#academic-freedom

#academic-freedom

In 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17 into law, banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions across the state. In the years since, the University of Texas at Austin has been steadily remaking itself in the image demanded by conservative legislators across town.

It's been a hard year for higher education. He argued that the sector has been insulted, demeaned and assaulted, which has "disrupted our work" and "threatened our ability to do what we do for students, for communities and for America."

Academic freedom includes the right to teach and research "controversial or unpopular ideas related to the discipline or subject matter," but also says "academic freedom is not absolute." The move came despite opposition from the American Association of University Professors, which wrote the seminal 1940 definition of the concept.

While faculty at the state's public research universities-Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma-will keep their tenure, new teaching staff at the 23 affected colleges will shift to renewable contracts tied to "teaching effectiveness, student completion, job placement, and economic alignment."

In a letter addressed to Purdue leadership, which was publicized Friday and shared exclusively with the Guardian, dozens of signatories argue that the university soft banning students based on their nationality erodes higher education's core values of meritocracy, equality and academic freedom. They called on Purdue to clarify any instructions it has given graduate admissions committees and to restore offers to scores of international students they say the university rescinded last year.

Over the past several years, Texas has moved from griping about "woke campuses" to fundamentally restructuring the governance, curriculum, and tenure protections of its public universities. The cumulative effect is not reform. It's consolidation of power. And the target is the traditional independence of higher education. TL:DR - send your kids to Texas public universities, and it's like having the Texas legislature teach your kids.

I assume that it's intended to provide ammunition to go after disfavored faculty and/or to instill such a chill on campus that nobody would dare to say anything provocative in the first place. Whether those motivations are locally held or are meant to keep the university below the radar of certain culture warriors, I don't know. The effects are the same either way, and they're devastating to the mission of a university.

When I saw the Association of American Universities' rejection of the White House's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," I knew that the institutions invited to join the agreement were likely to reject it, too. At a time when organizational communication seems to be the province of PR firms, it is still true that a missive from a group representing some of our country's most prestigious research institutions carries substantial weight in U.S. higher education.

In a November email to faculty, Houston president Renu Khator wrote that the university's responsibility is to "give [students] the ability to form their own opinions, not to force a particular one on them. Our guiding principle is to teach them, not to indoctrinate them." The recent memo, sent by college dean Daniel O'Connor, asks faculty to "document compliance" with Khator's note.

We argue that "faculty members could hold strong viewpoints and yet act in accordance with the highest professional standards." We state emphatically that "it is not possible to make faculty experts refrain from articulating any political viewpoint" while adding that "it is possible to require that they limit the viewpoints expressed in classes to those that are academically justifiable and germane, and to create a space in class where other defensible positions can be expressed."

intensive and relentless public relations campaign

They say the state's process for developing the textbook and new course framework was opaque, rushed and designed to pressure universities into adopting censored learning materials without a legal directive to do so. Furthermore, the textbook-a heavily edited version of an open-source sociology textbook titled Introduction to Sociology 3e-now makes only cursory mentions of important sociological concepts regarding race, gender, sexuality and other topics that have drawn Republican ire.

When members of the American Historical Association (AHA) gathered in Chicago for their annual conference from January 8-11, 2026, many hoped the professional society would condemn the undermining of education and historical research in the United States and abroad. While the majority of members who attended the conference's business meeting on January 10 voted in favor of two resolutions denouncing the destruction of education infrastructure in Gaza and attacks on core principles of education in the United States, respectively, the wins were short-lived.

Last year was a record-setting one for education censorship; more than half of U.S college and university students now study in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how college campuses can operate, according to a new report from PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for campus free speech and press freedom.

From her student years at Radcliffe College where she volunteered with the Black Panthers to provide sickle cell disease screening in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, to her work on HIV prevention when she was on the faculty of the University of Zimbabwe, to her pioneering role on AIDS care in Africa as the Rockefeller Foundation's point person on health equity, to her tenure as the commissioner of health for both New York City and New York State,

Texas A&M University will not reinstate Melissa McCoul, the instructor fired in September after a video showing a student confronting her over a gender identity lesson went viral, New York Times reported.

The university told computer science lecturer Peyrin Kao earlier this month it was placing him on six months of unpaid leave, citing an optional post-class session in which he talked about the relationship between tech companies and the Israeli military ending with Free Palestine and a separate incident in which he said during class that he was on hunger strike for a cause he believed in.

Hettinger's mounting discomfort with US higher education led her last spring to Class Action, a two-year-old grassroots network of students and recent graduates promoting a critique of elite institutions' contributions to an increasingly divided American society. At times, the group's criticism echoes the one exploited by Trump in his campaign to reshape US higher education to fit his ideological agenda.

Last Tuesday afternoon, Dean Andrea Baccarelli at the Harvard School of Public Health sent out a brief message announcing that one of the country's most experienced and accomplished public health leaders, Dr Mary T Bassett, would step down as director of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. The email struck a polite, bureaucratic tone, thanking her for her service and offering an upbeat rationale for a new focus on children's health.

"The article discussed peers using teasing as a way to enforce gender norms. I do not necessarily see this as a problem. God made male and female and made us differently from each other on purpose and for a purpose. God is very intentional with what He makes, and I believe trying to change that would only do more harm," Fulnecky wrote. "Overall, reading articles such as this one encourage [ sic] me to one day raise my children knowing that they have a Heavenly Father who loves them and cherishes them deeply and that having their identity firmly rooted in who He is will give them the satisfaction and acceptance that the world can never provide for them."