Academic freedom remains a constant issue in the United States and around the world. Professors find themselves facing calls for termination for their research, teaching, public statement, or social media posts. At the same time state legislatures have passed laws curtaining faculty speech and undermining institutional autonomy, while the Trump
administration is using increasingly novel forms of executive power to discipline academics and academic institutions. To understand these dynamics and to address how teachers might shape their own craft in the classroom in response, Matt Evans (mevans8@nwacc.edu), Editor of the Political Science Educator and Professor of Political Science at Northwest Arkansas Community College, interviewed Isaac A. Kamola (isaac.kamola@trincoll.edu), Professor of Political Science at Trinity College and Director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Kamola has published extensively on higher education, including the white paper “Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and the Legislative Attack on Higher Education, 2021–2023,” and two monographs: Free Speech and Koch Money (Pluto Press, 2021) with Ralph Wison, and Making the World Global: US Universities and the Global Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2019). This conversation took place over Microsoft Teams and was edited for clarity and brevity.
Question: Could you give us a basic definition of academic freedom?
I think its helpful to start with an overview of what makes American higher education so unique. Most countries have national laws laying out what faculty job descriptions and their protections, how faculty are promoted, hired and fired, all of that stuff.
The United States, however, lacks a national system of higher education and instead has an heterogenous amalgamation of private colleges, large private universities, state-run flagship research institutions, regional colleges and universities, community colleges, religious schools, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), for-profit schools, military academies, and so on. And, because of a historical commitment to states’ rights, and opposition to federal involvement in education, the United States lacks any overarching law laying out exactly what academic freedom is. Instead, we have a definition of academic freedom created by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), in 1915 during a time, not unlike our own, saw many high-profile firings of faculty. In 1915 all faculty were at-will employees. They were hired by colleges and universities, and if they said something that their bosses objected to, they could be fired. As happened at Stanford University, for example, where Professor Ross criticized the railroads. Leland Stanford was a railway baron and his widow sat on the university board, which fired Professor Ross.
John Dewey, Aurthur Lovejoy, and other faculty members formed the AAUP in 1915 in response to these firings. Their first step was to write and ratify the Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure which laid out the principle of academic freedom as including freedom of inquiry and research, and freedom of extramural utterance and action, or the freedom to speak publicly outside one’s professional position. The 1915 Declaration posited that higher education cannot serve as “the cornerstone” of society or advance “scientific knowledge” if faculty are beholden to external pressures. The 1915 Declaration describes faculty members as more like judges, rather than employees. Namely, we are appointed experts, who pursue an interest that is not always aligned with those who hire us. A judge appointed by a governor, for example, can still rule against the state, in the same way that a faculty member might follow lines of inquiry that university presidents, trustees, donors, or politicians might object to. The 1915 Declaration then lays out the institution of tenure as the best protection for academic freedom.
This vision of academic freedom, however, faced considerable challenges during the Red Scare during the 1930s, in which academic freedom continued to be violated for those accused of being communists, socialists, pacifists, or otherwise subversive. The AAUP responded by working with the American Association of Colleges (now the American Association of Colleges and Universities; AAC&U) to operationalize the understanding of academic freedom laid out in 1915. The result was the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, a negotiated compromise between those advocating for the interests of faculty and those representing colleges and universities, and those in administration. The 1940 Statement clearly defined academic freedom in teaching, research, and extramural speech, and also laid out the institution of tenure as the best way to protect academic freedom. In the decades that followed this became the tenure system as we know it across the U.S. academic. Namely, seven years of peer-review and assessment, as part of a process overseen by the faculty. With hiring in the hands of the faculty. And disciplinary decisions overseen by a faculty hearing committee, which determines whether or not a faculty member engaged in speech that demonstrates a “cause” for termination or non-renewal. This definition of academic freedom, and tenure process, has now been ratified by more than 280 professional and disciplinary associations, including the American Political Science Association (APSA), and is included in roughly three-quarters of faculty handbooks.
Question: Could you say more about what academic freedom means?
Of course! Academic freedom includes the freedom to teach, which includes deciding what readings should be taught; what assignments to be assigned and how they are assessed; to determine grades free from external interference; and to be able to talk about controversial issues in the classroom without fear that doing so will lead to retaliation or termination. It also means that faculty should be in charge of determining the curriculum, through elected faculty committees. If faculty are forced to teach a curriculum imposed by a governing board, political appointees, or by politicians themselves (such as in Ohio after SB 1), then teaching becomes a political project pushed by those without expertise in the subject matter, and who have political or economic interests in what is taught and how. We see this in Florida with the Board of Governors determining the core curriculum and mandating the teaching of a particular Sociology textbook.
The second aspect of academic freedom is the freedom to research what faculty want and to publish their find their findings. This doesn’t mean faculty are free to publish whatever they want. Rather, faculty publication is regulated by the peer review process, whereby the scholarly community assess what constitutes a good argument.
The third type of academic freedom is called extramural speech, which is the freedom to speak as a member of the public. The argument for the protection of extramural speech is that one can only do their job as a researcher and teacher if they have access to a classroom, a library, to be part of an intellectual community. However, if the writing of an op-ed or speaking at a rally or participating in Congressional testimony could jeopardize my job then I’ve essentially given up my freedom to speak. Extramural speech, in other words, is the recognition that faculty must have the ability to speak publicly without fear of retaliation.
Extramural speech also includes intramural speech, which is speaking as a member of one’s academic community. For colleges and universities to be governed democratically then teachers and researchers must also have the freedom to criticize their own institutions. I must have the freedom to criticize the policies of my college without fear of retaliation, recognizing that doing so is an important part of what it means to have a thriving and vibrant intellectual community.
Question: Within intramural speech, shared governance is part of that intramural speech where the faculty having meaningful agency over the direction of the institution or the curriculum or other sorts of policies?
Absolutely. The AAUP’s 1940 Statement ties academic freedom to the tenure system. In 1966 the AAUP released another statement on shared governance. That statement was also co-negotiated with other professional associations representing academic institutions—the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB)—recognize that academic freedom and tenure are insufficient to protect academic freedom, if professors don’t have the ability to govern the institution as well. That document lays out a vision of the university as a partnership, whereby governance is a joint effort between two equal parties. The board oversees the infrastructure of the institution that makes the educational mission possible, whereas faculty are those that govern the actual academic mission of the institution, namely teaching and research. For example, me and my colleagues in Trinity’s Political Science department have a better idea of what 18, 19, 20-year-old political science majors should be learning in our classes. We should therefore be the ones who are developing the curriculum for our department. And the faculty should be determining the curriculum for the entire school through faculty committees and through a process that involves considerable consultation. We should be the ones deciding who to hire, whether a candidate fits the qualifications and the standards that we’re looking for, whether their teaching and research meet our standards of quality. We should be the ones engaged in promotion and tenure decisions as well as whole other hosts of important decisions that have to do with the economic or the educational mission of the institution both in in in research and teaching.
I don’t know how to maintain the steampipes on Gates Quad, or whether we should be recruiting students in California or Colorado, who we should hire to design a new Life Sciences building, or any other those kinds of decisions. Those should be left to the governing board. However, in places that concern the faculty—such as fundraising priorities—faculty should be consulted and have a voice at the table.
Question: How do case law and Supreme Court cases impact this definition of academic freedom?
In terms of the law, academic freedom is often considered a subset of First Amendment rights. This was laid out most foundationally in Justice Frankfurter’s 1957 decision in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, in which he declared that “The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident.” This argument drew from an anti-apartheid report from South African academic institutions, “The Open Universities in South Africa,” which laid out “the four essential freedoms of a university,” which include the ability “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.”
Since then there are a number of cases that reference the AAUP standards and policies. Those often comes from the fact that AAUP principles of academic freedom are included in faculty manuals, which often serves as a labor contract. Therefore, if faculty members are sanctioned for their speech then refer to campus policies legal case. The legal protections of academic freedom therefore vary by public and private institution, and according to labor law in various states.
It’s important to remember that the power of academic freedom very much lies in its normative power but also the ability for faculty and our allies to defend it. If you’re looking for ways academic freedom can be included in union contracts, I would recommend checking out our recently published report “Academic Freedom and Collective Bargaining,” co-written with the National Center of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions.
The AAUP also uses the mechanism of censure to discipline institutions found violating academic freedom. If faculty are terminated without due process, as what happened in Muhlenberg College that fired Maura Finkelstein, the AAUP researches the situation, writes a report, then votes to put that institution on the censure list. It’s a form of normative naming and shaming.
Question: Thinking more about the broad nature of academic freedom, autonomy is part of it. But it’s a bounded autonomy. Where does standardization lie in terms of thinking about that sort of autonomy for academic freedom? Is it contrary to academic freedom that a department standardizes assignments or gradebooks?
Yeah, that’s a great point. The AAUP has guidance around exactly this issue in our statement on academic freedom in the classroom. The fundamental premise is that faculty should be primarily in charge of the curriculum. However, there is a recognition that departments may decide that it is beneficial to have a standardized introduction class, for example. In this case individual professors may not have the ability to choose a particular textbook because the curriculum has been standardized. However, that decision should be made by faculty, based on their expertise, and not decided by the Board of Trustees or a wealthy donor or some other external influence. Furthermore, those who are directly involved in the teaching of that class should also be heavily involved in deciding what the content of that class is as well.
Question: Does academic freedom mean that faculty can teach material outside the topic of the class? Can faculty, for example, talk about Palestine in a math class?
Academic freedom is a set of rights but also responsibilities. Faculty are required to teach the content of the class. A faculty member, for example, is not free to walk into a math class (or a Shakespear class, or a Latin class, etc.) and say “OK. From now on we’re talking about Palestine because this is the most important topic…” However, a professor of an Intro to American Politics class could – according to their pedagogical understanding and who they are, who is in the classroom, and how they understand their role as a professor – take time out of class to have a conversation about pressing issues. For example, my experience as a teacher has led me to believe that space should be made to talk about issues of concern. And not just political issues but also, say, tragedies that happen on campus that could be consuming student attention. I think the classroom works better when we have space to talk about these issues. However, the AAUP’s standard is that such non-topical conversations cannot “permanently intrude.”
Where does this line exist? Again, it should be up to the faculty as a self-regulating entity. If a student feels like their class has been hijacked by a faculty member spending time on topics outside those found in the course description, there should be a process to file a complaint. The relevant disciplinary committee, which includes faculty representation, would then evaluate that complaint and determine the sanction.
Question: Would you say that students have academic freedom? How would you define that from a student perspective?
The AAUP’s understanding of academic freedom is based on the fact that faculty have expertise that others, including students, do not. Faculty members have gone through years of graduate school, have produced a dissertation, have passed a vetting processes in being hired, are peer reviewed and assessed and, in doing so, demonstrate a certain amount of expertise. This expertise means that there should be greater latitude in terms of making decisions about what to teach in the classroom or what or how to research a particular topic. Students, precisely because they don’t have that expertise don’t, according to AAUP standards, have academic freedom in the same way.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they don’t have academic freedom. The AAUP Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students lays out that student should be able to take classes free from indoctrination, and should be free to share their ideas and beliefs without a reprisal. If the faculty member says, I don’t like this idea cause it’s too conservative, or I don’t like that idea because it’s too radical, and therefore I’m going fail you, that would be a violation of academic freedom.
This is very different than what actually happened in Oklahoma, in the psychology class, where the student provided Biblical evidence in a paper. The graduate student grading the paper correctly noted that the student did not fulfill the assignment because they presented the evidence (i.e., Bible passages) that are not recognized as valid evidence within the academic discipline. Failing the student wasn’t discriminatory or hostile to a Christian worldview. The TA correctly determined that the student didn’t engage with the discipline of a psychology, which has certain kinds of evidentiary expectations.
Question: So, you might say that people don’t have the right not to be offended; that is to say, reading controversial texts is part of the education process and students don’t have the right to ask for alternative texts that more closely aligned with their values.
This gets a bit technical, but the same rule of thumb holds. Namely, deference should go to the professor. I’m thinking about ten years ago when we experienced the moral panic about trigger warnings. On the one hand, the use of trigger warnings was based on an argument about how power and language work and how exposure to texts can affect people differently. A white student reading about violent experiences of racism is likely, for example, to experience that text differently than a Black student. The practice of including trigger warnings was offered as a kind of experimentation designed to address that problem.
In terms of academic freedom, freedom of teaching, it should be up to the faculty to determine how they want to include controversial or potentially uncomfortable texts in the classroom. You could have two professors that are coming from different theoretical and conceptual positions. That could, for very good reasons, come down on different sides of that same issue. That is exactly what should take place within higher education. Likewise, if there’s a campus policy around trigger warnings it should have been developed through shared governance. This is a curricular issue, and it’s up for the faculty to determine. This is important because institutions are different from one another. The University of Chicago, which kind of prides itself on being the free speech bastion, might conclude that there should be no trigger warnings. In fact, it did. But that decision came in the form of a brash letter from the dean, rather than from a faculty body. You can imagine a lot of schools that are minority serving or have a lot of queer and trans students might come down on the issue differently. In many cases it was students requesting trigger warnings, and some schools are more likely to take that into account. But also it’s important to recognize that whether or not trigger warnings are a flashpoint now, that experiment has also changed how classes are taught. I often now think about how students might react to certain readings and give a heads up in advance. I think that’s good pedagogical practice. But other faculty are free to disagree.
Question: Going further into this definition, we might think about different contexts. One context where there is no tenure, either the person’s an adjunct and they don’t have a full-time position or someone is at a community college and doesn’t have a tenure system, or maybe someone’s a VAP and doesn’t have tenure. How is academic freedom recognized in those contexts? Would you say that it exists in a very real way in those contexts?
This is a really important issue, Matt. Especially since today 68 percent of faculty member are contingent.
First of all, I think it’s important to note that the AAUP does not recognize the difference between a tenure track position and a non-tenure track position. That’s an artifice that institutions have created to justify and legitimize short-term contracts. The definition of tenure serving seven consecutive years of being reviewed and assessed and continually renewed. For example, if one taught at the same institution for seven years, even if that was on a one year contract, that faculty member would be considered to have tenure. The school is effectively saying “We trust you to do your work, we trust you to teach our students, we trust you to do the research, and we recognize you in that way.”
Furthermore, the AAUP recognizes that all faculty should expect to enjoy academic freedom.
However, in practice, tenured faculty have to be actively terminated by their institution. Contingent faculty, in contract, face the threat of non-renewal. In other words, contingent faculty who criticize their administration, advance ideas the cause problems for the institution, or organize to form a union can simply not be extended a contract the following year.
In principle contingent faculty—especially those who have serve several years—should receive the same due process afforded to the termination of tenured faculty. However, in practice, as we know, the imbalance is real.
It’s not surprising therefore that we’ve seen a dramatic increase in contingent faculty unionization. Bargained contracts can include protections against nonrenewal. And the union can also make it politically costly to retaliate against faculty members.
Question: Thinking about competence as part of academic freedom, how much grace is given maybe to the fact that people are human and maybe in the classroom they may say a thing that’s incorrect? Or maybe even there’s incommensurate positions where a political scientist should be a critical theorist versus a value-free Weberian. The Weberian will attack the critical theorist for bringing in values to the analysis. How much grace and latitude is given to this notion of competence? What do we mean by competence in this context?
That’s really the crux of it. Joan Scott, the feminist theorist and amazing thinker on academic freedom, raises this issue in what she calls “academic freedom as an ethical practice.” Scott points to this tension precisely. On the one hand, we’re evaluated by the standards of our discipline. On the other hand, we all know that much of the best work is done pushing the discipline to move beyond itself. How to assess disciplinary competence while challenging the discipline itself? Scott comes down on something that is very similar to the term that you use: grace. Ideally faculty should recognize that we don’t all agree and that there are going to be significant differences. And that those differences are important. And there should be space for navigating them. The disciplinary sphere should actually be the place where different ideas are navigated intellectually, rather than relying on extra intellectual measures, like politicizing and retaliating against a faculty member.
The question of competency and how to assess it is an ongoing question but the real key to that discussion is that the evaluation of our peers should take place through the question of fitness. You can imagine a Marxist who is critical of the Straussian, hates everything about them and their ideas, but still recognizes that the Straussian shows up to work each day and provides a reasonable class, maybe on content that’s wildly opposite of what that faculty member would wish it was. But as long as it doesn’t demonstrate an unfitness, there’s not cause to fire that faculty member. Imagine a situation where a historian of modern Europe comes into a class and teaches that the Holocaust did not take place. That would demonstrate that they are unfit to serve because it demonstrates a violation of the core tenets of what it means to be a historian. A computer science professor who maintains a Holocaust denial website in their free time, but does not bring their material into their classroom, demonstrates their stupidity and unlikability, their racism and all other unadmirable attributes. However, it does not demonstrate an unfitness to serve as a computer science professor.
Question: If you’re teaching a class, how do you bring in academic freedom as a norm and try to socialize your students towards it?
At the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, we’ve actually developed some academic freedom syllabus language. Feel free to cut-and-paste it directly into your syllabus.
There’s a way of presenting academic freedom in ways that are very legalistic and very procedural, which cites the AAUP’s 1940s statement and reports. When we developed this language we instead opted to present academic freedom in a more pedagogical way. Talking about the classroom as imbedded within scholarly debates and therefore not a place to simply roll in with your talking points from Fox News. Or something you just saw on TikTok. Instead, it makes it clear that students are being asked to engage in an ongoing scholarly conversation on topics over which there can be wide ranges of disagreements. To really think about being clear that the classroom is a place of competency and where we’re training how to be competent participants in these conversations.
I’m really proud of the language that we came up with. I’ve included it in my syllabus and I discuss it during the first day of class to help set the tone.
Besides putting academic freedom on the syllabus, do you think it’s necessary to have readings or have it as a course topic in a political science class?
Yeah, absolutely. In addition to the syllabus language, we’ve also developed the academic freedom module. Like many, I was never trained in what academic freedom. Not as an undergraduate or graduate student. In fact, among faculty, I don’t know anybody who had academic freedom as part of their professional graduate training or faculty orientation. To address this, we developed a module that’s designed to be taught over a one and a half or two-hour period that could be dropped into any graduate school course, first-year faculty orientation. It could be used as a discussion group for faculty. I’ve used it as a basis for a presentation at a Faculty Senate. The module includes a reading, discussion questions, a lecture, and PowerPoint presentation. It could also be adjusted to an undergraduate curriculum. I think teaching academic freedom is more important now than ever before. So we’re trying to make it easy to do so!
Question: Thinking about the classroom, If you want to have robust academic freedom, you want to have different ideas and people with different levels of passion. How do you balance out the diversity of those ideas with maybe inclusiveness and making people feel welcome? Some people may be more abstracted from very controversial issues, and some people may be very deeply involved in highly controversial issues. What sorts of practices do you think we could look to be successful as political scientists in the classroom trying to maintain academic freedom?
It’s really hard, and I think that’s where the art of teaching comes in. As educators, we often have to handle situation on the fly. Oftentimes, in very difficult situations. Ideally there would be room to make mistakes.
Unfortunately right now, we are now under incredible scrutiny. As Ralph Wilson and I demonstrate in Free Speech and Koch Money Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (Pluto University Press, 2021), a robust monitoring and surveillance apparatus exists to take faculty speech and turn it into kind a viral sensation for political reasons.
This semester I’m teaching a class on race, class and world politics. I’ve decided that it’s important to teach about Palestine, and to have students think about where the violence in Gaza fits in to the broader conversations we are having. In teaching that class, I tell my students quite explicitly that in some schools and university systems that have adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, that teaching a book that describes the violence of 1948 as ethnic cleansing may violate school policy, state law, and even Trump’s executive order on anti-Semitism. I tried to make it clear that there is an effort to shut down certain kinds of ideas, and what is at stake.
Similarly, I teach a class on African anti-colonial theory and I’m oftentimes asked about “the other side.” What is the pro colonialism side? I just say that I don’t know of any good arguments justifying colonialism. There’s Bruce Gilley’s piece, but that’s garbage. Bad scholarship. I try to make it clear why I include certain topics and texts and not others – some are better than others, and we only have 13 weeks so tough decisions have to be made. I’m not going to spend a class period asking students to read discredited articles about why colonialism is good. It would be a disservice to my students.
The way you frame the question is really great. Some people are more abstracted or removed from experiences of marginalization, racism, homophobia, sexism. Personally I think its important to be attentive to that and to navigate that reality in ways that are as graceful and humane as possible. I think that that’s why the attack on Melissa McCoul at Texas A&M was so harrowing. She was teaching a class on contemporary children’s literature, which includes a lot of recent books on gender and gender nonconformity. In order to help her students understand what these books were about she offered a short overview of what non nonbinary means. A student filmed the lecture and said she found it objectionable. Professor McCoul did an amazing job explaining exactly why she was making the decisions that she did, which were in line with her discipline, and if the student found it objectionable for religious grounds they could leave. The recording captures grace in the classroom. The sting video, however, went viral and the governor of Texas called for Professor McCoul to be fired. Which Texas A&M capitulated in doing. That’s a real tragedy.
I’ve been doing this long enough to wake up in the middle of night and still think “God, I can’t believe I said that in that class. I can’t believe that I assigned that reading, or I can’t believe I said that thing off the hip.” Those moments still haunt me. The problem today, however, is that there’s a massive political infrastructure that exists to weaponize these moments, and that’s really scary.
Question: What advice would you give to faculty about taping and videoing in their classroom, as well as the possibility of doxing and the actuality of doxing and pulling these moments out of context?
We have a really great report on how to respond to Turning Points on campus. It includes a section policies around video recording, and some examples of really good policies. Again, recording laws vary state to state. But, as much as possible, it makes sense to have a clear policy that lays out both in a syllabus but also ideally at the institution level as well. It is really important to preserve the institutional ability to engage in classroom discussion in ways that preserve the sanctity and privacy of the classroom.
As far as resources go, we have an Academic Freedom First Aid Kit, which lays out tips for digital security and places to get legal support. We also provide some resources about dox defense. I’ve also done work supporting faculty facing targeted harassment. In those instances, it’s really important that that campus institutions have policies in place about how to respond. And if there is a faculty member that’s facing targeted harassment, its important that their colleagues reach out proactively to provide support. When Campus Reform or Fox News slanders a faculty for partisan gain it is common for administrators and even fellow colleagues to assume trust their right-wing attack machine rather than their colleague. In my years of working on targeted harassment with faculty, I found that in almost all cases the stories you hear in the right-wing media ecosystem are either outright lies or gross distortions of what took place. The actually story is often much more complicated and much more nuanced. My advice is to always trust our colleagues, and then proactively support them and each other.
Question: Do you have anything else you’d want to add at the end of this interview?
Yeah, I think it’s really important that all faculty become active in defending academic freedom on their own campus. If you’re not already, I would recommend becoming involved in your campus union or your AAUP chapter. Working in solidarity is really important.
If folks don’t have an AAUP chapter or don’t know if they have an AAUP chapter on their campus, they could check out the Academic Freedom Field Guide. That lays out all the things one needs to know about how to find your chapter, how to start a chapter, all of that. Or you could just reach out to me. I’m always more than willing to talk with folks about how to defend academic freedom on their campus and within their professional association. We’re all in this together.
Question: And you would even say in right to work states and at institutions that it feels like there’s not a lot of collective action going on that there’s still the possibility of faculty organizing and getting behind academic freedom?
Absolutely. Some of the strongest AAUP chapters have been in South Carolina, Florida, and Texas. As bad as things are in Florida and in Texas, they would be much worse without those unions and AAUP chapters organizing on the ground. Right now in Virginia, faculty are fighting for the right to collectively bargain. While Governor Spanberger has (disgracefully) vetoed that bill, the issue is more of a live issue than in a long time. And very much still winnable. The AAUP chapters in Virginia have played a critical role in this fight.
At George Mason University, the board was comprised of Heritage Foundation members, including the author of the chapter of Project 2025 on Education. This board called for the firing of the university president. It was the AAUP chapter that rallied to defend the president.
You don’t know when you are going to need a political organization to defend yourself and your colleagues. My experience with the AAUP started when we created a chapter at Trinity in 2017 in response to Trump’s election as a way to defend our undocumented students. A few months later, Campus Reform wrote about my colleague and there was a real concern he would be fired from his position. However, because we had an AAUP chapter we were in a better position to defend our colleague. These stories exist all across the country. There are victories fought and won every day. And the movement to defend academic freedom is growing stronger everyday. That being said, we need all hands on deck to protect our profession, our ability to do our work, and to protect each other.
