campuses. We, a group of faculty members from Columbia University, Barnard College, and…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following statement was issued yesterday in response to a decision earlier that day by the Department of Homeland Security to revoke Harvard University’s certification in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, effectively removing over seven thousand students from campus. In a press release DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said the administration…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Last week the American Constitution Society hosted a video conversation on academic freedom with Andrew Manuel Crespo, the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law and Executive Faculty Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard University. Professor Crespo is an AAUP member who is serving as general counsel…
BY MICHAEL FERGUSON Following is the editor’s introduction to the spring 2025 issue of Academe, “Trump 2.0,” out this week. The full issue and table of contents can be found here. Patricia McGuire, in her contribution to the online edition of this issue, succinctly describes the stakes of the second Trump administration’s intertwined attacks on higher education…
BY ALAN SINGER On Thursday, April 17, I marched with New York City AAUP chapters and thousands of educators, students, workers, and allies from the arch in Washington Square Park to Foley Square in lower Manhattan in defense of higher education. We rallied to defend the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution…