Resources You Can Use to Fight for Academic Freedom

CDAF is producing a series of Action Reports to help inform the battle to protect rights.

Even as someone involved with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, it can be hard to keep with with the volume of resources being developed by the CDAF fellows and various collaborators.

Among those resources are “Action Reports,” which - I’ll be honest - may seem a little dry on the surface, the kind of thing that organizations push out to make it seem like you’re doing something. But speaking as someone who can be skeptical of these outputs, I can testify that these documents are hugely useful and, as the title suggests, are designed to help people be better informed about what actions they can and should do (legally, practically, strategically) when they find themselves or their institutions are under attack.

Here are three recent Action Reports. You can click the titles to access the full text of each.

Navigating Post-Tenure Review Through Shared Governance and Collective Bargaining: Lessons from Florida State University (FSU)¹

“Post-tenure review” legislation is a stalking horse for ending tenure entirely by creating additional burdens on faculty that create mechanisms which allow for punitive actions against faculty which have nothing to do with the quality of the teaching or research.

Florida’s legislature has been busy crafting legislation that removes institutional and individual autonomy and instead substitutes control by government fiat. The above action report is - for good reason - more judicious in its discussion of these issues, but the intent seems clear to me.

Here’s what’s important about this Action Report: When your state legislature comes for your institution, this is a blueprint that fills in missing knowledge and provides concrete, actionable things to do in order to resist this kind of attack on academic freedom.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni: A Little-Known Driver of the Attacks on Academic Freedom and Shared Governance²

The American Council for Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) is one of those innocuous-sounding names that seems like it must be engaging in staid and traditional work. Maybe they get together for a nice golf weekend at Hilton Head once a year to play 36 holes and produce a few panels emphasizing the importance of the careful stewardship of higher education institutions.

For all I know, they do get together for golf weekends, but as CDAF fellow, Nancy MacLean shows in this Action Report, ACTA is a hard right project that is designed to constrain the freedom of individuals and autonomy of institutions in order to further their overt ideological agenda.

ACTA has its hands in all kinds of activities that make institutions less free and less responsive to institutional stakeholders like students, faculty, and staff while putting a thumb (or something much heavier than a thumb) on the scale in the interests of corporations and right-wing ideologues. Often, these activities are happening through opaque processes, and you may not know that ACTA is at work on your campus. This Action Report helps identify when these things are happening and what to do to resist these incursions on institutional autonomy and freedom.

Understanding the Law and Policies for Grant Terminations for the National Science Foundation³

The speed and seeming finality with which the Trump Administration has “cancelled” federal funding through entities like the National Science Foundation is meant to signal that it has the capacity to do so on its absolute authority.

But as we’ve seen in other actions, this is a case where there are established policies, laws, and procedures that must be followed, and grant recipients may have rights and recourse that they can pursue to protect their rights and their funding.

This Action Report answers key questions around what to do if a grant is suspended or terminated without notice and what steps may be taken in response.

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One of the realities I’m personally waking up to in light of the events of the last several months is that protecting academic freedom as an important part of the larger project of representative democracy is likely to come in the form of individual battles where everyone takes some small action that makes larger progress possible.

Beating back an attempt to erode rights on one campus does not solve the problem for all campuses. Regaining access to the funds for one grant does not restore everyone’s funding. But these fights can and do increase the odds of winning the next fight.

The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. 

1. Authors: Jennifer Proffitt, Theodore Clevenger Professor in Communication, Florida State University; Tim Cain, Professor of Higher Education, University of Georgia, Fellow at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (AAUP); Risa Lieberwitz, Professor of Labor and Employment Law, Cornell University; Isaac Kamola (editor), Director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (AAUP)

2. Author: Nancy MacLean, Fellow at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (AAUP)

3. Editors: Ethan Prall, Law and Environment Scholar, University of Miami and Isaac Kamola, Director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (AAUP)