My letter to university administrators, in the face of Trumpist attacks on academic freedom — considering what academic freedom derives from, and why institutions have a broader responsibility to defend academic “freedom to” as well as academic “freedom from”
(Letter written to a couple vice-provosts and deans of my acquaintance)
Dear
I write to you together, as the only friends I have at the decanal and provostal level, and thus involved in how universities respond to the current threats against us.
My reason for writing is summed up in this piece from The Crimson. US Universities need to respond to the current attacks strongly and, most important, collectively. Masha Gessen said the same thing in a New York Times conversation the other day: “The only thing that would work against Trump is a united front of higher education leaders who would both push back on him and articulate some new ideas about why their institutions are essential for our society’s future.”
I know you and your university administrations are facing pressures to keep your head down and hold your breath while others get attacked. I know this from my own experience as part of a group of scholars singled out and visa-banned by the PRC over two decades ago. At the time, we in the “Xinjiang Thirteen” tried in vain to get our institutions, which included Georgetown, MIT, Dartmouth, University of Kansas, Mt. Holyoke, Miami University of Ohio and others, to get together and respond collectively to the attacks on academic freedom from the People’s Republic of China. This proved impossible. Many institutions were worried that to do so would jeopardize their burgeoning initiatives with the PRC. As a result, the impediments to academic exchange stood. One colleague left the field; another was denied tenure; another lost a research fellowship. In my own case, I was not fired, and could carry on writing albeit on new topics, but I did feel thrown under the bus by both the PRC and Georgetown.
The bus careening wildly towards us now is bigger, faster and more dangerous. My experience last time led me to think about what academic freedom is. I wrote a paper arguing that it derives not from the First Amendment, or particular decisions of the US supreme court, or even the AAUP guidelines. Ultimately, academic freedom is rooted in the fact that in colleges, universities and academic-adjacent institutions like university presses, our work and professional advancement, from the time we first go to college through publishing books as senior scholars, is subject to expert peer review. That is the system we use in the modern world to ensure the quality of knowledge production. Any outside interference in curriculum, censoring of research topics, or personal attacks on scholars, strikes at the heart of that system, undermining its quality and ability to differentiate legitimate knowledge from the type of “research” you can find anywhere in social media or on the internet. Peer review, and thus academic freedom, makes the difference between vaccines and snake oil — in any field.
That experience also led me to conclude that academic institutions’ — and administrators’ — responsibility to academic freedom goes beyond just refraining from interfering in teaching and research on campus. To preserve academic freedom, it is also incumbent upon institutions, which are by definition more powerful than individual students and faculty, to actively defend their scholars from outside attacks as best they can. This means institutions must provide legal, financial, logistical, medical and most of all political support to scholars under assault. It means helping to find work-arounds if outside forces inhibit a scholar’s research or teaching.
Let me give you an example. A Uyghur-American student at a state university several years ago was among several students who won a scholarship through the campus Confucius Institute to study Chinese at a university in the PRC for a semester. Then, her visa alone among her classmates was denied, clearly because of her Uyghur family background. Her university’s initial response was simply to shrug and say there was nothing it could do. Having planned to be in China, she had not signed up for courses at her college here, nor was her local financial aid available, so she would have had to sit out the semester. After she contacted us, along with a few others I wrote on her behalf to the university president, and in the end convinced him that the right thing to do was to finance her study for a semester in Taiwan — which the university did. That work-around was an example of an institution actively and creatively supporting a scholar under outside attack, and thus fulfilling its responsibility to academic freedom even though they could not reasonably fight the PRC.
Timothy Snyder’s recent book On Freedom suggests a concise way to describe the full scope of academic freedom: the responsibility is not just to maintain “freedom from” (e.g. freedom from a dean telling me not to teach a certain controversial book). There is a broader institutional responsibility to do one’s best to provide “freedom to”: freedom to pursue the knowledge, even when some outside force is censoring it, undermining safe conditions or threatening the scholar trying to do produce or teach it.
Right now, we face unprecedented threats to both modes of academic freedom, both from and to. Universities must remember this responsibility to protect and support academic freedom of all their scholars as best they can. Right now, university administrations are far from doing the best they can — as far as I can tell, they are barely doing anything (though I assume they are quietly looking out for their own intramural interests without sticking their heads above the parapet).
What would doing our best in the current shitstorm mean? First and foremost, as Masha Gessen said, it means standing together, not alone where you can be picked off one by one. Presidents, provosts, deans and others steering the ships of scholarship should be talking not just intramurally, but pan-academically across the country, to optimize a common response and implement it with conviction, courage and panache. For starters, it would be great to see a couple dozen university presidents standing together before the cameras and denouncing the illegality and ill-advisability of cuts to federal grants, blacklists of supposedly antisemitic campuses, and especially the illegal measures being taken and threatened against holders of student visas and green-card scholars. Our university presidents need to collectively shout “No!” with the same tone and moral clarity displayed by Georgetown Law School’s dean William Treanor, when he responded to the outrageous and unconstitutional demands of the Interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia to censor the Law School’s curriculum in conformance with the racist whims of the Trump administration.
Here are a few other things US universities might do together:
· Issue an unequivocal call for the release and end to persecution of US permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil. You may not wish to speak up on this because of the Israeli third-rail in US politics, but having come for the Palestinians, they are already coming for the Chinese: a bill to ban all PRC students has been introduced to the House, ostensibly to prevent them (including high school students) from spying. Deporting or banning scholars on the basis of supposed speech crimes or vague racially-tinged insinuations, with no evidence, should be met with instant, universal and clamorous opposition from our university leaders.
· Announce a joint legal defense fund for scholars under attack, funded by all universities in the coalition according to their ability. Pool legal expertise from your several law schools and provide pro bono help where necessary.
· Define and announce collective procedures for how universities will handle incursions by DHS, ICE and other law enforcement: E.g. No police may come on campus without first liaising with campus security and university administration. No immigration-related searches or other activity without a proper judicial warrant signed by a judge, submitted to university general counsel in advance. Get your lawyers together and come up with these rules, promulgate them and defend them collectively. Fight violations in court. Private universities are private property: Defend them as such from illegal police entry.
· Regularly and consistently call out the lies and bullshit directed against universities. Great damage has been done by letting stand unsubstantiated claims of ubiquitous campus anti-semitism. Great damage has been done by quietly acquiescing to hallucinatory mis-characterizations about “DEI” on campus, from politicians and pundits on the right and left (all stemming not from empirical evidence, but from a deliberate campaign cooked up by Chris Ruffo, Georgetown SFS ‘06). We know that reality in our universities is nothing like those bizarre imaginings. When the government calls on a university to “eliminate DEI,” you should first ask, “what exactly do you mean by DEI? Do you mean the staff and programs we have created to ensure compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX, and other Equal Employment Opportunity laws that remain on the books?” And, otherwise, widely publicize any unconstitutional demands, refuse them, and actually make the case that area studies, legal studies, gender studies, foreign languages, and the history of all Americans (not just those of European descent) are all valid and necessary to a good education. Your faculty are available to help you make that point.
· There are fewer than ten trans athletes among the over 500,000 athletes competing in NCAA sports nationally. If none of them are on your campus, maybe you don’t need to write rules discriminating against them? And for those ten, here is a good opportunity to try to figure out individualized solutions and creative workarounds, rather than demonize and discriminate against an entire class of people.
· Publish joint op-eds by groups of university presidents. It would be great to hear something from them other than the current deathly silence. But more than that, start messaging, and messaging better, in other ways. Get snappy, sassy (and probably younger) comms people to present the case for academic freedom on social media. Address false accusations of elitism, the persistent rumor that college education is worthless, or that universities sneer at common folks (when in fact we are striving to reach out, recruit and offer free tuition to first generation and low-income students, veterans and other people less likely to go to college, as part of diversification efforts). Address misunderstandings about campus protest. Stop letting bad faith political actors and pundits falsely describe and define what we do. Again, if you do this collectively, say as an alt-uni account, the trolls will have no one in particular to flame, and your donors can’t be mobilized against you. But you can get a sharp message out when you need to.
In all of these matters, state institutions have less flexibility than private institutions, and rich private institutions enjoy the most power. It is thus important that elite schools hold the line and support other colleges and universities with less latitude to do so.
University administrators are highly incentivized to be risk-averse, and now more than ever, that really shows. But recent history tells us unmistakably that slavish acquiescence to illegal and unreasonable demands from government and other outside actors gets you not even a short-term reprieve. They just come back again a month or a week later with more censorious demands, more invasions of our campus, more extortionate threats. They will squeeze as much as they can from you by threatening to take away $400 million, and when you cave, they come right back to threaten to take it away again.
The brute has invaded the grove. He is trampling the vineyards, spit-roasting our gentle creatures, despoiling our fruits. He has thrust daggers between our ribs. The daggers may not yet have pierced our heart, and you might think you can hide in a shady corner of the garden and hope he just goes away. But you will bleed out before he leaves, because he is having too much fun, and he is likely to stab you again just for the hell of it. The only feasible course is to stand up and actively protect our scholarly freedoms, both from and to. All the colleges and universities must pull out those daggers, stand together as one, and with a thunderous cry of defiance, turn them against the assailant.
If I may milk this metaphor a bit more: you seem to feel that the “heart” now feeling the prick of those daggers is your endowment, your donations, your federal funding. But that is wrong. Those threats, as the Chinese say, are simply threats to the limbs, not to the trunk. The heart that you need to protect above all is your scholars and their academic freedom from, and freedom to. We will gladly freeze hiring, let in fewer Ph.D. students, teach more with fewer TAs, unplug the xerox machine, even let you suspend payments into our 401-k’s — all of that, as we did during the pandemic — if it is in aid of our core enterprise of honest knowledge production and dissemination. But we can and will do that willingly only if our administrations do their job, which is to do their best to defend scholars and scholarship.
Last time, you fought back against COVID as best you could and faculty and students all pitched in. This time, facing a different kind of force majeure, our administrations seem to cower, kowtow and curry favor while our colleagues are silenced, censored, and Shanghaied by thugs from campus to distant prisons. Why should we happily tighten our belts to protect the endowment if the top brass are sacrificing academic freedom, the beating heart of what we do, to satisfy corrupt authoritarians, presumptuous donors, corporate efficiency experts and all the other ignorant and bad faith bullies who won’t ever be satisfied anyway?
Please: you manage professors for a living — a task notoriously like herding cats. If you can do that, it shouldn’t be impossible to gather a bunch of university leaders. Organize. Stratigize. Put all our formidable minds together. Make noise. And really do your best, collectively, to protect academic freedom. If ever there was a “hang together or hang separately” moment, it is now.
Thanks,
Jim
17 March, 2025
