There is a playbook for dismantling academic freedom that has played out more thoroughly outside the United States and which may help us better understand the threats inside the US today.
Earlier, this newsletter featured a Q&A with CDAF fellow Eve Darian-Smith, author of Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters, a new book that, in part, explores the web of activities that make up this attack.
The Anti-Democratic Attack on Higher Education
As one of the small number of non-academics among the fellows of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, I’m continually impressed with how much my fellow fellows from academia know, and how deeply they’ve thought about issues in their areas of expertise.
In this episode of the Academic Freedom on the Line podcast, Eve Darian-Smith is joined by Audrey Truschke and Fatima El-Tayeb, along with podcast host Vineeta Singh, to unpack the full context of these transnational assaults on academic freedom.
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 in 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 was just released in 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 AAUP’s 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:
Legal and Academic Resources for Academic Freedom and On-Campus Protests - Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Policing Higher Education by Eve Darian-Smith
Un/German by Fatima El-Tayeb Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer
India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent by Audrey Truschke
Further reading:
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