AAUP Presents

The 9th episode of our special series “Academic Freedom on the Line” is a conversation among 4 authors who contributed to the recently published University Keywords, a volume on how universities operate as social and economic engines that shape society beyond their traditional educational roles. Andy Hines, the volume editor, Senior Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, and author of Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University; Jennifer Ruth, professor in the School of Film at Portland State University, and co-director of The Palestine Exception, who serves on the steering committee of Coalition for Action in Higher Education; and Ellen Schrecker, renowned historian of McCarthyism and US higher education, and most recently the co-editor of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom with Jennifer Ruth and Valerie C. Johnson; and interviewer Vineeta Singh, a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. We share this conversation with you in the hopes that it helps you leverage your curiosity, drive for knowledge, and research skills in the service of creating more just universities and more just societies. Links to resources mentioned in our conversation: To read/watch with your study group: University Keywords The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities Vietnam: history, documents, and opinions on a major world crisis Palestine Exception (documentary) To connect with other academic workers: Historians for Peace and Democracy Starting an AAUP Chapter, Step By Step Upcoming AAUP events and trainings Coalition for Action in Higher Education or email CAHE at DayofAction @ proton.me

In this special episode of our series Academic Freedom on the Line, Vineeta Singh interviews Anna Feder, an organizer, curator, and cinema exhibition consultant who serves as the Director of Programming for the Resistance of Vision Film Festival. Anna has collaborated with the Palestine Anti-Repression Network and the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom to create a series of video testimonies from educators who have faced backlash for standing with their students or for questioning the Palestine exception. We also hear the testimony of one of her interviewees, MIT professor Michel De Graff. You can find the rest of the series here. You can learn more about Anna’s case on the Academe blog. And you can read the AAUP’s new report on Title VI, Discrimination, and Academic Freedom here.

In this episode we discuss case AAUP v. Rubio, the lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration's policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting non-citizens, students and faculty who participate in pro-Palestinian activism, with Ramya Krishnan, the lead attorney for the AAUP in the case. We also hear from Todd Wolfson, the AAUP's president, about the AAUP's broader legal work and strategy as it fights to protect higher education from the onslaught of attacks by the Trump administration. The guests are ​​Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, and Todd Wolfson, the AAUP president. The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn. Episode links: Summaries about AAUP v. Rubio and arguments by the Knight InstituteSummaries of the current AAUP litigation against the Trump administration

A new episode of our special series Academic Freedom on the Line with the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom focuses on university governing boards and their workings. Raquel Rall, Associate Professor in the School of Education at UC Riverside and Demetri Morgan, Associate Professor of Education at University of Michigan Marsal School of Education and CDAF fellow, join us to explain the differences between public and private boards, what an “advisory role” actually means, and how to create meaningful communication between board members and academic workers and community members. Be sure to visit the website of the Center for Strategic and Inclusive Governance, the Rall’s and Morgan’s new project designed to equip higher education boards and leaders with research-informed tools for mission-centered decision-making. The website includes open access resources and rapid-response guides bridging scholarship and practice. And you can submit suggestions for additional resources or areas of investigation! Further Reading for the Board-Curious: Boards Must Fight for Institutional Independence (opinion)| Inside Higher EdDecision-Making for the Public Good: Leveraging Higher Education Governing Boards for Equitable Student Success |Change: The Magazine of Higher LearningIntroducing boards to the equity conversation: State-level governing boards and discourses of social justice| Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.New national center supports higher education governance | UCR News

We’ve all heard about the changes to federal research funding since the beginning of the Trump administration. This episode of our special series Academic Freedom on the Line takes a deeper look at the landscape of federal research funding. How is research funding allocated? What is disrupted when these funds are precipitously cut? What could this mean for the future of research in the United States? To help us answer these questions, we call on experts in the fields of federal bureaucracy and legal studies. Our guests are Mary Feeney and Ethan Prall. Feeney is the Frank and June Sackton Chair and Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University and Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Prall is an environmental legal scholar and scientist, a Harvard Law School grad, and currently an Abess Fellow, Society of Conservation Biology Graduate Student Fellow, and doctoral candidate in environmental science and policy at the University of Miami. Links to resources mentioned in the conversation: Understanding the Law and Policies for Grant Terminations for the National Science FoundationWorkbook: NSF by NumbersNIH In Your State - United For Medical ResearchDo science and engineering drive economic growth?https://grant-watch.us/The Endless Frontier by Vannevar Bush

This episode of our special series in partnership with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom zooms out from the “Trump versus Harvard” headlines to situate attacks on US higher education institutions in a transnational context. We ask an interdisciplinary panel of scholars studying different parts of the world to help us set aside American exceptionalist frameworks and understand what is happening in the US in broader geographical, historical, and political contexts. Our guests: Audrey Truschke is Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. For the last three years, she served as chair of the Rutgers Faculty and Graduate Student Union Academic Freedom Committee. Her latest book, India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent was published earlier this month (June 2025). Fatima El-Tayeb is Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her research interests include Black Europe, comparative diaspora studies, queer of color critique, critical Muslim studies, decolonial theory, transnational feminisms, visual culture studies, race and technology, and critical European studies. The English translation of her book Un-German: Racialized Otherness in Post Cold-War Europe comes out this month (June 2025). Eve Darian-Smith is a Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine as well as a fellow at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. She is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in law, history, and anthropology. Her book Policing the Mind: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters has just been published by Johns Hopkins University Press in May, 2025. Links to sources mentioned in the conversation: Fighting on Three Fronts” by Hank ReichmannLegal and Academic Resources for Academic Freedom and On-Campus Protests - Rutgers AAUP-AFTPolicing Higher EducationUn/German by Fatima El-Tayeb Translated by Elisabeth LaufferIndia: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent by Audrey Truschke Further reading: Academic Freedom in India in 6 tables— IAFNPunched, choked, kicked: German police crack down on student protests | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al JazeeraPeace Petition Scholars, Turkey –Scholars at RiskHungary broke EU law by forcing out university, says European CourtDiscourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire

This episode of our special series “Academic Freedom on the Line” takes a look at accreditation, a seemingly complex but essential mechanism for safeguarding both the quality of education our institutions offer as well as the institutional and disciplinary autonomy that allows them to create and enforce standards of rigor without direct interference from the federal government. Robert Shireman of the Century Foundation joins us to demystify the role of accreditation agencies and help us understand why changes to accreditation threaten academic freedom in the United States. Links: CDAF’s Executive Power Watch Fact Sheet on Accreditation Academic Freedom Is Under Attack. College Accreditors May Be the Best Line of DefenseChronicleHow an Accreditation War Could StartAAUP Testimony to NACIQIAccreditation and Academic Freedom: An AAUP and Council for Higher Education Accreditation Advisory Statement

For this episode, we speak with a coalition of student leaders actively organizing against state-level DEI bans in Texas and Kentucky. This is the third episode in the special series, "Academic Freedom on the Line," being produced in conjunction with the AAUP's Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF). Host Vineeta Singh also speaks with Clare Carter at the Freedom to Learn team to help us understand how state legislatures have attacked the principles of academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and shared governance, and then we get to hear from the students about what this has looked like on their campus, and how they have mobilized against these attacks. The episode guests are: Links: Get involved with Texas Students for DEIStudents for DEI at the University of LouisvillePEN America’s work on Education CensorshipAmerica’s Censored Classrooms 2024

This is the second episode of the limited series AAUP Presents: Academic Freedom on the Line. Our guest Dr. Stephanie Hall is a leading expert on college accountability and the for-profit higher education industry. Her research and advocacy in these areas have been instrumental for federal and state legislation, congressional oversight, and federal agency action. We ask her what the Department of Education is for, why the right perceives it as a threat, and how the right uses “polarizing” language to obfuscate its attacks on civil rights. CDAF host Vineeta Singh is joined for this episode by Hall and Barrett Taylor. Dr Hall began her more than 20-year career in education as a middle and high school teacher in Atlanta and then Brazil. She has spent the past decade focused on policy issues including the governance of education policy and institutions, teacher education policy, undergraduate pathways, and workforce development, most recently as the senior director for higher education policy at the Center for American Progress (CAP). Prior to CAP, Dr. Hall worked with the Century Foundation and the University System of Maryland office of Academic and Student Affairs. Barrett Taylor is professor and coordinator of the higher education program at the University of North Texas. His research focuses on the relationship between universities and their environments, with particular attention to state politics and policy, the organization of academic work, and institutional inequality. Links: Stephanie Hall: What Will Happen to Your Student Loans if Trump Closes the Department of Education? | Teen VogueDear Colleague LetterLegal threat to Section 504 sets precedent for civil rights attacks, advocates sayCDAF Fact Sheet on Antisemitism Executive OrderStephanie Hall: Invasion of the College Snatchers ASU GSV next month

In this episode we discuss the AAUP's statement Against Anticipatory Obedience which offers guidelines about how to respond to attacks on higher ed like those being launched by the Trump administration and its right wing allies. The statement says in times like these, "it is the higher education community’s responsibility not to surrender to such attacks—and not to surrender in anticipation of them. Instead, we must vigorously and loudly oppose them." Henry Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University–East Bay and one of the statement's writers, walks us through the history and the recommended actions in the face of attack. In part two of the episode, we discuss what specific steps faculty can take to strengthen their CBAs and handbooks to safeguard academic rights and governance. The guests in part two are Mark Criley, a senior program officer in the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance at the AAUP, and Monica Owens is a senior program officer and field services representative in the Department of Organizing. The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn. Links: Against Anticipatory Obedience 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities,Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure,Statement on Procedural Standards in the Renewal or Nonrenewal of Faculty AppointmentsUnderstanding Academic Freedom, Henry Reichman, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025

This episode kicks off a new limited series hosted by the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF), AAUP Presents: Academic Freedom on the Line. CDAF serves as a resource and knowledge hub for all people—including faculty, students, campus workers, alumni, administrators, trustees, parents, journalists, policymakers, and business leaders—seeking to build a flourishing higher education system, rooted in institutional autonomy, workplace democracy, and freedom from coercion and external interference. Its current projects include an Academic Freedom field guide that curates resources for individuals, institutions, and organizations facing attacks on academic freedom and Executive Power Watch, tracking executive orders that impact higher education with fact sheets that break down what these new policies are intended for and how campus leaders can resist them. The guests are center Director Isaac Kamola and CDAF fellows Tim Cain, Don Moynihan, and Vineeta Singh. Isaac Kamola is an associate professor of political science at Trinity College. He is also the founder of Faculty First Responders, a program that monitors right-wing attacks on academics and provides resources to help faculty members and administrators respond to manufactured outrage. Tim Cain is a professor in the University of Georgia’s Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education and associate editor for the Review of Higher Education. Don Moynihan is the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and co-director of the Better Government Lab. Vineeta Singh is associate director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Virginia Commonwealth University and will be the host for this limited series. Links: AAUP PresentsPolitical Interference in Higher Ed: Escalations, Attacks, and the Billionaires Behind ItCenter for the Defense of Academic Freedom | AAUPAcademic Freedom on the Line NewsletterPublicationsAcademic Freedom SyllabusAcademic Freedom Field GuidJoan Scott on Academic Freedom as Ethical PracticeEllen Schrecker: Worse than McCarthy

In this episode we discuss the AAUP's new statement On Institutional Neutrality. As college and university communities begin to suffer the consequences of unchecked power, the statement reaffirms that institutional neutrality is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it—and that respect for faculty voices and shared governance procedures is essential to sound decision-making and the protection of those who dissent. Our guests are the report's coauthors, Joan Wallach Scott and Brian Soucek. Scott is a historian and an emerita professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Soucek is professor of law and chancellor’s fellow at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. He is also a member of AAUP’s Committee A. The episode is hosted by Anita Levy, a senior program officer in the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance. Links: On Institutional Neutrality FAQs on Institutional Neutrality

In this episode we discuss the Nonpartisan College Voter Registration and Education Project, a student voter registration project that aims to increase student voter registration and turnout by asking faculty to devote five minutes of class time to voter education and on-the-spot voter registration. The guests are Sam Novey, Chief Strategist at the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, and Michael Rosenblum, professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University and affiliate of the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute for strengthening global democracy. He is an AAUP member in the Johns Hopkins chapter of the AAUP. Episode links: Nonpartisan College Voter Registration and Education Project registration form

In this episode we discuss academic boycotts and the AAUP's revised policy on boycotts, released this August. We’ll hear more about the statement, how it came about, and where it fits in the current debates about academic freedom in higher education. The guests are Rana Jaleel, an associate professor at the University of California at Davis and chair of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Risa L. Lieberwitz, a professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the general counsel of the AAUP. She is also a member of Committee A. Episode links: 2024 Statement on Academic Boycotts“The AAUP Has Always Defended Academic Freedom. We Still Do,” Rana Jaleel and Todd Wolfson, The Chronicle of HIgher Education, August 21, 2024 “The AAUP Is Right, Supporting Boycotts is Academic Freedom.” Joan Wallach Scott, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 20, 2024“Changing My Mind About Boycotts, Joan W. Scott,” Journal of Academic Freedom, Volume 4, 2013 2006 Statement on Academic Boycotts

In this episode, I discuss the AAUP’s involvement in the Black Freedom Struggle in the 1950s and 1960s as it related to higher ed with Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, dean of the graduate school and professor of social and cultural foundations in the College of Education at the University of Washington. Drawing on her recently published article of the same name in AAUP's Academe, we discuss how Black private institutions, Black public institutions, and white public institutions in the period approached the civil rights movement as it related to academic freedom on campus; Williamson-Lott gives us examples and perspective on how these different types of institutions “understood their self-interest differently.” Links: "The AAUP and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1955–1965," Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, Academe, Spring 2024

As campus protests in support of Palestine are met with often violent and repressive crackdowns, we talk to three faculty members, all AAUP members, who report on what's happening at their respective campuses. We speak to Annelise Orleck at Dartmouth College, whose arrest at a May 1 protest at Dartmouth garnered significant press coverage, Todd Wolfson at Rutgers University, where faculty supported students as they came to a negotiated solution to end their encampment, and Nivedita Majumdar at John Jay College in the City University of New York system, where 173 people were arrested during protest at the the end of April. AAUP president Irene Mulvey also weighs in on the ongoing crackdown and threats to higher ed. The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn, AAUP's digital organizer. Links: In Defense of the Right to Free Speech and Peaceful Protest on University Campuses, AAUP statement and sign-on, April 29, 2024"Police Treatment of a Dartmouth Professor Stirs Anger and Debate," The New York Times"Rutgers students — reluctantly — end Gaza solidarity encampment," New Jersey Monitor"CUNY and Columbia organizers hold press conference and rally after Tuesday police sweeps," The Colombia Spectator

In this episode we dive into how data, educational technologies (or “EdTech”), and other technological forces are shaping and sometimes harming higher education. The guests are Martha Fay Burtis, an associate director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University, and Jesse Stommel, a faculty member in the writing program at the University of Denver and cofounder of Hybrid Pedagogy: The Journal of Critical Digital Pedagogy. In a recent article for the AAUP's Academe magazine, Burtis and Stommel explain how “increasingly, technology companies are treating educational institutions as conglomerations of data, reducing the human teachers, staff, and students to bits and binary. Too many of these companies are more interested in selling solutions to problems of data than they are in genuinely supporting the people represented by those data.” Listen for more. Links: "Bad Data Are Not Better Than No Data, Academe"Counter-friction to Stop the Machine: The Endgame for Instructional Design", Hybrid Pedagogy "Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade and How to Stop,'" Hybrid Pedagogy Design Forward faculty development program

As violent, militarized responses to protests on campuses across the country continue, in this episode we look at how political interference in higher education has expanded in dangerous ways. We discuss how the right (and increasingly the center) have demonized higher education as a public good, and examine the historical origins of the current onslaught of political interference in higher ed. Isaac Kamola, an associate profes­sor of political science at Trinity College in Connecticut guests. He is the director of the AAUP’s newly established Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, which will examine and confront the recent surge of political and ideological attacks on American higher education. It was established by the AAUP with funding from the Mellon Foundation. Jennifer Ruth, a professor and associate dean at Portland State University also guests. She is the coauthor, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and coeditor, with Valerie C. Johnson and Ellen Schrecker, of the forthcoming The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. Links: "Subnational Authoritarianism and the Campaign to Control Higher Education," Jennifer Ruth, AcademeWill Academic Freedom and Campus Free Speech Survive? Inside Higher EdIn Defense of the Right to Free Speech and Peaceful Protest on University Campuses, AAUP statement

Faculty and student groups at more than 50 U.S. college and university campuses will hold a National Day of Action for Higher Education on Wednesday, April 17 in a coordinated nationwide counterprotest against the sustained right-wing assault on American higher education as a public good. Organizers say the Day of Action for Higher Education will demonstrate how cross-rank organizing, robust faculty governance, labor solidarity, and protection of the freedom to teach and learn are crucial to the survival of higher education and to its vital social purpose in a democracy. In this episode host Mariah Quinn, the AAUP's digital organizer, talks to two of the organizers of the April 17 movement about how it came about and the path forward. Our guests are Rebecca Karl, a professor of history at New York University and president of NYU-AAUP, and Amy Offner, an associate professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and president of AAUP-Penn. Links: Day of Action for Higher Education website

From Florida to Texas to Ohio to Indiana politicians in some states are trying to substitute their own ideological beliefs for educational freedom by passing legislation that interferes with how colleges and universities operate. They’re introducing bills that mandate or prohibit content in the classroom, empower partisan political appointees to determine campus policy, limit the freedom to learn, teach, and conduct research. In this episode we look at member-led efforts to fight legislative interference in Texas and Ohio, specifically pushing back against bills targeting diversity equity and inclusion programs, tenure, and collective bargaining. We talk about each campaigns successes, failures, and the lessons learned. The guests are Karma R. Chávez, the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor and Chair in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves on the executive committee of the AAUP chapter, and Sara Kilpatrick, the AAUP Ohio Conference Executive Director. She previously worked as the political director for the Ohio Senate Democratic Caucus. The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn, AAUP's digital organizer. Links: Lessons from AAUP Advocacy in Texas, Karma Chávez, Academe, Fall 2023A Provisional Victory in Ohio, Sara Kilpatrick, Academe, Fall 2023Ohio Conference website with information about SB 83AAUP UT Austin chapter website page tracking Texas higher ed billsAAUP resources on political interference