Sustained Dialogue Institute

Concept Glossary

An A–Z reference of 49 interconnected concepts in U.S. higher education.

Developed August 2026. Questions or updates: info@sustaineddialogue.org

Academic Freedom

Academic freedom is defined in a 1997 UNESCO Conference Recommendation as a higher education scholar’s “right, without constriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom of teaching and discussion, freedom in carrying out research and disseminating and publishing the results thereof, freedom to express freely their opinion about the institution or system in which they work, freedom from institutional censorship and freedom to participate in professional or representative academic bodies” (UNESCO, 1997, para. 27). The right covers choosing research questions and following evidence where it leads. It covers publishing unwelcome findings and teaching a discipline as the discipline has developed it. It also covers professional judgment over curriculum and assessment, and public speech within the scholar’s expertise. See freedom to teach and learn.

Thus, it is a global right for a scholar to teach, research, and speak in their area of expertise without coercion from those who control their employment or their work. It is, nonetheless, under threat in the US according to recent reports. Currently, academic freedom in the United States is declining after a long history of case-law related legal protection (Kinzelbach et al., 2026). State legislatures have passed laws that restrict what faculty may teach. Congress and federal agencies have attached conditions to appropriations and suspended research funding as leverage over what is studied. Watchlists compiled by advocacy groups and public-records requests expose individual faculty to targeting and doxing for the content of their work. See watchlists. See doxing.

In a national survey of faculty attitudes and perceptions, 35% of respondents reported having less freedom to teach without interference, and 53% said they were more worried about becoming targets of online harassment than they were six or seven years earlier (American Association of Colleges and Universities [AAC&U], American Association of University Professors [AAUP], & NORC at the University of Chicago, 2024).

Why is this right so important? Individual scholars exercise their work freely for a public purpose: the search for truth. In a healthy educational system, the public benefits from trustworthy knowledge because no single actor, not even a university that employs faculty, should be suppressing or interfering with it. See institutional autonomy.

Academic freedom is not written word-for-word in the United States Constitution. That fact is often used to argue it has no real legal protection, but the argument misunderstands how U.S. law works. The Constitution is written in broad terms, and much of what it protects has been worked out by the Supreme Court interpreting it, case by case. When the Court interprets the Constitution to protect something, that decision is binding law: government officials and lower courts must follow it, the same as if the words were in the text. Lawyers call these decisions precedent.

Academic freedom is protected this way. Over roughly a century, courts have grounded it primarily in the First and Fourteenth Amendments, alongside state constitutions and contract law. The Fourteenth Amendment is what makes the First Amendment apply to state governments, which includes public universities. In Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), the Supreme Court described the four essential freedoms of a university: to decide on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it is taught, and who may be admitted. Later decisions treated academic freedom as a concern of the First Amendment. See free speech.

So when someone says academic freedom is not constitutional because it is not named in the document, the accurate reply is that it is not absent from the law: the Supreme Court has recognized it under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and those decisions are binding. How far that protection reaches is debated, and it is weakest for faculty at private universities and those off the tenure track. But “it isn’t in the Constitution” is not the end of the argument. It is the start of one.

Academic freedom is related to, but not the same as, the individual right to free speech. The First Amendment restrains the government, not private employers. At a public university, which is part of state government, that means officials cannot freely punish protected faculty speech, though courts weigh it against the university’s interests as an employer. See free speech. At a private university the First Amendment does not reach the employment relationship at all. Because these constitutional protections are uneven, the day-to-day protections most faculty rely on come from three further sources:

a widely used framework from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which is not enforceable by law
handbook and contract language, which binds only where courts read it as an employment agreement
collective bargaining agreements, where they exist

The AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure is widely adopted as institutional language but is not enforceable as law. For non-tenured faculty on annual contracts, and those in state institutions with restrictive policies banning offices or concepts, this right is so thin as to be unreliable. This is why it is measured as an indicator by organizations like V-Dem, which track the health of a democracy.

What academic freedom is for is contested. Is it similar to free speech, or is it something like a union’s stated goal? The answer determines which defense will hold when laws restrict the right.

Scott (2019) argued for defending academic freedom as a professional right that protects the application of disciplinary expertise. For example, a historian’s freedom to teach the history of chattel slavery rests on her training, on peer-reviewed scholarship, and on the methods of her field. It does not rest on her right as a citizen to hold opinions. Scott (2019) argued that campus speech advocates increasingly collapse academic freedom into free speech, and that the collapse gives up the strongest legal defense. A citizen’s right to opinion is limited. A discipline’s authority to determine competent practice is stronger as a claim, and that authority is under attack.

Reichman (2021) reached a mostly aligned position, tracing the concept’s history from a German tradition, Lehrfreiheit, through the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration and the 1940 Statement, to subsequent erosion after 2010. He argued that the concept depends on professional expertise, and that the 1940 Statement is a historical baseline rather than an enforceable standard. Thus, per Reichman (2021), folding academic freedom into campus free speech debates has made defending it harder.

Meyerhoff (2019) criticized the concept as excluding too many to be intended toward truth for public benefit. Meyerhoff argued that a defense that excludes students, non-tenured faculty, or curious minds actually protects a guild interest, and does not protect the conditions for inquiry. See freedom to teach and learn.

Critics on the right call the concept a convenient cover for ideological capture of faculty hiring and curriculum. See viewpoint diversity.

Chemerinsky and Gillman (2026, 2017) defended a position closer to the campus free speech tradition. They argued that academic freedom and free speech rest on overlapping foundations, and that universities should adopt broad speech protections rather than separate professional scholars and citizens as distinct.

Soucek (2026) pushes against this conclusion. He argues that universities as institutions have legitimate reasons to speak, and that the rhetoric of neutrality often obscures what is at stake. See institutional neutrality.

Regardless of the larger legal arguments and protections, there is a way to locally bolster the case for academic freedom. Academic freedom is strongest whenever the academic work in question is defensible by others in an academic’s area of disciplinary expertise. A teaching choice any competent peer could defend is a stronger claim than one grounded in personal conviction. Research findings that follow from sound methods are stronger than those that do not. Thus, scholars can avoid threats by adhering to scholarly areas and expected standards from others in their field, while never targeting populations in their classrooms. See excellent teaching.

Sources
American Association of Colleges and Universities, American Association of University Professors, & NORC at the University of Chicago. (2024). Academic freedom and civil discourse in higher education: A national study of faculty attitudes and perceptions. https://www.aacu.org/research/academic-freedom-and-civil-discourse-in-higher-education-a-national-study-of-faculty-attitudes-and-perceptions
Chemerinsky, E., & Gillman, H. (2017). Free speech on campus. Yale University Press.
Chemerinsky, E., & Gillman, H. (2026). Campus speech and academic freedom: A guide for difficult times. Yale University Press.
Kinzelbach, K., Lindberg, S. I., Lott, L., & Panaro, A. V. (2026). Academic Freedom Index – 2026 update. FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and V-Dem Institute. https://doi.org/10.25593/open-fau-2865
Meyerhoff, E. (2019). Beyond education: Radical studying for another world. University of Minnesota Press.
Reichman, H. (2021). Understanding academic freedom. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Scott, J. W. (2019). Knowledge, power, and academic freedom. Columbia University Press.
Soucek, B. (2026). The opinionated university: Academic freedom, diversity, and the myth of neutrality in American higher education. University of Chicago Press.
Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/354/234/
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (1997). Recommendation concerning the status of higher-education teaching personnel. Adopted by the General Conference at its 29th session, Paris, 11 November 1997. https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-concerning-status-higher-education-teaching-personnel

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Accessibility

As of 2026, institutions are dismantling their DEI infrastructure, some under statute and some in anticipation of one. On campuses where disability services share offices, staff, and budget lines with that infrastructure, dismantling it can disrupt those services too, even though no law names them. See anti-DEI legislation. See institutional over-compliance. There is one requirement no state statute can remove: the federal one. The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973) require accommodation (Madaus, 2011), which makes accessibility the rare equity commitment with enforceable federal architecture behind it.

The word accessibility includes two separate practices. The first is accommodation, in which the institution adjusts courses and facilities for a student’s individually documented disability, and the student must document, request, and often re-request each adjustment (Madaus, 2011). The second practice is universal design, meaning that the course should be built so that access requires no individual request. Meyer, Rose, and Gordon (2014) published the universal design for learning framework, in which courses are designed from the start with multiple means of engagement, representation, and action, so that access is a feature of the course rather than an exception processed one student at a time.

Accommodation creates a burden on each student to ask, and universal design does not. A student hesitant to be visible is a student less likely to file the paperwork that accommodation requires. See sense of belonging.

When designing a course or program, build the access in rather than waiting for the requests.

Sources
Madaus, J. W. (2011). The history of disability services in higher education. New Directions for Higher Education, 2011(154), 5–15.
Meyer, A., Rose, D. H., & Gordon, D. (2014). Universal design for learning: Theory and practice. CAST Professional Publishing.

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Affective Polarization

It’s become common to avoid certain classroom topics. The reason is often not the topics themselves. What’s behind it? Recent research in the U.S. is pointing to a phenomenon greater than simple disagreement or distrust.

Affective polarization is dislike, hostility, and distrust of those who identify with other political parties or beliefs. For example, two faculty members can agree on most policy questions and still refuse to work together, because each reads the other’s party as a verdict on character.

Iyengar and Westwood (2015) measured this hostility. In the study, participants discriminated against members of opposing political parties in hiring. For example, participants picked candidates who shared their party even when an opposing applicant had stronger credentials. Notably, the discrimination by party exceeded discrimination by race within the same experimental designs. Political party, these researchers argued, had become a social identity that people act on, not a summary of policy views.

Mason (2018) explained why the hostility intensified through a mechanism of social sorting. Partisan identity increasingly aligns with racial, religious, and ideological identities. Thus, a political disagreement activates several identities at once. For example, a dispute over immigration policy can feel like a challenge to a person’s religion, race, and ideology simultaneously, because those identities bundle with political affiliation. Mason (2018) also found that anger, bias, and political activism rise in groups where these identities align.

Sunstein (2002) identified a group-level mechanism: deliberation among like-minded political parties reliably moves a group toward a more extreme version of its starting tendency. Sunstein (2002) identified two drivers. Members of such a group hear a limited pool of arguments, mostly on one side. In-group members also compare themselves with one another and shift positions to keep their standing. For example, a department, a dormitory, or a curated social media feed can each become a like-minded group.

Why does the difference between disliking positions and disliking people matter for higher education? Because initiatives often focus on one-off topics, policies, or problems, rather than correcting the identity-based perceptions and stereotypes that drive the hostility. Thomas and Brower (2018) wrote that a campus’s political climate can be measured and improved. Within such a climate, affective polarization is the component that one-off, topical remedies miss. A syllabus that balances readings addresses policy disagreement, but it does not reach students who have concluded that classmates across party lines are bad people. Iyengar and Westwood’s (2015) findings suggest that students and faculty who don’t speak up aren’t scared of thoughtful debate, but instead fear semi-permanent social classification. See chilled climate for learning.

Scholars, professionals, and practitioners are not in consensus about how to manage this on campus, but a large-scale test of interventions offers some direction. Voelkel et al. (2024) reported results from the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, a US megastudy testing 25 interventions against partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes in a national sample of over 32,000 people. Nearly every intervention reduced animosity, and the strongest effects came from correcting misperceptions and from showing people sympathetic examples of the other side. A short video of Utah’s 2020 gubernatorial candidates, from both parties, jointly pledging to honor the election’s vote count reduced support for partisan violence. A video correcting exaggerated beliefs about divides between Democrats and Republicans was found to reduce both animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. The interventions that worked shared a pattern: they gave people direct, corrective information about the other side, rather than asking them to reason through a policy position. This lines up with Iyengar and Westwood’s (2015) point that party functions as identity, not argument, since it suggests animosity responds to identity-level correction rather than issue-level debate.

Three qualifications are worth noting. First, Gurin et al. (2013) found from intergroup dialogue research that structured, sustained interaction across group lines reduced hostility. Campus dialogue programs draw on that research. See dialogue in practice.

Second, some scholars caution that mismanaged intergroup contact can backfire based on Sunstein’s (2002) finding. If deliberation among like-minded people breeds extremity, then simply convening people is not neutral. Contact that is competitive, unequal, or anonymous can worsen hostility rather than reduce it.

Finally, a third view treats campus remedies as marginal. Mason (2018) documented the drivers of sorting at the national level: parties sorted by identity, identities stacked on one another, and media that profit from outrage. Scholars taking this position warn against grading a campus on a variable it barely moves. The three positions are not exclusive. Also, the empirical literature on which interventions durably reduce affective polarization is young. For anyone designing or judging a campus program, the open question is empirical: which structures durably reduce distrust of people, rather than only softening disagreement over positions.

Sources
Gurin, P., Nagda, B. A., & Zúñiga, X. (2013). Dialogue across difference: Practice, theory, and research on intergroup dialogue. Russell Sage Foundation.
Iyengar, S., & Westwood, S. J. (2015). Fear and loathing across party lines: New evidence on group polarization. American Journal of Political Science, 59(3), 690–707.
Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil agreement: How politics became our identity. University of Chicago Press.
Sunstein, C. R. (2002). The law of group polarization. Journal of Political Philosophy, 10(2), 175–195.
Thomas, N., & Brower, M. (2018). Conceptualizing and assessing campus climates for political learning and engagement in democracy. Journal of College and Character, 19(4), 247–263.
Voelkel, J. G., Stagnaro, M. N., Chu, J. Y., et al. (2024). Megastudy testing 25 treatments to reduce antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity. Science, 386(6719), eadh4764.

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Anti-DEI Legislation

Anti-DEI legislation is now in force in states across the country, and since 2025 the federal government has extended similar restrictions to universities nationwide. Anti-DEI legislation is a family of state and federal measures restricting diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) work in higher education. The targets include programs, offices, hiring practices, trainings, and statements. A law clinic at the University of California, Irvine counted at least 20 state bills targeting higher education since 2021 (UC Irvine International Justice Clinic, 2026). See state legislative restrictions. Seven of those passed in 2025. The anti-DEI measures fall into several categories:

admissions restrictions;
spending and structural restrictions, which prohibit DEI offices or bar public funds from DEI programs;
hiring and training restrictions, which ban mandatory diversity trainings or diversity statements in hiring;
curricular restrictions, which limit what instructors can teach.

For example, in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions under the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI. The decision addressed admissions only. Yet after the ruling, many universities also cut hiring, scholarship, and programming efforts.

Texas Senate Bill 17 (2023) prohibits DEI offices at public universities. Florida Senate Bill 266 (2023) bars state and federal funds from being spent on DEI programs. The Florida statute also moves curricular authority to state university boards. Under these laws, universities have closed DEI offices and eliminated staff positions. But some universities have also cut programs the statutes never named. See institutional over-compliance.

Since January 2025, the federal government has joined the states. Federal agencies have terminated more than 5,000 research grants worth over $2 billion (UC Irvine International Justice Clinic, 2026). The cuts included grants that funded STEM pipelines for underrepresented students. In 2025, the White House also sent a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” to nine universities, offering preferential funding in exchange for policy changes. As of January 2026, none of the nine had signed (UC Irvine International Justice Clinic, 2026).

Where did the state statutes come from? Wilson and Kamola (2021) traced a two-decade campaign behind them. They showed that donor-funded think tanks produced model legislation and media messaging years before 2023. Thus, when state legislatures acted, drafted bills and talking points were already on hand. Al-Gharbi (2024) offered a different explanation. He argued that legislators acted because DEI offices had expanded without evidence that they reduced inequality. See inclusive excellence. He also argued that mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring tested ideological agreement rather than teaching or research quality. Al-Gharbi (2024) writes that legislators forced changes universities had declined to make on their own. Ahmed (2012) researched how institutions actually implemented their diversity commitments. Drawing on interviews with diversity practitioners, she documented that universities often treated a diversity policy or a new appointment as proof of change in itself, so the stated commitment could substitute for altering the structures it named. However, in response to the Supreme Court, it’s notable that Soucek (2026) argued that universities, not courts, dismantled those programs. On Soucek’s (2026) reading, administrators conceded more than the case demanded because they chose to minimize legal risk. See institutional over-compliance.

Scholars have only begun measuring these laws’ effects. Patton (2024) wrote that restrictive bills affect the study of inequality itself. Pedota, Garces, Epstein, Ngaosi, and Khalayleh (2025) interviewed 32 faculty members at two public universities facing proposed anti-DEI bills. Many of those faculty reported navigating the threats with little institutional protection. A researcher whose findings could be read as promoting a restricted concept now works under uncertainty. See chilling effect.

Scholars disagree over whether Students for Fair Admissions requires what universities cut. They disagree over whether the eliminated programs reduced inequality. They disagree over whether the legislation corrects an overreach or halts a correction still in progress.

For a reader concerned about their institution, the practical question is which category a given statute falls into: spending, hiring, or curricular restriction. That category determines what a compliance office can lawfully change without new legislative action. And a program cut by institutional choice rather than by a bill can be restored without any change in the law.

Sources
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
al-Gharbi, M. (2024). We have never been woke: The cultural contradictions of a new elite. Princeton University Press.
Patton, L. D. (2024). Still climbing the hill: Intersectional reflections on Brown and beyond. Educational Researcher, 53(2).
Pedota, J., Garces, L. M., Epstein, R., Ngaosi, T., & Khalayleh, A. (2025). “We’re on our own out here”: Faculty member responses to legislative threats to academic freedom and scholarship on race. The Journal of Higher Education, 96(7).
Soucek, B. (2026). The opinionated university: Academic freedom, diversity, and the myth of neutrality in American higher education. University of Chicago Press.
Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
UC Irvine International Justice Clinic. (2026, May). Report on the impact of state and federal policies on academic freedom in the United States. https://ijclinic.law.uci.edu/2026/05/28/ijc-publishes-report-on-the-impact-of-state-and-federal-policies-on-academic-freedom-in-the-united-states/
Wilson, R., & Kamola, I. (2021). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.

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Autocratic Government Interference in Academia

Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) describe how elected leaders with autocratic impulses tend to erode democracies through law rather than coups. These leaders seek control over courts, election bodies, and regulatory agencies. They then move against institutions that can contradict them, notably news media, and universities, proceeding by statute, appointment, or budget, with no single step triggering the same alarms that a coup would cause. See institutional autonomy.

In academia, imagine step-by-step, an autocrat seeking control using the following:

funding leverage
control of accreditation or oversight bodies
leadership replacement
courts and laws directing what universities may teach

In this example, a university that has lost budget control is less able to resist a board takeover, and a captured board rarely defends the curriculum afterward.

Douglass (2021) documents university specific cases in Turkey, Hungary, India, and Brazil, where governments used lawful instruments (targeted amendments, emergency decrees, budget control, and board appointments) to relocate, restructure, or take direct control of universities. The case detail is treated in the institutional autonomy entry. See institutional autonomy.

In 2025, the US federal government froze or canceled more than $3 billion in approved research grants, halting nearly 2,500 medical research projects that federal panels had already approved (Brennan Center for Justice, 2025). Federal agencies also suspended funds at specific universities, including Columbia and Harvard, to compel governance changes. The White House then offered 9 universities preferential funding in exchange for policy commitments, and none had signed by January 2026 (UC Irvine International Justice Clinic, 2026). Also, state legislatures have passed at least 20 laws targeting higher education since 2021, 7 of them in 2025 alone, ranging from anti-DEI directives to bans on instruction about specific topics (UC Irvine International Justice Clinic, 2026). See anti-DEI legislation.

The major question isn’t whether the pattern is exact from country to country: it’s whether or not democratic institutions are able to withstand legal sequences that result in government control and loss of a school’s autonomy. The V-Dem Institute’s most recent dataset (2026) classified the United States as an autocratizing country and no longer counts it among liberal democracies. But Lott et al. (2025) measure how academic freedom fares during democratic backsliding and found that academia often withstood such episodes. The disagreement is truly about whether each country’s buffers are holding.

What can be done to preserve campuses as democratic institutions? Resist interference at its earliest stages, including attempts to control funding conditions and accreditation, before leadership replacement and content laws take hold.

Sources
Academic freedom under siege: The global fallout of US authoritarianism and its threats to comparative and international education. (2025). Comparative Education Review, 69(3).
Brennan Center for Justice. (2025). The cost of the Trump administration’s attacks on research funding. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cost-trump-administrations-attacks-research-funding
Douglass, J. A. (2021). Neo-nationalism and universities: Populists, autocrats, and the future of higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown.
Lott, L., Kinzelbach, K., & Lindberg, S. I. (2025). Can free academia withstand democratic backsliding? Why some universities wither while others survive. International Political Science Review.
Scholars at Risk. (2025). Free to think 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2025/
UC Irvine International Justice Clinic. (2026, May). Report on the impact of state and federal policies on academic freedom in the United States. https://ijclinic.law.uci.edu/2026/05/28/ijc-publishes-report-on-the-impact-of-state-and-federal-policies-on-academic-freedom-in-the-united-states/
V-Dem Institute. (2026). Democracy report 2026: Unraveling the democratic era? https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026_lowres.pdf

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Bullying

Harassment campaigns reach scholars from outside the institution, and a second kind of hostility comes from inside it, through supervision, evaluation, and peer standing. It reaches every employee category: faculty, staff, administrators, and graduate workers. See harassment. The two patterns differ in origin and in remedy: harassment arrives from outside and requires safety and communications responses, while bullying arises inside the institution and requires grievance procedures, governance, and employment protections.

Bullying, in the standard research definition, is repeated negative treatment of a person over an extended period, within a relationship where a difference in power leaves the target unable to defend themselves on equal terms (Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf, & Cooper, 2003). A single dispute, however sharp, sits outside the definition. For example, a supervisor might assign someone an unwanted schedule once during a staffing shortage, or might assign that person an unwanted schedule every term after a disagreement. Only the second is bullying.

Among faculty, studies place the share who report experiencing bullying between 18 and 32 percent (Keashly & Neuman, 2010; McKay, Arnold, Fratzl, & Thomas, 2008). Among administrators and staff, Hollis (2015) surveyed 401 respondents across 175 US colleges and universities, from student affairs and human resources to athletics, information technology, and executive ranks, and found that 62 percent had experienced or witnessed workplace bullying in the prior 18 months. Zabrodska and Kveton (2013) assessed 1,533 university employees of all categories and found that 13.6 percent met a strict operational definition of a bullying target, with 7.9 percent identifying themselves as targets. The numbers differ because the measures differ: Hollis (2015) counted anyone who experienced or witnessed bullying over 18 months, while Zabrodska and Kveton (2013) counted only weekly exposure to negative acts. The finding the studies share is that bullying appears in every employee category examined.

The direction of the mistreatment also differs by role. In survey data that Keashly and Neuman (2010) reported, faculty most often identified colleagues as the bullies, at 63.4 percent, while frontline staff most often identified superiors, at 52.9 percent. A tenured professor bullied by a peer and a financial aid officer bullied by a director face the same pattern through different relationships, and the officer usually faces it with fewer protections. Contingent faculty, graduate workers, and staff often depend for continued employment on the decisions of the person mistreating them, and most staff and administrators work without any equivalent of tenure. See lack of job safety. A person whose contract renews annually has a strong reason to file no grievance against the person who renews it. Keashly and Neuman (2010) recorded the barriers that keep targets from reporting, so a thin complaint record is evidence about reporting conditions, and it is weak evidence about the amount of bullying.

For a reader assessing their own institution, the practical question is what a person in the least protected role could safely do about repeated mistreatment by the person who controls their contract. Where the honest answer is nothing, the institution probably has a bullying problem its records can not show.

Sources
Einarsen, S., Hoel, H., Zapf, D., & Cooper, C. L. (2003). The concept of bullying at work: The European tradition. In S. Einarsen, H. Hoel, D. Zapf, & C. L. Cooper (Eds.), Bullying and emotional abuse in the workplace: International perspectives in research and practice (pp. 3–30). Taylor & Francis.
Hollis, L. P. (2015). Bully university? The cost of workplace bullying and employee disengagement in American higher education. SAGE Open, 5(2).
Keashly, L., & Neuman, J. H. (2010). Faculty experiences with bullying in higher education: Causes, consequences, and management. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 32(1), 48–70.
McKay, R., Arnold, D. H., Fratzl, J., & Thomas, R. (2008). Workplace bullying in academia: A Canadian study. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 20(2), 77–100.
Zabrodska, K., & Kveton, P. (2013). Prevalence and forms of workplace bullying among university employees. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 25, 89–108.

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Campus Unity

Outside pressure comes at a campus one constituency at a time: legislatures constrain what faculty teach, funders and federal agencies lean on presidents and boards, administrators cut staff positions, and a hostile climate raises the costs for students. See external threats. Constituencies absorbing different harms respond separately, at different speeds, often at cross purposes. Campus unity means responding as one institution instead.

Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) reported a general finding from episodes of democratic erosion: institutions survive coordinated pressure when their defenders respond as a coalition, and they fail when each constituency arranges its own protection. See coalition building.

The campus-level obstacle is that the constituencies disagree in earnest, about institutional neutrality, about speech, about priorities. So unity built by suppressing the disagreement fails on its own terms. Saunders (2005) argued that durable common action rests instead on relationships that survive disagreement, built through sustained interaction rather than declared. See relationship-building.

Unity is a capacity a campus constructs in advance, not a message it issues in the moment. Build the cross-constituency relationships before the crisis that will need them.

Sources
Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown.
Saunders, H. H. (2005). Politics is about relationship: A blueprint for the citizens’ century. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Chilled Climate for Learning

Currently, an unformed idea a student floats in class can be screenshotted and posted within the hour to an anonymous app like Fizz, where classmates comment on it out of context. Faced with that risk, students hesitate to speak. A chilled climate for learning is what a classroom falls into when that hesitation becomes the norm: fewer questions asked, fewer positions tried out, contested material narrowed or dropped, silence where argument used to be.

The condition isn’t made by any one role. Statutes with undefined terms make instructors steer wide of contested material. See chilling effect. Recording, posting, and watchlist submission make everyone speak as if every sentence may travel. When students often need recorded lectures, instructors grow more cautious. When affective polarization is the default, students hold back further. See watchlists. See affective polarization.

In an AAUP, AAC&U, and NORC (2024) national faculty survey, about a quarter (24.1%) of faculty reported being limited or unable to choose the content they teach in their courses. The student side is thinner in the data. In the National Survey of Student Engagement [NSSE], 41% of first-year students and 39% of seniors reported never or only sometimes having discussions with people with political views other than their own during the school year (NSSE, 2025). Thomas and Brower (2018) studied nine campuses through focus groups and interviews with nearly 500 students, faculty, and staff, and identified habits of political discussion, in and beyond the classroom, as one of the attributes that separate politically healthy and engaged campuses from disengaged ones.

Curious about how court judges decide if an environment for speech is chilled? See chilling effect.

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Chilling Effect

The Supreme Court built the phrase “chilling effect” into constitutional law during the McCarthy era. In Wieman v. Updegraff (1952), the Court struck down an Oklahoma loyalty oath applied to teachers. Justice Frankfurter wrote that such oaths chill the free play of the spirit that teachers ought to cultivate. In Dombrowski v. Pfister (1965), the Court let a person challenge a law before enforcement, when it was already deterring speech. See academic freedom.

So how can the chilling effect change syllabi, research agendas, and more? Take the current moment. State legislatures across the US are restricting what public universities may teach about race, gender, and US history. PEN America’s Index of Educational Gag Orders, updated monthly, counts more than 185 such bills introduced since January 2021, with 19 states now enforcing at least one as law or policy. Some educators are now removing content that no law actually forbids. That gap is the chilling effect in action: people drop lawful expression or inquiry because the consequences are scary.

Law professor Frederick Schauer (1978) explains why people silence themselves beyond what a law demands. A speaker who cannot tell whether a law covers her words faces a gamble. If she speaks and guesses wrong, she may lose her job. If she stays quiet, the cost falls on other people, who never learn the choice was made and likely won’t notice. Silence may be the safer bet for her, but it simultaneously risks the quality of learning and the strength of collective expression. Multiply that bet across thousands of careful people, and whole topics become silent. This is of particular concern in the US higher education landscape, as adjuncts, pre-tenure professors, staff, and others face heightened risks.

There is precedent for ending some chilling laws by their wording. Courts have recognized two types of speech laws that can potentially be struck down due to their chilling effect: vague and overbroad speech laws. The law allows these to be challenged before prosecutors enforce. A vague law is one whose scope is hard to understand, while an overbroad speech law covers speech the government may not restrict. Either flaw is grounds to challenge the law or strike it down.

Thus, vague terms like “divisive concepts,” “promote,” or “compel assent” may be in these categories as educators have to guess the scope. A professor who cannot tell whether a reading “promotes” a banned concept may cut the reading. A university that cannot gauge its legal exposure may play it safe across the board. Pedota et al. (2025) interviewed 32 faculty members at two public universities where legislators had proposed anti-DEI bills. Many of those faculty members pulled back from race-related scholarship before any bill became enforceable law. See institutional over-compliance. See self-censorship. See anti-DEI legislation.

People can also chill expression without any statute. Watchlist operators publish faculty names and course titles. Doxing campaigners post home addresses. Activists and officials file public-records requests for professors’ emails and syllabi. The person exposed fears harassment, not prosecution, and avoids the lawful work all the same. See watchlists. See doxing. This results in:

research directions not pursued,
courses not proposed,
readings not assigned,
questions not asked.

Research like Pedota et al’s study of 32 faculty help us understand whether a chilling effect is happening, along with comparisons to previous syllabi or research plans.

In two recent higher ed cases, courts applied the rule with force. In Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors (2022), a federal court blocked the university provisions of Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, finding the “divisive concepts” ban both viewpoint-discriminatory and unconstitutionally vague; the injunction stayed in place while the state appealed. In American Association of University Professors v. Rubio (2025), a federal court found that federal officials had intentionally chilled noncitizen faculty and students’ protected speech through an “ideological deportation” policy, and in 2026 the court vacated it. Both courts treated the chill as a harm worth stopping.

Scholars now debate how far a court should rely on this nearly invisible effect. Schauer (1978) labels this as a problem for judges. No one disputes that the deterrence happens. But a judge is asked to strike a law over a harm that appears only as an absence of speech. Courts can still act anyway, on the evidence of behavior that did change. Thus, look back at your last syllabus, before a law or proposed law, or watchlist. See if you can find the proof that a clear-eyed court judge would want: some presumed consequence you were avoiding, what behavior was changed, and the documentation that shows that change.

Sources
American Association of University Professors v. Rubio, No. 1:25-cv-10685 (D. Mass. 2025).
Dombrowski v. Pfister, 380 U.S. 479 (1965).
PEN America. (n.d.). Index of educational gag orders [Ongoing tracker]. Retrieved July 5, 2026, from https://pen.org/educational-censorship/index-of-educational-gag-orders/
Pedota, J., Garces, L. M., Epstein, R., Ngaosi, T., & Khalayleh, A. (2025). “We’re on our own out here”: Faculty member responses to legislative threats to academic freedom and scholarship on race. The Journal of Higher Education, 96(7).
Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors of the State University System, 641 F. Supp. 3d 1218 (N.D. Fla. 2022).
Schauer, F. (1978). Fear, risk and the first amendment: Unraveling the “chilling effect.” Boston University Law Review, 58, 685–732.
Wieman v. Updegraff, 344 U.S. 183 (1952).

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Civic Trust

Distrust between groups of citizens now runs high enough that members of one group sometimes treat cooperation across political difference as betrayal. See affective polarization. Universities convene people across exactly that difference, so the distrust reaches their classrooms, their convenings, and their public standing.

Civic trust is the working confidence among strangers and near-strangers that makes shared self-government possible. The current distrust reduces that confidence.

Allen (2004) defined the concept’s foundation: democratic citizenship is a practice of trust-building among strangers, sustained by reciprocity and by the visible sharing of sacrifice, and weakened when some groups are asked to accept losses that other groups never share. O’Neill (2002) argued that institutions earn trust by demonstrating trustworthiness rather than by declaring it. Saunders (2005) reported a finding from decades of dialogue practice: people in conflict change what they can do together before they change what they believe, so trust returns first through working relationships. See relationship-building. See dialogue in practice.

Civic trust runs between citizens. Citizens’ confidence in institutions is a separate question, treated under decline in public trust.

Universities are among the few institutions positioned to rebuild trust between citizens, in classrooms and convenings. That work differs from repairing a university’s reputation. For any campus program, ask which of the two it aims at: trust among the participants, or public confidence in the institution.

Sources
Allen, D. (2004). Talking to strangers: Anxieties of citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. University of Chicago Press.
O’Neill, O. (2002). A question of trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002. Cambridge University Press.
Saunders, H. H. (2005). Politics is about relationship: A blueprint for the citizens’ century. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Clear Classroom Expectation Setting

Most protections a campus offers operate only after trouble arrives. Expectations stated in advance operate before: a contested reading that is clearly announced and justified in the syllabus is documented as a defensible choice for those who might raise issue.

Clear classroom expectation setting is the practice of being explicit about the terms on which a course will run: the material it will take up and the disciplinary reasons for taking it up, how disagreement will be conducted, the difference between assessing an argument and endorsing it, and what will be graded and how.

This practice also includes group norms or community agreements that the group makes clear to each other and decides to follow together. For example, consider that a syllabus might be bolstered by each student agreeing to the following on the first day of class:

Judge ideas based on the quality of the thinking provided, not based on assumptions about the speaker.
Listen before answering.
Disagreement with ideas, even the instructor’s, is important and encouraged.
Keep what is said in the room in the room (known as Chatham house rules), which may even mean keeping our phones out of reach.
It’s okay to offer the beginning of an idea even if you’re not sure about it yet.
Try to share rationale behind your thinking from relevant readings or related scholarly material, not from informal sources like podcasts or non-academic sources.
Hate speech that threatens the learning environment or targets specific protected classes will not be part of these scholarly conversations.
The professor or others may say things that are different from what you’ve heard previously. When those moments happen, we will ask questions about what is being shared to learn, distinguishing discomfort from harm.

Instructor’s terms are stated in the syllabus and aloud. The group’s norms are often built by the group with influence from the instructor to help the learning environment succeed. See norms of behavior.

Stated expectations can make risk taking possible. Students should have clear assurance that they won’t be penalized. Consider the importance of stating or risking unformed ideas, and that precisely is where the capacity for disagreement gets built (Schwartz, 2024). Edmondson (1999) named this condition as psychological safety: a shared belief that a group is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Edmondson (1999) measured it in workplace teams and found that teams that believed that they could take personal risks learned more.

Ben-Porath (2017) explains that clear expectations go beyond just course content in that they should address who speaks and how, not only what may be said. See free speech. See affective polarization. See doxing. See watchlists.

Clear practices protect the instructor through documentation, allow all to take intellectual risks, and create shared learning responsibility.

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Coalition-Building

In October 2025, the federal government sent nine research universities a proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, offering preferential access to federal funding to institutions that accepted a set of policy commitments, including changes to admissions, hiring, and governance. Each university received the offer separately, and each could have sought its own arrangement. Instead, the refusals came in public succession. MIT declined first, writing that scientific funding should rest on scientific merit alone (Kornbluth, 2025), and within three weeks seven of the nine had declined, most citing institutional autonomy and merit-based research funding. None of the nine signed. The American Association of Colleges and Universities published a statement opposing the compact, signed by more than 100 college and university presidents, while the nine universities decided (American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2025). The refusals were issued separately rather than negotiated jointly, but each public refusal lowered the cost of the next, and the shared reasoning functioned as a joint position. The convergent interest named above is what the presidents’ letters actually cited. See institutional over-compliance.

This serves as a helpful example of coalition building as a response to powerful threat. It means making decisions together, across groups whose interests differ, so that outside pressure meets one unified group instead of several separate ones. This example provides a lesson to those employed or studying at US colleges.

On a campus, at least one interest already points in the same direction for every group: institutional autonomy, meaning the institution’s ability to make its own decisions about teaching, research, hiring, and admissions. Faculty, staff, students, administrators, and boards disagree in earnest about speech, priorities, and curricula. Whatever a group wants the institution to do, the group needs the institution to remain the body that decides. That shared need is the reason a campus coalition is possible despite disagreement. See institutional autonomy.

Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) reported the general finding from episodes of democratic erosion. Institutions survive coordinated pressure where broad coalitions form, including between groups that disagree on much else, and fail where each group makes its own arrangement with the source of the pressure, complying early, settling quietly, or distancing itself from the other groups in exchange for being left alone. Each separate arrangement leaves the remaining groups smaller in number and easier to target, so the arrangements rarely provide the safety the group sought. Wilson and Kamola (2021) documented the other side of that dynamic: the campaign pressuring universities is organized across states and organizations, so a campus that answers as separate constituencies meets a coordinated effort with a divided one.

Coalitions are harder to build now than in past decades. Mason (2018) showed one reason: partisanship has become a social identity, so hostility between groups runs beyond any actual disagreement over policy. See affective polarization. See flashpoints. And campus divides no longer run only along party lines. The conflicts that followed the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel and the war in Gaza divided students from students, faculty from boards, and donors from administrations, and the divisions did not sort neatly by party. Donors withdrew gifts, congressional hearings preceded the resignation of several university presidents, and federal investigations opened while campuses were still arguing internally.

A shared interest in autonomy does not feel shared when the other group feels like an enemy, so campus coalitions must now be built across distrust, not only across disagreement. Han (2024) documented one such effort, a program in an evangelical megachurch that built working relationships across racial divides among members who disagreed politically, and the solidarity grew through years of sustained work rather than through agreement reached in advance. See dialogue in practice. See relationship-building.

Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa (2021) studied six organizations whose collective action succeeded where most such action fails and found that the successful ones invested in the depth, commitment, and unity of their members rather than in the number of participants to build collective voice.

Most campuses already have a structure for making decisions across groups. In shared governance, faculty, administrators, and the governing board each hold responsibility for certain institutional decisions and share responsibility for others. The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, formulated jointly by associations representing all three groups, described institutional decision-making in these terms. The connection to coalition building is direct. A campus whose groups already make decisions together does not need to assemble a coalition when a crisis arrives, because the coalition exists and has practice. See shared governance.

A coalition broad enough to work contains members with real conflicts, and the conflicts do not pause while the coalition operates. See open disagreement. The groups must act together on the shared question while still disagreeing, sometimes sharply, about other questions. So, coalition building requires relationships that survive disagreement, and it requires trust that the other groups will do what they said they would do, built by watching them do it. Waiting for agreement on whether the administration should have done x, the last election, or Palestine means the coalition likely never forms. See relationship-building. See civic trust. See external threats.

Coalition building is slow, it happens before the crisis or not at all, and it is a practice. For your campus, ask which decisions are stronger together.

Sources
American Association of Colleges and Universities. (2025, October 3). AAC&U statement on the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” https://www.aacu.org/newsroom/aac-u-statement-on-the-trump-administrations-compact-for-academic-excellence-in-higher-education
American Association of University Professors. (1966). Statement on government of colleges and universities. https://www.aaup.org/report/statement-government-colleges-and-universities
Han, H. (2024). Undivided: The quest for racial solidarity in an American church. Knopf.
Han, H., McKenna, E., & Oyakawa, M. (2021). Prisms of the people: Power and organizing in twenty-first-century America. University of Chicago Press.
Kornbluth, S. (2025, October 10). Regarding the compact. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Office of the President. https://president.mit.edu/writing-speeches/regarding-compact
Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown.
Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil agreement: How politics became our identity. University of Chicago Press.
Wilson, R., & Kamola, I. (2021). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.

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Community Building

When a controversy begins on a campus, the people it involves often meet one another for the first time through the controversy itself. See decline in public trust.

Community building is the deliberate creation of settings, habits, and shared undertakings within which people come to know one another well enough to disagree.

Holt-Shannon and Mallory (2014) argued from their statewide civic engagement practices that a community grows stronger by working through disagreement in structured settings, and that the “working through”, rather than any agreement it produces, is what strengthens the community. Allen (2004) made the same case in political theory: trust among strangers grows through practiced talk, including talk about the matters on which the strangers disagree. See civic trust. See dialogue in practice.

People who have practiced disagreement together can disagree again and remain in community with one another. People who have avoided disagreement meet their first real conflict without that experience, and the conflict is likelier to end the relationships along with the argument.

For your campus, ask who would be involved if a controversy began tomorrow, and whether those people already know one another. A community exists to the degree that they know each other in low-stakes ways. See flashpoints.

Sources
Allen, D. (2004). Talking to strangers: Anxieties of citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. University of Chicago Press.
Holt-Shannon, M., & Mallory, B. L. (2014). The compost of disagreement: Creating safe spaces for engagement and action. Journal of Public Deliberation, 10(1), Article 22.

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Conflict Transformation

Hocker and Wilmot (2018) define conflict as an expressed struggle between at least two parties who depend on each other and who perceive that their goals are incompatible, that resources are scarce, and that the other party is interfering with their goals.

Lederach (2003) explained the difference between conflict resolution, which asks how to end the current episode, and conflict transformation. Conflict transformation requires a person to observe what the conflict says about the relationships between the parties, and then requires would-be problem-solvers to shift those relationships and the conditions around them. For example, consider a department chair with a dispute between two faculty members. A chair who resolves the dispute might separate their committee assignments and close the complaint. A chair who transforms the dispute might do those same things, and might also ask why the two distrust each other, and which parts of the department’s workload or decision-making feed the distrust.

The literature suggests that academia needs tools to tend to relationships in conflict. Mason (2018) explained why settling the issue does not always end conflicts, as mutual political hostility is greater than actual issue disagreement in the US, so conflict is never only about the issues or arguments. See affective polarization. Saunders (1999) worked in separate peace processes but reached the same conclusion as Lederach. The topic or episode is temporary. The relationships between the parties continue after the episode ends, so the relationships are what the work has to change.

What are the basics that anyone on a campus should know about conflict? Campus conflicts also are about questions in relationships that continue after each episode. People keep teaching, studying, and working together after the controversy. That is what makes transformation possible and suppression temporary.

Deutsch (1973) draws a useful distinction between constructive conflict and destructive conflict. In a constructive conflict, the parties air a real disagreement and come away satisfied that they gained something from the process. In a destructive conflict, the process expands beyond the original issue, continues after the original cause has become irrelevant, and leaves the parties worse off. Harassment, doxing, and threats are destructive conflict. See harassment. See doxing.

Timing matters as much as method. Glasl (1999) mapped conflict escalation as a sequence of stages, from tension that a group can still discuss to open attempts to damage the other party, and matched interventions to stages. A party can choose to de-escalate at almost any stage. The interventions available at an early stage require less time, money, and skill than the interventions required at a late stage.

The field has developed a menu of interventions for different moments:

A pause, in which the parties stop a meeting or process and reestablish safety before taking any other step
Private coaching, in which a trained person helps one party think through that party’s goals and options
Facilitated dialogue, a structured conversation among the parties led by an impartial facilitator. See dialogue in practice.
Mediation, in which the parties reach their own agreement while a neutral third party manages the process, or arbitration, in which the third party decides (Moore, 2014)
Restorative practices, including community building to prevent harm, improve systems that create negative conditions, and even restorative conferences in which the people affected by a harm meet to name the harm and decide together how to repair it (Zehr, 2002)
Trusted messengers/shuttle talks, people whom one or more parties find credible and who relay questions and messages while the parties cannot yet speak directly (Wehr & Lederach, 1991)
Shared agreements, made in calm periods, about how a group will handle its disputes. See clear classroom expectation setting.
Structural change, meaning reorganized work or reassigned duties, so that the parties no longer depend on each other
Public education, meaning briefings, workshops, and forums that establish the local facts of a dispute and identify who is affected
Inducements, meaning that one party finds out what the other party needs and provides some of it (Fisher & Ury, 1981)

Each intervention can be used at different levels of formality, confidentiality, duration, and skill. Legal action, human resources investigations, and formal policy change are not first on the list to improve relationships. Those processes decide rights and impose outcomes, though they remain available when the alternative dispute interventions cannot proceed.

Runde and Flanagan (2013) define conflict competence as the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral skills that improve the outcome of a conflict and reduce the likelihood of escalation or harm. They argue that the skills are learnable.

For your campus, ask two questions. In the last flashpoint, did anyone suggest an intervention that would change the underlying relational conditions that generated the conflict? Who on your campus helps a person choose among these interventions? Whether the answer is an ombudsperson or a skilled colleague, knowing that the interventions exist matters less than knowing which person nearby can use each one.

Sources
Deutsch, M. (1973). The resolution of conflict: Constructive and destructive processes. Yale University Press.
Fisher, R., & Ury, W. (1981). Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in. Houghton Mifflin.
Glasl, F. (1999). Confronting conflict: A first-aid kit for handling conflict. Hawthorn Press.
Hocker, J. L., & Wilmot, W. W. (2018). Interpersonal conflict (10th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.
Lederach, J. P. (2003). The little book of conflict transformation. Good Books.
Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil agreement: How politics became our identity. University of Chicago Press.
Moore, C. W. (2014). The mediation process: Practical strategies for resolving conflict (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Runde, C. E., & Flanagan, T. A. (2013). Becoming a conflict competent leader: How you and your organization can manage conflict effectively (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Saunders, H. H. (1999). A public peace process: Sustained dialogue to transform racial and ethnic conflicts. St. Martin’s Press.
Wehr, P., & Lederach, J. P. (1991). Mediating conflict in Central America. Journal of Peace Research, 28(1), 85–98.
Zehr, H. (2002). The little book of restorative justice. Good Books.

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Cross-Role Solidarity

External threats reach staff, faculty, students, contract instructors, board members, adjuncts, and senior leaders unevenly. Bills restrict what faculty teach and staff operate. Funding conditions impact presidents and boards. Program cuts eliminate staff positions, and a hostile public climate raises the costs of study for students. The people with the least employment protection, contingent instructors, graduate workers, and staff face the most personal risk. See external threats. See lack of job safety.

Cross-role solidarity is the practice of defending people in other campus roles: each role uses the protections it has on behalf of the roles that lack them. For example, a tenured professor might speak publicly against the nonrenewal of an adjunct’s contract, because tenure protects the professor’s speech while the adjunct’s contract offers no such protection.

Campus roles often respond to pressure separately, and separate responses sometimes become disputes between the roles themselves. Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) found that a group that negotiates alone leaves the remaining groups easier to target. See coalition building.

Meyerhoff (2019) argued that solidarity is a requirement rather than an option: a defense of academic freedom that covers only tenured faculty defends one group’s employment terms, while the conditions of inquiry a democracy requires extend to every role that teaches and studies. Wilson and Kamola (2021) documented the coordination on the other side: the campaigns restricting higher education are organized across states and organizations, so a campus that responds as separate constituencies meets an organized campaign with a divided one.

For your campus, ask which protections your role has and which roles lack them. Solidarity begins when a protected person uses a protection for someone else.

Sources
Meyerhoff, E. (2019). Beyond education: Radical studying for another world. University of Minnesota Press.
Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown.
Wilson, R., & Kamola, I. (2021). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.

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Decline in Public Trust

Public confidence in higher education, as in most institutions in the US, has been falling. Putnam (1995) documented a decades-long decline in trust in these institutions and in other people. Putnam located it in the thinning of civic connection itself rather than in any single institution’s conduct. The decline in trust is what makes claims against universities easy to believe and defenses of them easy to dismiss.

Gallup has measured the decline in higher education directly: in 2015, 57% of the nation reported high confidence in higher education, and by 2024 the share had fallen to 36%, recovering only partially to 42% in 2025 (Gallup, 2025).

Among those with little or no confidence in higher education in the US, 38% said colleges push political agendas (Gallup, 2025).

What can universities do publicly to improve public trust in higher education? Daniels (2021) named the methods available on the university’s side: social mobility, civic education, stewardship of facts, practiced pluralism. See social contract. See democratic mission of higher education.

The wider decline in public trust reaches beyond universities. Sunstein (2017) explained one mechanism, the sorting of people into like-minded information enclaves, and Mason (2018) documented another, partisan hostility that exceeds actual disagreement over issues. See truth, science, misinformation, and disinformation. See affective polarization. A public in that environment has few reliable ways to judge which institutions deserve its trust.

Judging trustworthiness is a skill, and universities are among the few institutions that teach it: weighing evidence, checking sources, and hearing out disagreement. So, the work universities do to rebuild their own standing and the work they do educating the public are the same work. See truth, science, misinformation, and disinformation. See civic trust.

Sources
Daniels, R. J., with Shreve, G., & Spector, P. (2021). What universities owe democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gallup. (2025, July 16). U.S. public trust in higher ed rises from recent low. https://news.gallup.com/poll/692519/public-trust-higher-rises-recent-low.aspx
Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil agreement: How politics became our identity. University of Chicago Press.
Putnam, R. D. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78.
Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #Republic: Divided democracy in the age of social media. Princeton University Press.

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Democracy

Democracy is self-government by citizens, and democracies and universities depend on each other. Universities depend on a democracy’s grants: charters, land-grant acts, appropriations, research funding, autonomy. See social contract. Democracies have made those grants because self-government requires what universities produce: citizens who can weigh evidence and disagree without breaking the community, and facts the public can check. Daniels (2021) argued that educating for self-government is part of what universities owe for their grants; see democratic mission of higher education for that argument in full.

As of 2026, democratic erosion is reaching higher education in the US through bills restricting instruction, appropriation conditions, funding and tax-exemption leverage, and audits of faculty and curricula. See autocratic government interference in academia. See anti-DEI legislation.

Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) showed how contemporary erosion proceeds: not by coup but through law, with referees captured, media and universities pressured, and rules bent within the letter of the law. Because each side’s health conditions the other’s, a weakening democracy shows up early in its universities, and the state of the universities is a readable indicator of the democracy.

The same authors’ finding about defense is specific: democracies survive these episodes where broad coalitions form across differences. See coalition building. Allen (2004) added the citizen-level half: democracy is sustained by practices of trust among strangers, not by constitutional machinery alone. See civic trust.

Defending the university and defending democracy are similar. The working materials for both are coalitions and practices that build trust.

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Democratic Mission of Higher Education

Several state legislatures now fund new civics centers while limiting what related courses may teach, which puts an old idea back in dispute. The democratic mission of higher education is a specific claim that colleges and universities exist in part to sustain self-government: to widen access to knowledge, prepare citizens to deliberate, and keep a store of facts and expertise the public can draw on to solve its problems in a democracy. In the United States these have been detailed in these distinct congressional and presidential acts:

The Morrill Land Grant Acts (1862, 1890), which granted federal land to fund colleges serving agriculture and the mechanic arts so that higher education would serve the many rather than the few;
The GI Bill (1944), which financed college for millions of veterans;
And The Truman Commission report (1947), which argued that expanding access to higher education served the following three goals: “Education for a fuller realization of democracy in every phase of living, Education directly and explicitly for international understanding and cooperation, and Education for the application of creative imagination and trained intelligence to the solution of social problems and to the administration of public affairs” (I, 8).

These democratic public purposes are essential claims for educators seeking to respond to those who believe that education should be inherently apolitical and/or uncontroversial, or who are dealing with state intervention that uses the term “civics” differently than described herein.

The public funds higher education only in part, through land grants, appropriations, student aid, and research grants, while tuition, donors, and endowments cover the rest. That partial funding makes the mission hard to defend. Someone must still decide what a public university teaches, and at a public institution the state holds that authority. So the objection to a funding condition cannot simply be that the state has no right to direct what it funds.

Legislators funding civics institutes claim the tradition of this mission, and claim their role is to restore it. Tennessee’s General Assembly created the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with a $6 million appropriation (Tenn. Pub. Ch. 963, 2022). Florida’s legislature authorized the University of Florida’s trustees to establish the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, funded by state appropriations and charitable donations (Fla. Stat. § 1004.6496, enacted 2022). Ohio’s Senate Bill 117 (2023) created five such units, including the Salmon P. Chase Center at Ohio State University. Scholars including Thomas (2010) answer that political learning requires engaging contested questions, so a mandate that puts contested questions off-limits, even while funding civics, removes the political learning it claims to restore.

So the object in question isn’t just what education is for. It’s whether restrictions on what can be taught can ever achieve this mission, who gets to influence what is taught, and who receives funding for it. See donor pressure. See state legislative restrictions.

These questions carry weight because of the moment. Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) described how elected leaders with autocratic aims erode democracies through law rather than coups: statute by statute, appointment by appointment, budget by budget, with no single step raising alarm. The instruments that built the democratic mission are the same instruments that method uses. A civics mandate is lawful whether it widens the mission or narrows it, so whoever controls the appropriation can reshape what campuses teach while the process still looks routine. This is no longer a distant risk. The V-Dem Institute (2026) reclassified the United States as an autocratizing country, no longer a liberal democracy. When one actor can narrow the store of facts and the training of citizens through a budget vote, the mission and the democracy it serves are in question together. See autocratic government interference in academia. See anti-DEI legislation.

The scholarship supplies the tests educators can apply. Daniels (2021) itemized the debts above. Thomas (2010) argued that campuses are among the few remaining institutions where political learning can be taught deliberately rather than left to occur. And Allen (2004) wrote that institutions convening strangers for practiced talk across difference are doing constitutional work whether or not they name it. See civic trust.

So when a proposal arrives wearing the mission’s language, hold it to the mission’s own tests: does it widen access, does it protect contested questions, and does it leave the store of facts unbent by any single actor? An instrument that fails those tests is narrowing the mission while borrowing its name, and that is the pattern the interference entries document.

Sources
Allen, D. (2004). Talking to strangers: Anxieties of citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. University of Chicago Press.
Daniels, R. J., with Shreve, G., & Spector, P. (2021). What universities owe democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown.
Morrill Land-Grant Acts (1862, 1890), GI Bill (1944), Truman Commission report (1947) (historical documents).
Thomas, N. (Ed.). (2010). Educating for deliberative democracy [Special issue]. New Directions for Higher Education, (152).
V-Dem Institute. (2026). Democracy report 2026: Unraveling the democratic era? https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026_lowres.pdf

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Dialogue in Practice

A campus facing conflict, over a war, an election, or a protest, might now announce a dialogue or other restorative conversation program in response. Dialogue in practice involves narrative and rational exchange toward understanding, including structured, facilitated forms of conversation across lines of difference. It is distinct from debate, which aims to win, and deliberation, which aims at a decision. The umbrella practice is intergroup dialogue: facilitated, recurring meetings between members of different social, political, role, or demographic groups, designed so that participants examine the relationship between their groups rather than simply exchange positions (Zúñiga, Nagda, Chesler, & Cytron-Walker, 2007).

Dialogue as a practice on campus involves many forms. It covers semester-long intergroup dialogue (IGD) courses with trained co-facilitators, developed in the 1990s in the Michigan intergroup relations tradition (Zúñiga, Nagda, Chesler, & Cytron-Walker, 2007). It covers Sustained Dialogue (SD) groups in residence halls and student organizations with trained peer moderators, a five-stage process Harold Saunders developed from peace negotiation (Chufrin & Saunders, 1993; Saunders, 1999) and used on campuses since 1999 (Wuerz, Fitzgerald, Grenier, & Lezzi, 2019). It also covers shorter deliberative forums and one-time facilitated conversations. Sarrouf and Hyten (2019) write about Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD), a model also in use for decades, designed so that a single facilitated conversation or a short series runs productively using skilled facilitation, prepared questions, agreed ground rules, and fair speaking times.

A Sustained Dialogue group might bring the same twelve students together every other week for an academic year, moving from removing barriers to productive conversation, to naming a campus problem, to acting on it together, while a Reflective Structured Dialogue might be one evening built around those designed elements.

Commonly, a “dialogue event” on campus might involve a panel with limited audience questions. Such an event might detail scholarly research rather than sharing rationale across perspectives.

Dialogue programming is expanding quickly following October 7, 2023 and ensuing campus protests. Institutions have opened civility centers, added facilitated conversation to orientation, and announced initiatives ahead of contentious elections. Programs range in branding, intention, ease of implementation, goal, and structure. Institutions now offer dialogue programming as their answer to legislators, donors, and their own communities after a difficult year. See campus unity.

Dialogue’s position in campus political life is described by Binder and Kidder (2022) who interviewed 77 politically active students at four public universities and identified student focused dialogue programming as an alternative to more polarizing activism channels. The researchers note that strong formats allow students to communicate across the ideological spectrum without being asked to compromise their convictions or become moderate. They added a caveat: such programs are an alternative to contentious activism, not an antidote to polarization. See norms of behavior. See affective polarization.

Dialogue as a practice can provide a campus a way to examine its culture and norms. The IGD Zúñiga, Nagda, Chesler, and Cytron-Walker (2007) model has participants critically reflect on the group patterns and institutional arrangements they operate inside, rather than only exchanging positions, and the Saunders (1999) process has participants map the relationships driving their local situation and design actions they can take themselves. In both forms, the norms that the group names become material the group can work on. The participants themselves become the resource for that work.

Construction of a group and articulation of a dialogue structure’s goals matter deeply. A dialogue group that includes influential members has already assembled allies who can drive culture change. Tankard and Paluck (2016) found that norms shift when the visible behavior of well-connected members changes what people take to be typical and approved. See norms of behavior for the culture-change evidence. Some research literature contains sharp critique for those who might use dialogue as a quickly implemented silver bullet. Young (2001) argued that dialogic and deliberative processes can favor those who are already advantaged. Thus, the activist who declines an invitation to a dialogue may fairly suspect that a misconstructed process risks being extractive without producing remedy. A dialogue deployed to moderate activism or as a substitute for a policy decision may be counterproductive.

What does the evidence support? Gurin, Nagda, and Zúñiga (2013) reported a multi-university field experiment: more than 1,450 students at nine universities were randomly assigned to semester-long dialogue courses on race or gender or to control groups, and the dialogue students showed measured gains in intergroup understanding, empathy, and motivation to act across difference. Svensson and Brounéus (2013) randomly assigned students to a two-term Sustained Dialogue program at Addis Ababa University during a period of political tension and ethnic violence, then measured outcomes for 716 participants and non-participants. Participants showed decreased mistrust alongside increased trust toward students of other ethnic origins. The same participants also reported a stronger sense of the importance of ethnic identity and a greater perception of being discriminated against on campus.

Given the current moment in the United States, how can we understand the risks and role of identity-based content? Both of these control-group, random-assignment studies answer a common worry: that naming race, ethnicity, or other group identities in the room will be too divisive. Neither study found that result. The Gurin, Nagda, and Zúñiga (2013) IGD courses took race and gender as their explicit content, and participants showed gains in understanding, empathy, and motivation to act across difference. The Svensson and Brounéus (2013) participants engaged ethnic identity directly during a period of ethnic violence, and their trust in students from other ethnic groups rose. The university participants in Ethiopia also reported a stronger sense of ethnic identity and more perceived discrimination on campus. One reading of that finding is that the dialogue made existing discrimination something participants could see and name, which points to interrogation of local norms. The study itself does not settle what the heightened awareness means, so the finding marks a question for program designers rather than a verdict. Thus, a dialogue program focused on identity may be read as a chance to examine the campus’s own norms and conflicts, not as the introduction of a controversial topic for its own sake. The studies also carry a design lesson: both allowed ample time, a semester in one and two terms in the other, for participants to discuss what may be difficult. Allen (2004) argued that practiced talk among strangers is constitutive of democratic citizenship. Identity differences, especially in a divided time, are deeply relevant to our citizenship. See civic trust.

Many structured dialogue processes rest on the same evidence base that is described in intergroup contact theories: change runs through intentional encounter over time with clear goals, not only through chance encounters focused on gaining skills. Paluck, Green, and Green (2019) re-evaluated the intergroup contact literature itself and found that regular contact reduces prejudice on average, but that even the most rigorous studies show smaller effects and that evidence on adults and on long-term change remains thin. This finding does not overturn the research on dialogue over time, it narrows the claim to what well-designed, sustained programs have demonstrated.

Scholars agree that structured contact across difference can move attitudes. They disagree about how large and durable the change is outside programs with that design, and about whether dialogue that isn’t action-focused should ever stand in for a formal decision from those with power. See open disagreement.

For a reader evaluating or designing a program on their own campus, the practical test is fidelity to evidence-based conditions: the same participants meeting over an ample amount of time, trained facilitation, and an explicit path from talk to action based on listening to constituents, examination of local norms, and trust-building. See coalition building.

Sources
Allen, D. S. (2004). Talking to strangers: Anxieties of citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. University of Chicago Press.
Binder, A. J., & Kidder, J. L. (2022). The channels of student activism: How the left and right are winning (and losing) in campus politics today. University of Chicago Press.
Chufrin, G. I., & Saunders, H. H. (1993). A public peace process. Negotiation Journal, 9(2), 155–177.
Gurin, P., Nagda, B. A., & Zúñiga, X. (2013). Dialogue across difference: Practice, theory, and research on intergroup dialogue. Russell Sage Foundation.
Inside Higher Ed. (2024, August 21). Anticipating more unrest, colleges prioritize civic dialogue. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/free-speech/2024/08/21/anticipating-more-unrest-colleges-prioritize-civic-dialogue
Paluck, E. L., Green, S. A., & Green, D. P. (2019). The contact hypothesis re-evaluated. Behavioural Public Policy, 3(2), 129–158.
Sarrouf, J., & Hyten, K. (2019). Creating cultures of dialogue in higher education: Stories and lessons from Essential Partners. In N. V. Longo & T. J. Shaffer (Eds.), Creating space for democracy: A primer on dialogue and deliberation in higher education (pp. 85–96). Stylus Publishing.
Saunders, H. H. (1999). A public peace process: Sustained dialogue to transform racial and ethnic conflicts. St. Martin’s Press.
Svensson, I., and Brounéus, K. (2013), “Dialogue and interethnic trust: A randomized field trial of ‘sustained dialogue’ in Ethiopia,” Journal of Peace Research, 50(5), 563–575.
Tankard, M. E., & Paluck, E. L. (2016). Norm perception as a vehicle for social change. Social Issues and Policy Review, 10(1), 181–211.
Wuerz, E., Fitzgerald, R., Grenier, M., & Lezzi, O. (2019). Sustained Dialogue Campus Network. In N. V. Longo & T. J. Shaffer (Eds.), Creating space for democracy: A primer on dialogue and deliberation in higher education (pp. 110–118). Stylus Publishing.
Young, I. M. (2001). Activist challenges to deliberative democracy. Political Theory, 29(5), 670–690.
Zúñiga, X., Nagda, B. A., Chesler, M., & Cytron-Walker, A. (2007). Intergroup dialogue in higher education: Meaningful learning about social justice (ASHE Higher Education Report, Vol. 32, No. 4). Jossey-Bass.

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Donor Pressure

Donor pressure is the exercise of influence through giving.

Reich (2018) described large-scale giving as the conversion of private assets into public influence. He found that this influence is largely unaccountable, often perpetual, and heavily tax-advantaged.

Donors, giving their own money, attach conditions to university gifts which can influence hiring, curriculum, framing, language, and governance. A donor also can withdraw support, or threaten to withdraw it, over choices that they do not agree with.

The practice is as old as U.S. higher education. Thelin and Trollinger (2014) traced giving to U.S. colleges from the colonial period to the present. Donors have attached terms to gifts from the beginning, institutions have in turn weighed those terms against their own goals from the beginning, and disputes over donor intent recur throughout. Their conclusion is that philanthropic support is central to the character of US colleges and universities.

Who tends to give and why? Eaton (2022) studied the largest individual donors to US universities and found that people from finance, mainly private equity and hedge fund managers, now hold a rising share of both trustee seats and the largest gifts at the most selective private universities. Many of them are alumni of the same institutions. Donors expect appreciation, reciprocity, and increased social status in return for giving, and the largest donors receive measurable returns, including tax reductions and admissions advantages for their children. Eaton also found that wealthy households give a smaller share of their income than poor households.

Reich (2018) still defended philanthropy, as giving is good for democracy when it adds to the range of funded ideas and pays for long term work outside what governments and markets fund, and it is bad for democracy when it is exercised as unaccountable power. Legitimate donors should be able to choose what to support. See outside funding. Documented campus cases show the pressure itself reaching academic decisions, and the donors’ stated causes differ across the cases.

Between 2003 and 2011, George Mason University signed gift agreements in which the Charles Koch Foundation endowed funds that paid the salaries of economics professors at the university's Mercatus Center. The agreements required five-member committees to select those professors and granted the donor the right to name two of the five members. Donor appointees also served on advisory boards that held the right, under the agreements, to recommend a professor's dismissal from the center. For years, university administrators denied that the foundation's gifts limited academic freedom, and the university refused public records requests for the agreements. In 2018, after a former student sued under Virginia's public records law and a judge questioned the refusal, the university released them. The university's president stated that the agreements fell short of the standards of academic independence he expected any gift to meet, while noting that all but the earliest stated the final say in appointments lay in university procedures, and he ordered a review of every donor agreement supporting a faculty position (Washington Post, 2018). The foundation answered that the agreements let it recommend candidates rather than decide hires, and that it no longer signs agreements with that level of input (Washington Post, 2018).

Choosing what to fund is philanthropy. Governing what is funded is outside control of academic decisions. That distinction is the test for any campus gift agreement. Ask whether the agreement lets the donor pick the subject or lets the donor decide the findings, the hires, and the curriculum. A donor who picks the subject is practicing philanthropy and preserving institutional autonomy. A donor who decides the findings, the hires, or the curriculum is governing the institution from outside.

Sources
Bok, S. L. (2023, December 12). Donors should not decide campus policies or determine what is taught. The Philadelphia Inquirer. https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/scott-bok-penn-resignation-free-speech-liz-magill-antisemitism-20231212.html
Eaton, C. (2022). Bankers in the ivory tower: The troubling rise of financiers in US higher education. University of Chicago Press.
George Mason president: Some donations 'fall short' of academic standards. (2018, April 28). The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/george-mason-president-some-donations-fall-short-of-academic-standards/2018/04/28/bb927576-4af0-11e8-8b5a-3b1697adcc2a_story.html
Moody, J. (2023, November 2). What do universities owe their donors? Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/governance/executive-leadership/2023/11/02/what-do-universities-owe-their-donors
Reich, R. (2018). Just giving: Why philanthropy is failing democracy and how it can do better. Princeton University Press.
Siraganian, L. (2025, Fall). Seven theses against viewpoint diversity. Academe.
Thelin, J. R., & Trollinger, R. W. (2014). Philanthropy and American higher education. Palgrave Macmillan.
Wilson, R., & Kamola, I. (2021). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.

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Doxing

Doxing is the publication of a person’s private information, such as a home address, family details, or a class schedule, to a hostile audience. The information is often assembled entirely from public records. Scholars at Risk (2025) counts doxing among the attacks on scholars that are rising in democracies as well as autocracies, and the incidents in its record often begin with a campus controversy.

Doxing is typically one stage in a sequence. A classroom moment or a publication circulates online. A watchlist or a media campaign then directs public attention to the scholar. Hostile participants then publish the scholar’s private information, and some of them contact the scholar’s home, family, or employer. Different actors conduct each stage, most of them off campus, and the scholar alone experiences the consequences of every stage. See watchlists.

Oksanen, Celuch, Latikka, Oksa, and Savela (2022) measured online hate and harassment against academics and found the harassment uneven: scholars who study contested social questions, such as race, gender, and political violence, receive the most. The Scholars at Risk (2025) record matches that finding, and doxing appears in both records as one tactic among the others.

The pace of targeting is rising by every available measure. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) tracked 525 attempts to sanction scholars for their speech in 2025, part of a combined 958 censorship attempts across its scholar, student, and speaker databases, against a previous combined record of 477 set two years earlier (FIRE, 2025). Single campaigns now reach many scholars in days. Whitford (2025) identified 37 faculty and staff members under online harassment within about a week of a political killing in September 2025, and at least 24 of them had already been terminated, suspended, or placed on leave. No published count yet measures doxing of scholars as its own category, so these adjacent counts are the best available evidence.

Professional protections assume a dispute about a scholar’s work. Tenure clauses, handbook provisions, and peer-review norms each address objections to research or teaching. Doxing targets the person rather than the work, so those protections give a doxed scholar no remedy. Occupational safety law gives the scholar little more. The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, through its general duty clause, requires employers to keep the workplace free from recognized hazards that are likely to cause death or serious physical harm. The federal act leaves out state government employees, so faculty at public universities are covered only where their state operates its own approved workplace safety plan, and whether a doxing campaign counts as a recognized workplace hazard remains untested in enforcement. Penney (2022) described the general mechanism that follows: people give up lawful activity to avoid a consequence they have seen others suffer. A doxing campaign therefore deters teaching and research well beyond its single target. See chilling effect. See researcher safety.

What should a campus actually do? PEN America’s Online Harassment Field Manual (n.d.), written for writers and journalists and for the organizations that employ them, sets out the practices that transfer directly to a campus:

Prepare before any incident. Establish a written protocol, name a single reporting channel, train staff in account security, and offer data-removal services that delete personal information from people-search sites.
Treat a doxing incident as a safety matter from the first hour, and route it to campus safety staff rather than to a grievance or disciplinary process.
Document everything immediately: screenshots, links, dates, and phone logs, preserved before platforms or posters remove the content. A trusted colleague can do this on the target’s behalf when the material is distressing.
Reduce exposure: secure the target’s accounts, request removal of the published information from platforms, and take listed locations, such as class schedules and directory entries, out of public view.
Report specific threats to the platforms and, where a threat is direct, to law enforcement.
Support the person: the institution answers outside inquiries so the scholar does not have to, and it offers mental health care and legal counsel.

After the incident, review what the campus itself publishes. Office locations, schedules, and directory details which a campus posts publicly are the first records a doxing campaign collects.

Sources
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. (n.d.). Scholars under fire database [Ongoing tracker]. Retrieved July 12, 2026.
Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, 29 U.S.C. § 654.
Oksanen, A., Celuch, M., Latikka, R., Oksa, R., & Savela, N. (2022). Hate and harassment in academia: The rising concern of the online environment. Higher Education, 84(3), 541–567.
PEN America. (n.d.). Online harassment field manual [Ongoing resource]. Retrieved July 12, 2026, from https://onlineharassmentfieldmanual.pen.org/
Penney, J. W. (2022). Understanding chilling effects. Minnesota Law Review, 106(3), 1451–1530.
Scholars at Risk. (2025). Free to think 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2025/
Whitford, E. (2025, September 19). Doxing campaign endangers faculty and free speech. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/academic-freedom/2025/09/19/right-wing-doxing-campaign-endangers-faculty-and-free

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Equity Research

Restrictions on universities reach the scholarship itself: grants cancelled over flagged keywords, centers closed, findings recharacterized as ideology. Patton (2024) examined the conditions under which equity researchers now work and the persistent gap between the field’s accumulated evidence and its policy uptake. For the statutes, the grant figures, and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (2023), see anti-DEI legislation.

Equity research refers to the scholarly field: the empirical study of how educational access, experience, and outcomes differ by race, gender, class, and disability, and of what changes those differences. Dowd and Bensimon (2015) exemplified its practitioner-facing branch: equity-minded inquiry that turns an institution’s own data into a diagnosis of institutional practice rather than of students.

Under attack, a discipline’s standard defense is peer review, methods anyone can check, and revision by evidence. Scholars use it to answer objections to their conclusions. A topic-level restriction bypasses it entirely, because a ban on the subject cannot be answered with better methods. Methods were never the objection.

That is what makes the current restrictions categorically different from scholarly contestation: a field, not a conclusion, is the target.

When you meet a restriction aimed at a field, note that no improvement in methods can answer it. That mark separates it from scholarly criticism, which methods can always answer.

Sources
Dowd, A. C., & Bensimon, E. M. (2015). Engaging the “race question”: Accountability and equity in U.S. higher education. Teachers College Press.
Patton, L. D. (2024). Still climbing the hill. Educational Researcher, 53(2).

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Excellent Teaching

A faculty member’s teaching choices can quickly come under scrutiny. The UC Irvine International Justice Clinic (2026) counted more than 20 state laws restricting teaching and campus programs since 2021. See anti-DEI legislation.

Excellent teaching in higher education is the exercise of skillful judgment based on expert training in one’s field of study. The instructor decides what to assign, what to treat as central, and what counts as a strong argument. They also discuss contested questions as open areas for investigation while showing where competent practitioners stand and why.

When a teaching choice is challenged, the defense should be based in the specific academic disciplinary wisdom. Any competent peer in the field should be able to justify the choice. See expectations of neutrality in teaching.

Ben-Porath (2023) distinguished pedagogical openness from neutrality. Openness exposes students to the range of competent positions on a contested question. Neutrality suppresses the instructor’s own judgment. Good teaching, she argued, requires the first and is undermined by the second. Schwartz (2024) treated question-asking as a discipline that can be taught: students build the capacity for disagreement by practicing it on questions that matter to them, with an instructor whose judgments are acknowledged and open to challenge. Soucek (2026) located the line between indoctrination and skillful judgment in the same place: what the discipline requires.

So the definition and the defense coincide. When you plan a course, teach to what your discipline requires and say openly which judgments are yours. That is excellent teaching, and it is also the strongest available answer if the choice is ever challenged.

Sources
Ben-Porath, S. (2023). Cancel wars: How universities can foster free speech, promote inclusion, and renew democracy. University of Chicago Press.
Schwartz, L. (2024). Try to love the questions: From debate to dialogue in classrooms and life. Princeton University Press.
Soucek, B. (2026). The opinionated university: Academic freedom, diversity, and the myth of neutrality in American higher education. University of Chicago Press.
UC Irvine International Justice Clinic. (2026, May). Report on the impact of state and federal policies on academic freedom in the United States. https://ijclinic.law.uci.edu/2026/05/28/ijc-publishes-report-on-the-impact-of-state-and-federal-policies-on-academic-freedom-in-the-united-states/

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Expectations of Neutrality in Teaching

Expectations of neutrality in teaching are demands, formal or informal, that an instructor withhold judgment on contested political, social, or ethical questions. It can take many forms, including a legislature requiring “viewpoint neutrality,” an institution asking faculty to “present both sides,” a chair’s quiet suggestion, or a student complaint. The demand is that the instructor function as a conduit through which contested material passes without being shaped by the instructor’s judgment.

Ben-Porath (2023), in Cancel Wars, distinguishes pedagogical openness (exposing students to the range of competent positions on contested questions) from neutrality, the suppression of the faculty member’s own judgment. Good teaching requires the first and is undermined by the second. A faculty member who refuses to say what she thinks the best answer is models intellectual cowardice, not openness. One who states her position while making clear it is contestable teaches students to assess arguments on their merits and models inquiry as a practice.

The AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles cautioned that teachers should be “careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject” (AAUP, 1940). Later interpretive comments rejected the neutrality reading of that clause, stating the intent was never to discourage controversy, which sits at the heart of free inquiry. Yet the expectation persists through many channels. A departmental guideline might direct a political science instructor to present immigration policy “from both sides” without indicating which empirical claims the evidence supports.

Soucek (2026) argues that treating neutrality as the default and expression as the exception inverts how teaching works: the default is the exercise of disciplinary judgment, and the question is when and how to acknowledge that judgment openly, not whether to exercise it at all.

The term is easily confused with institutional neutrality, which concerns the university’s official voice rather than the instructor’s judgment. The Kalven Committee (1967) argued the institution stays silent precisely so its individual members remain free to judge and speak. Extending that restraint to individual instructors confuses the mechanism with the goal. See institutional neutrality.

A competing consideration runs the other way. Students are in a vulnerable position relative to the instructor: they are being graded, and they have institutional reasons to remain in good standing. An instructor’s expression of political views in that asymmetric relationship may chill student expression. The response most scholars favor is not to forbid faculty from holding or expressing views but to require care about when and how they do so, and to maintain space for students whose views differ.

The expectation is being written into law. Since 2021, state legislatures have introduced waves of bills restricting how race, gender, and U.S. history may be taught. Measures aimed at higher education have been enacted in 23 states; in 2025 alone, 14 such laws passed, seven targeting colleges and universities (PEN America, 2025). See state legislative restrictions. Faculty are adjusting: in a 2024 survey of 6,269 faculty across 55 institutions, 42% said they were at least somewhat likely to self-censor in classroom discussions (FIRE, 2024). The fuller record of trimming, softening, and omitting lives in the self-censorship entry. See self-censorship.

The scholarly debate is less about whether teaching without sharing one’s judgment is possible (mostly it is not) than about what to do. Weber (1919/1946) argued that the lecture hall is a place for teachers, not prophets or demagogues, because students attend under compulsion and cannot answer back. Fish (2008) argued faculty should “academicize” contested questions, treating them as objects of analysis rather than occasions for advocacy. Kelly (1986) distinguished four stances toward controversy: exclusive neutrality (avoiding contested issues), exclusive partiality (teaching one position as correct), neutral impartiality (airing issues without disclosing a view), and committed impartiality (disclosing the teacher’s view while giving competing positions a fair hearing). Kelly defended committed impartiality, arguing that concealing a considered judgment models evasion rather than fairness.

Hess and McAvoy (2015) studied politically charged discussion in dozens of secondary classrooms over several years and found that teacher disclosure made little measurable difference to students’ own positions. What students tracked was whether competing views received a fair hearing. They drew the line that much of the field now uses: a political classroom teaches students to deliberate contested questions; a partisan classroom recruits them. See political not partisan. The finding comes from high schools, so it transfers to higher education as informed caution rather than proof.

Cognitive psychology provides educators useful research. Koehler (2016) found that presenting expert consensus alongside a token dissenting view caused readers to underestimate the actual consensus: the balanced format distorted understanding rather than informing it. Lewandowsky et al. (2012) similarly found that discredited claims continue to shape reasoning even after correction, so airing a rejected position “for balance” can leave a residue the rebuttal does not remove. False balance can mislead even when offered in good faith.

Post (2012) writes that the measure of classroom speech is disciplinary competence, not neutrality. Universities pay faculty to exercise trained judgment in selecting readings, ranking methods, and grading arguments; a norm that forbade judgment would forbid the job. A geologist who gives equal time to a 10,000-year-old Earth is not being neutral; she is misreporting her field. See academic freedom. See excellent teaching.

Wilson and Kamola (2021), in Free Speech and Koch Money, chronicle the expectation being funded into existence through think tank papers in the 2000s, model legislation in the 2010s, and enacted state law in the 2020s.

These scholars agree that indoctrination is a professional failure. They disagree about nearly everything after that: whether disclosure helps or harms students, whether “balance” is owed to positions a discipline has examined and rejected, and who decides when judgment has crossed into advocacy. The scholarship leaves all three open.

For an instructor weighing a classroom choice, the workable test is not “did I express a view” but “could a competent peer in my discipline defend this choice”: the reading list, the framing, the judgment offered and the grounds given for it. Neutrality is not the standard any discipline actually uses; defensibility is. See excellent teaching.

Sources
American Association of University Professors. (1940). 1940 statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure (with 1970 interpretive comments). https://www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure
Ben-Porath, S. R. (2023). Cancel wars: How universities can foster free speech, promote inclusion, and renew democracy. University of Chicago Press.
Fish, S. (2008). Save the world on your own time. Oxford University Press.
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. (2024). Silence in the classroom: The 2024 FIRE faculty survey report. https://www.fire.org/facultyreport
Hess, D. E., & McAvoy, P. (2015). The political classroom: Evidence and ethics in democratic education. Routledge.
Kalven Committee. (1967). Report on the university’s role in political and social action. University of Chicago. https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports/KalvenRprt_0.pdf
Kamola, I. (2021). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.
Kelly, T. E. (1986). Discussing controversial issues: Four perspectives on the teacher’s role. Theory & Research in Social Education, 14(2), 113–138.
Koehler, D. J. (2016). Can journalistic “false balance” distort public perception of consensus in expert opinion? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 22(1), 24–38.
Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., Seifert, C. M., Schwarz, N., & Cook, J. (2012). Misinformation and its correction: Continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(3), 106–131.
PEN America. (2025). With a wave of new bills in 2025, state legislators cast a web of control over higher education. https://pen.org/with-a-wave-of-new-bills-in-2025-state-legislators-cast-a-web-of-control-over-higher-education/
Post, R. C. (2012). Democracy, expertise, and academic freedom: A First Amendment jurisprudence for the modern state. Yale University Press.
Soucek, B. (2026). The opinionated university. University of Chicago Press.
Weber, M. (1946). Science as a vocation. In H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds. & Trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 129–156). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1919)

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External Threats

Scholars at Risk (2025) counts 395 attacks on scholars, students, and higher-education institutions in 49 countries between July 2024 and June 2025, and lists the United States among the 16 countries it highlights. The pressures reaching US campuses from outside includes:

state statutes restricting instruction and DEI programs;
federal research funding and tax exemption used as leverage;
public records requests aimed at teaching materials and correspondence;
litigation and the threat of it;
watchlist and doxing campaigns targeting individual scholars;
and coordinated media campaigns that turn local incidents into national stories.

The pattern is global and sequenced. Douglass (2021) traced the sequence across countries: delegitimizing rhetoric first, then funding and regulatory pressure, then direct intervention in governance. Universities are early targets of nationalist consolidation because their independence is the point of attacking them. For the governmental record, including the democracy-ratings data, see autocratic government interference in academia.

The forms are contested in different venues. Statutes are fought in courts and legislatures, funding conditions in budgets and negotiations, harassment campaigns in safety and security practice. A response built for one form does not transfer to another.

The category term carries less analytic weight than its members. Identify which member you face, then match the response to its venue.

Sources
Douglass, J. A. (2021). Neo-nationalism and universities: Populists, autocrats, and the future of higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Scholars at Risk. (2025). Free to think 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2025/

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Fairness or Equity

The word “equity” is currently being struck from public documents by name. Texas Senate Bill 17 (2023) and its counterparts list it among prohibited office functions, and 2025 federal directives ordered the term removed from agency programs and grant language. A word can survive a dispute about its meaning. These removals are different: they erase the word itself, and they land on a concept whose meaning was already the substance of a scholarly argument. See anti-DEI legislation.

Fairness or equity, in higher education, refers to the family of claims about what institutions owe students beyond identical treatment. The basic distinction is this: equality provides every student the same resources and rules, while equity calibrates resources and practice to need so that outcomes are attainable across the differences students arrive with. The distinction sounds administrative, but it is not, because it relocates responsibility. Bensimon and Dowd (2015) named that relocation equity-mindedness. When outcomes differ by race, the equity-minded question is what institutional practice produced the gap. The deficit-minded question is what is wrong with the students. The two questions generate different remedies, budgets, and accountabilities, which is why the vocabulary is fought over.

The empirical case that institutional practice moves outcomes is specific. Walton and Cohen (2011) showed that a brief intervention addressing students’ sense of belonging improved grades and well-being for Black college students across three years. A gap widely attributed to preparation responded to a change in institutional environment. Strayhorn (2018) assembled the wider record connecting belonging to persistence and achievement. See sense of belonging. Smith (2020) framed equity as institutional capacity: a thing an institution builds and can be evaluated on, not a sentiment it declares. Patton (2024) documented both the persistence of the disparities and the position of the researchers who study them under the statutes now removing the vocabulary. See equity research.

The critique the removals draw on has a scholarly form. Al-Gharbi (2024) argued that equity as practiced slid from opportunity toward outcome-equalization, and from measurable interventions toward bureaucratic mandate: offices, statements, and trainings whose growth outpaced any evidence of effect, administered by a professional class whose interests these offices and trainings served. On this account, the word came to license practices the original distinction never required, and the backlash reaches the word because the word stopped marking a distinction.

The disagreement is therefore layered. There is a semantic dispute about what equity means. There is an empirical dispute about whether equity-framed interventions work: the Walton and Cohen (2011) line of research says some demonstrably do, while the critique says most of them did not. And there is a locational dispute about whether responsibility for disparate outcomes sits with institutional practice or elsewhere. The statutes settle none of these. They remove the vocabulary in which the layers were argued, and the research cited above continues under other names or not at all. See inclusive excellence.

For a reader assessing their own institution, the practical question is which layer a given proposal or restriction touches: the word, the offices that carried it, or the disaggregated outcome data that made the argument possible. An institution can lose the word and keep the practice of asking what its own routines produce. It can also keep the word and never ask.

Sources
al-Gharbi, M. (2024). We have never been woke: The cultural contradictions of a new elite. Princeton University Press.
Bensimon, E. M., & Dowd, A. C. (2015). Engaging the “race question”: Accountability and equity in U.S. higher education. Teachers College Press.
Patton, L. D. (2024). Still climbing the hill: Intersectional reflections on Brown and beyond. Educational Researcher, 53(2).
Smith, D. G. (2020). Diversity’s promise for higher education: Making it work (3rd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
Strayhorn, T. L. (2018). College students’ sense of belonging: A key to educational success for all students (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Texas Senate Bill 17, 88th Leg. (2023).
Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science, 331(6023), 1447–1451.

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Flashpoints

A classroom remark, an invited speaker, a protest, or a syllabus line can now become a national story within hours, with organized responses arriving from actors far from the campus where it happened. A flashpoint is such an episode: a local conflict that becomes a national controversy through organized amplification, including screenshot circulation, watchlist submission, coordinated coverage, and legislative attention. See watchlists.

The term comes from sociology. Waddington, Jones, and Critcher (1989) built the flashpoints model from studies of pickets, demonstrations, and community disorder, and their central finding is that the triggering incident explains very little. Disorder spreads when conditions at several levels, structural, political, cultural, and situational, are already primed before the incident occurs.

Sunstein (2017) explained why the most inflammatory account of a campus event travels fastest. Fragmented information environments sort people into like-minded enclaves, and each enclave circulates the version of an event that best fits its own outrage. So, the public receives an account of the event before the campus has established the facts.

Ben-Porath (2023) documented the campus version of the Waddington, Jones, and Critcher (1989) finding: the episodes that escalate furthest are rarely about their triggering events. Two conditions cause a flashpoint to escalate. Firstly, there are grievances on the campus that the institution has left unaddressed, and, secondly, there are national conflicts that the local episode comes to represent. That is why the same speaker or remark becomes a national controversy on one campus and passes without any commentary on another.

One class of flashpoint arrives on a schedule. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) found that controversies over commencement speakers cluster in the same calendar weeks each year, in the spring weeks before graduation, and named that period “disinvitation season” (FIRE, 2014). A campus can expect this class of episode and prepare for it in advance.

The work of preventing a flashpoint happens mostly before one occurs. A campus that addresses its standing grievances has removed one of the two conditions that produce escalation, and a campus that knows which weeks bring speaker controversies can prepare before those weeks arrive. See conflict transformation.

Sources
Ben-Porath, S. (2023). Cancel wars: How universities can foster free speech, promote inclusion, and renew democracy. University of Chicago Press.
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. (2014). Disinvitation report 2014: A disturbing 15-year trend. https://www.fire.org/research-learn/disinvitation-report-2014-disturbing-15-year-trend
Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #Republic: Divided democracy in the age of social media. Princeton University Press.
Waddington, D., Jones, K., & Critcher, C. (1989). Flashpoints: Studies in public disorder. Routledge.

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Free Speech

Free speech does double duty in higher education conflicts. It is a constitutional protection invoked by scholars and students under restriction, and it is a policy vocabulary through which restrictions arrive: campus speech statutes, viewpoint neutrality mandates, audits framed as speech protection. PEN America’s Index of Educational Gag Orders, updated monthly, documents statutes arriving in that vocabulary. Which duty a given invocation performs is often the live question.

The First Amendment protects less campus speech than public argument claims it does, and four decided cases define what it actually covers. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), the Supreme Court struck New York’s loyalty-oath requirements and called academic freedom a special concern of the First Amendment, which is the holding that brings public university faculty inside the protection at all. In Pickering v. Board of Education (1968), the Court held that public employees speak as citizens on matters of public concern, subject to balancing against the employer’s interests. That holding sets the basic rule for faculty speech. In Healy v. James (1972), the Court held that First Amendment protections apply to students at public universities. And in Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), the Court held that speech pursuant to official duties is unprotected, while expressly reserving whether that rule applies to speech related to scholarship and teaching. The reservation is why the protection remains uneven for faculty. By itself, the First Amendment does not settle non-renewal, tenure denial, or discipline over the content of teaching, and it does not reach private universities at all. See lack of job safety. See shared governance.

Those four rulings are Supreme Court decisions, which makes them binding law that public universities and lower courts must follow, not advice they can weigh and set aside. This matters for a common move in campus arguments: the claim that a protection is not real unless the Constitution names it. The Constitution names free speech and does not name academic freedom, yet the Court has protected both by interpreting the text. See academic freedom.

So free speech and academic freedom are different claims, and whether to keep them apart is the live scholarly dispute. Scott (2019) argued that collapsing academic freedom into free speech surrenders the stronger defense: a citizen’s right to opinion is real but limited, while a discipline’s authority over competent practice is the claim actually under attack. Chemerinsky and Gillman (2017, 2026) defended the opposite integration: the two rest on overlapping foundations, and universities should adopt broad speech protections. Ben-Porath (2017) reframed the campus question as inclusive freedom: speech protections produce learning only where institutions attend to who can afford to use them.

Ask of any invocation of free speech which duty it is performing, protection or vehicle, and which decided case it would actually stand on.

Sources
Ben-Porath, S. (2017). Free speech on campus. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Chemerinsky, E., & Gillman, H. (2017). Free speech on campus. Yale University Press.
Chemerinsky, E., & Gillman, H. (2026). Campus speech and academic freedom: A guide for difficult times. Yale University Press.
Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410 (2006). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/547/410/
Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169 (1972). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/408/169/
Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 (1967). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/385/589/
PEN America. (n.d.). Index of educational gag orders [Ongoing tracker]. Retrieved July 5, 2026, from https://pen.org/educational-censorship/index-of-educational-gag-orders/
Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563 (1968). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/391/563/
Scott, J. W. (2019). Knowledge, power, and academic freedom. Columbia University Press.

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Freedom to Teach and Learn

In the US, tenure, peer review, and grievance procedures are built around teachers, but what about the rights of those who aren’t tenured, of independent scholars, and of students? The US has little legal infrastructure to protect these other freedoms.

Freedom to teach and learn are two separate rights: the freedom of instructors to teach what their disciplines know, and the freedom of students to read, ask, argue, try out positions, be wrong, and change their minds without surveillance or reprisal. Daniels (2021) argued that democracies care about these freedoms because self-government requires citizens who can weigh evidence, follow an argument, and disagree without ruining the community. See democratic mission of higher education.

Because democratic governments confer the freedom to teach and learn, it differs from academic freedom. Academic freedom is a professional right held by individual faculty and defended on the grounds of disciplinary expertise. See academic freedom. The freedom to teach and learn is civic, and it covers people who hold no professional rights at all, students first among them. See social contract.

The German universities that shaped today’s US research universities recognized two linked freedoms. Lehrfreiheit was the professor’s freedom to teach and investigate. Lernfreiheit was the student’s freedom to learn. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) acknowledged both freedoms in its 1915 Declaration of Principles, which details only the professor’s side: freedom of inquiry, freedom of teaching, and freedom of extramural utterance. The AAUP’s 1940 Statement turned that argument into language institutions could adopt, and universities built tenure, peer review, and handbook protections around it. Nothing comparable was ever built for students. Reichman (2021) documented that no tenure analog protects the freedom to learn, that no grievance procedure lets a student contest an eliminated program, and that the elective system is nearly all of Lernfreiheit that survived in practice in the US. Meyerhoff (2019) argues that a defense of academic freedom that excludes students and curious minds protects a guild interest rather than the conditions for inquiry.

The instructor’s side of this freedom has some legal footing, built through court decisions over the last century. The student’s side has almost none. It can be argued that no one ever built the protections to learn the truth in higher education the way tenure and grievance procedures were built for faculty.

State legislatures have passed divisive-concepts and anti-DEI statutes that restrict instructional content. For example, Florida’s Individual Freedom Act of 2022, known as the Stop WOKE Act, limits how public university instructors may address race and sex. A federal district court has blocked the act’s higher-education provisions while the state appeals; for the litigation record, see chilling effect. Legislatures have also attached conditions to appropriations that eliminate programs and offices. The UC Irvine International Justice Clinic (2026) counted more than 20 state laws restricting teaching and campus programs since 2021. Finally, federal agencies have used research funding as leverage: the Brennan Center for Justice (2025) counted more than $3 billion in NIH and NSF grants frozen or cut in 2025. See state legislative restrictions. See anti-DEI legislation.

In this context, students’ right to learn is vulnerable. When a statute removes a reading, cancels a course, or eliminates a program, students are affected and no handbook clause protects their right to learn what someone planned to teach. See chilling effect.

Moreover, Ben-Porath (2023) argued that a student who tries out an unformed idea and risks a viral screenshot is not free to learn, whatever the ideal protections say, and neither is a student whom harassers have pushed out of the conversation. See chilled climate for learning. Schwartz (2024) added that a classroom that has stopped asking hard questions has surrendered part of these freedoms even when no rule was ever announced. See excellent teaching.

What can be done to formalize these rights? That’s the civic question for those who want to preserve the freedom to learn inside and outside of academia.

Sources
American Association of University Professors. (1915). Declaration of principles on academic freedom and academic tenure (historical document).
Ben-Porath, S. R. (2023). Cancel wars: How universities can foster free speech, promote inclusion, and renew democracy. University of Chicago Press.
Brennan Center for Justice. (2025). The cost of the Trump administration’s attacks on research funding. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cost-trump-administrations-attacks-research-funding
Daniels, R. J., with Shreve, G., & Spector, P. (2021). What universities owe democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Meyerhoff, E. (2019). Beyond education: Radical studying for another world. University of Minnesota Press.
Reichman, H. (2021). Understanding academic freedom. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Schwartz, L. (2024). Try to love the questions: From debate to dialogue in classrooms and life. Princeton University Press.
UC Irvine International Justice Clinic. (2026, May). Report on the impact of state and federal policies on academic freedom in the United States. https://ijclinic.law.uci.edu/2026/05/28/ijc-publishes-report-on-the-impact-of-state-and-federal-policies-on-academic-freedom-in-the-united-states/

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Harassment

Coordinated campaigns follow scholars whose work or teaching circulates beyond campus, resulting in email floods, social media pile-ons, calls to employers and legislators, watchlists, and even death threats. Scholars at Risk (2025) documents the pattern, and Oksanen, Celuch, Latikka, Oksa, and Savela (2022) tracked its online form as a rising concern across academia.

Harassment, herein, is sustained, organized hostility directed at a person rather than an argument.

Outside participants join a campaign at near-zero cost each, while the targeted scholar absorbs concentrated professional, psychological, and physical-safety costs. Oksanen and colleagues (2022) found the harassment uneven, falling hardest on scholars studying contested social questions, and the pattern in the Scholars at Risk record matches: race, gender, and political-violence researchers absorb the most. Whitford (2025) documented one such campaign that reached dozens of scholars within a single week. See doxing. See researcher safety.

The deterrent operates on witnesses as well as targets. Colleagues who watch a campaign learn its lesson without receiving one, the chilling mechanism operating through example rather than statute. See chilling effect.

Harassment is distinct from bullying: harassment campaigns arrive largely from outside the institution, while bullying runs through the institution’s own hierarchy, and the two call for different remedies. See bullying.

Treat harassment as a campaign with an audience, and expect its largest effect on the people watching.

Sources
Oksanen, A., Celuch, M., Latikka, R., Oksa, R., & Savela, N. (2022). Hate and harassment in academia: The rising concern of the online environment. Higher Education, 84(3), 541–567.
Scholars at Risk. (2025). Free to think 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2025/
Whitford, E. (2025, September 19). Doxing campaign endangers faculty and free speech. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/academic-freedom/2025/09/19/right-wing-doxing-campaign-endangers-faculty-and-free

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Inclusive Excellence

Inclusive excellence is the argument that academic excellence and inclusion are a single standard rather than competing goods. An institution that educates only the students it was historically built for, or that achieves diversity in enrollment without broad success, has an excellence problem, not a diversity problem in this framework.

The framework grew out of the work of several scholars, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) advanced it beginning in 2005 through its Making Excellence Inclusive initiative, which commissioned papers including Williams, Berger, and McClendon (2005) and Milem, Chang, and antonio (2005).

Smith (2020) organizes the framework into four dimensions:

access and success,
campus climate and intergroup relations,
education and scholarship,
and institutional viability and vitality.

Williams, Berger, and McClendon (2005) wrote that the work fails when housed in a peripheral office and succeeds when built into the institution’s core academic functions, including curriculum, hiring, assessment, and budgeting. That requires organizational change, not programming.

By the late 1990s, researchers were measuring whether engagement across difference improves learning itself. Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, and Gurin (2002) analyzed multi-campus longitudinal data and found that interaction with diverse peers improved students’ intellectual engagement and their preparation for citizenship. That research supported the legal argument that a diverse student body serves a compelling educational interest.

In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the Supreme Court accepted the argument and upheld race-conscious admissions on educational grounds. The holding stood for twenty years, until the Court ended race-conscious admissions in 2023; for that case, see anti-DEI legislation.

Institutions adopted the framework widely, demographic diversity and degree attainment both rose, and the framework shaped curriculum, student support, hiring, and institutional planning. The outcomes were uneven. Attainment gaps persisted across racially and economically marginalized groups, intercultural learning often reached only a subset of students, and on many campuses the work stayed concentrated in student affairs rather than moving into academic decision-making.

The framework drew a substantial critique from inside equity scholarship. Ahmed (2012) studied diversity work as it is actually practiced and found some campuses worked on spreading inclusive excellence language rather than on creating relevant experiences for those who needed a more welcoming campus.

Bensimon and Dowd (2015) wrote about the practices that truly change a campus with equity-mindedness. They describe how to build routines that force attention to disaggregated outcomes, instead of just writing commitments or inputs. See fairness or equity.

Al-Gharbi (2024) argued that offices, statements, and trainings multiplied without evidence of improved outcomes as Bensimon and Dowd described, and that the fusion of excellence with inclusion made the framework unfalsifiable, since any criticism of those programs could be answered as opposition to excellence itself. Defenders of the statutes cite this account.

So, what’s to be made of how scholars can understand this now?

One position is that the framework named the right standard and was starved of implementation (Williams, Berger, & McClendon, 2005; Smith, 2020).
A second position is that the framework produced performance in place of change (Ahmed, 2012).
A third position is that the framework produced an unaccountable apparatus (al-Gharbi, 2024).

For a reader whose institution is responding to outside interference and retiring the framework, the practical question is what happens to the measurements underneath it: retention, completion, and climate data disaggregated by group. The offices can close and the phrase can go. Whether anyone still looks at the disaggregated outcomes is the test of what was actually dismantled.

Sources
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
al-Gharbi, M. (2024). We have never been woke: The cultural contradictions of a new elite. Princeton University Press.
Bensimon, E. M., & Dowd, A. C. (2015). Engaging the “race question”: Accountability and equity in U.S. higher education. Teachers College Press.
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/
Gurin, P., Dey, E. L., Hurtado, S., & Gurin, G. (2002). Diversity and higher education: Theory and impact on educational outcomes. Harvard Educational Review, 72(3), 330–366.
Milem, J. F., Chang, M. J., & antonio, a. l. (2005). Making diversity work on campus: A research-based perspective. Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Smith, D. G. (2020). Diversity’s promise for higher education: Making it work (3rd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
Williams, D. A., Berger, J. B., & McClendon, S. A. (2005). Toward a model of inclusive excellence and change in postsecondary institutions. American Association of Colleges and Universities. https://operations.du.edu/sites/default/files/2020-04/model-of-inclusive-excellence.pdf

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Institutional Autonomy

Universities are currently being governed from outside their own charters. In 2025 the federal government suspended research funds to named universities to compel changes in governance, admissions, and discipline. State appropriation bills carry curricular and personnel conditions. And in Florida in 2023, a slate of governor-appointed trustees at New College replaced the institution’s leadership and eliminated programs by board vote. Each action used a lawful instrument (funding, appointment, appropriation), which is what makes autonomy, rather than any single controversy, the concept under pressure. The Academic Freedom Index shows the U.S. institutional autonomy score fell from 3.3 in 2019 to 1.7 in 2025, a steeper and faster decline than Hungary, India, or Türkiye recorded (Kinzelbach et al., 2026).

Institutional autonomy is the authority of a university to govern its own academic affairs (admissions, curriculum, hiring, research priorities, and internal organization) without direction from the state, donors, or other external actors. It is held by the institution, where academic freedom is held by individuals. The two protect each other but are not the same, and each can fail while the other holds. See academic freedom.

Poskanzer (2002), in the standard legal treatment of faculty law, described how the institution’s authority connects to the individual’s. Courts sometimes speak of the university itself holding academic freedom, as an institution, to decide who teaches and what is taught. Poskanzer (2002) argued that this institutional version is not a separate power the administration holds over its faculty. It is largely the sum of individual faculty members’ academic freedom, exercised together through the faculty bodies that set curriculum, hiring, and tenure. On that reasoning, a university that sidelines its own faculty weakens the very autonomy it claims against outside control. See shared governance.

The autonomy of US higher education institutions is built into case law. For private institutions, the founding case is Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), in which the Supreme Court held the college’s charter to be a contract the state legislature could not unilaterally rewrite. For public institutions, several state constitutions, Michigan’s and California’s among them, establish their universities as constitutionally autonomous bodies rather than ordinary state agencies. Elsewhere, public universities don’t hold such clear provisions. In a time of autocratic interference, an institution whose autonomy rests on a constitution is threatened only by amendment, while one whose autonomy rests on annual appropriation is under threat during each budget cycle. See state legislative restrictions. See autocratic government interference in academia.

None of this is a single federal clause about universities. Autonomy’s legal footing comes from a founding-era Supreme Court decision and from individual state constitutions, so it is well established in law without being named in the national charter.

Douglass (2021) placed the US pressure in a comparative frame. Governments in Hungary, Turkey, India, and Brazil treated universities as political rivals and moved against them through legal instruments. Hungary’s 2017 higher-education amendments forced Central European University to relocate to Vienna, and its 2021 transfers moved public universities into foundations with government-appointed boards. Turkey’s post-2016 emergency decrees dismissed thousands of academics and gave the presidency direct appointment of rectors. Douglass’s (2021) point is structural: in each case autonomy was not abolished but re-instrumented. The charters, boards, and budgets that once secured independence became the channels of control. See autocratic government interference in academia.

Daniels (2021) supplied the normative account of why democracies granted autonomy at all. Institutions insulated from political direction can produce knowledge the public can trust precisely because no officeholder ordered its conclusions, and they owe back social mobility, citizenship education, stewardship of facts, and practiced pluralism. On this account autonomy is not a privilege but one side of an exchange, defensible only while the other side is paid. See social contract.

The live scholarly disagreement is where legitimate oversight ends and political direction begins. Public universities are publicly funded, and boards, legislatures, and voters hold lawful authority over them. Defenders of the recent interventions argue that appointed boards exercising statutory powers are accountability working as designed. Critics, Douglass (2021) among them, answer that the comparative record shows exactly this argument accompanying each erosion, since every step in Hungary and Turkey was formally lawful. On this view the test is not the legality of the instrument but whether it directs academic judgments (what is taught, who is hired, what is studied) that the institution’s charter assigned to the institution. Lott, Kinzelbach, and Lindberg (2025) added an empirical caution: measuring how academic freedom fares during democratic backsliding, they found that academia often withstood such episodes, which means institutional buffers sometimes hold. The disagreement is whether a given country’s buffers are holding now.

For a reader assessing their own institution, the practical question is which instruments of self-governance remain intact and which have already been transferred to actors outside the institution: who now appoints the board, what conditions ride on the appropriation, and which academic decisions the charter assigns to the institution still run through it. See shared governance.

Sources
Daniels, R. J., with Shreve, G., & Spector, P. (2021). What universities owe democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 518 (1819).
Douglass, J. A. (2021). Neo-nationalism and universities: Populists, autocrats, and the future of higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kinzelbach, K., Lindberg, S. I., Lott, L., & Panaro, A. V. (2026). Academic Freedom Index – 2026 update. FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and V-Dem Institute. https://doi.org/10.25593/open-fau-2865
Lott, L., Kinzelbach, K., & Lindberg, S. I. (2025). Can free academia withstand democratic backsliding? Why some universities wither while others survive. International Political Science Review.
Poskanzer, S. G. (2002). Higher education law: The faculty. Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Institutional Neutrality

Universities are currently adopting institutional-neutrality policies at a pace without precedent since the policy’s origin. After the campus conflicts of 2023 and 2024, Harvard, Stanford, and dozens of other institutions announced they would no longer issue official statements on contested public events, and several state legislatures have written neutrality requirements for public universities into statute. A document written for one university in one crisis, the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report of 1967, is being cited across the sector as the template, and its argument is being stretched to cover questions it never addressed.

Institutional neutrality is the position that a university, speaking through its officers and official statements, should not take sides on contested political and social questions that do not directly concern the university’s own operation. The claim is about the institution’s voice, not about what its members may say.

The Kalven Report was produced by a University of Chicago faculty committee chaired by Harry Kalven Jr. during protests over the Vietnam War and pressure for divestment. Its core argument: the university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic (Kalven Committee, 1967). An institution that takes official positions puts dissenting members in the position of dissenting from their employer, so institutional silence on public controversies is what protects the full freedom of the individuals inside. The report reserved an exception for matters that threaten the university’s own mission and operation. The location of that boundary has been contested ever since, because nearly any public question can be framed as touching the university’s mission.

Soucek (2026) argued that the neutrality frame obscures the real questions. Universities are opinionated by design: every curriculum decision, hiring choice, tenure case, honorary degree, and research priority is an institutional judgment about what is true, important, and worth doing. A blanket claim of neutrality cannot describe an institution built out of judgments. The workable questions are narrower: which university actors (a president, a department, a center), speaking in which capacity, on which questions, with what effect on the members who disagree. On Soucek’s (2026) account, both the demand that universities speak and the demand that they never speak fail for the same reason: they treat “the university” as a single voice when it is many.

The concept is routinely conflated with a different one. Institutional neutrality concerns whether the university as an institution should take positions. Expectations of neutrality in teaching concern what individual faculty may say to their students. In recent policy debates the institutional case has been used to argue the individual one, and the arguments do not transfer. The Kalven Report’s own logic runs the other way: the institution stays silent precisely so that its members, faculty included, remain free to speak. A statute or policy that cites institutional neutrality to restrict classroom expression has inverted the document it invokes. See expectations of neutrality in teaching.

The scholarly disagreement now runs on two fronts. Defenders of neutrality policies argue on Kalven’s original grounds: official statements chill dissenting members, commit the institution on questions where it has no special competence, and convert every world event into a test of the administration’s alignment. Chemerinsky and Gillman (2026) defended a position close to this tradition, arguing that universities should adopt broad speech protections rather than institutional speech. Critics answer that announced neutrality is itself a position. Silence following events that directly affect members of the community reads as indifference, and because the university continues to speak through what it funds, honors, and teaches, a statements policy makes the institution selectively rather than fully neutral. Ben-Porath (2023) pressed the inclusion side of this: an institution’s obligations to members harmed by public events do not disappear when its statements do, and the question becomes what the institution does rather than what it says.

Poskanzer (2025) offered a defense of institutional silence that tries to meet the objection that silence is itself a stance. He argued that a university should follow what he called a general rule of reticence: as a rule, its leaders should not issue official statements on contested public questions. Poskanzer (2025) drew a distinction the word neutrality hides. Reticence, in his account, is not a claim that the university has no views; it is a deliberate decision about whether and when to speak. He named four situations that call for speaking: when the university has genuine expertise the public debate needs, when speaking protects the conditions scholarship depends on, such as academic freedom or research funding, when the university’s own mission is the matter being decided, and when its survival is at stake. For instance, under these criteria a university would stay quiet about a distant war, but would speak to defend the research funding its own laboratories need. See academic freedom.

A second disagreement concerns the instrument. The Kalven Report was a faculty committee’s recommendation, adopted voluntarily by one institution through its own governance. The state statutes now mandating neutrality at public universities impose the same words by a different instrument, and scholars on both sides of the statements question treat the difference as substantive. A discipline an institution adopts for itself can be revised by the body that adopted it; a legislative mandate relocates the decision about the university’s voice to the legislature. See state legislative restrictions. See institutional autonomy.

For a reader evaluating whether their institution should speak, the test from the report remains useful: would silence protect or undermine the conditions that let individuals on campus speak freely? And for a reader evaluating a neutrality policy, the practical question is who adopted it and who can revise it.

Sources
Ben-Porath, S. R. (2023). Cancel wars: How universities can foster free speech, promote inclusion, and renew democracy. University of Chicago Press.
Chemerinsky, E., & Gillman, H. (2026). Campus speech and academic freedom: A guide for difficult times. Yale University Press.
Kalven Committee. (1967). Report on the university’s role in political and social action. University of Chicago. https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports/KalvenRprt_0.pdf
Poskanzer, S. G. (2025). The university’s voice: Principled silence and purposeful speech. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Soucek, B. (2026). The opinionated university: Academic freedom, diversity, and the myth of neutrality in American higher education. University of Chicago Press.

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Institutional Over-Compliance

Pedota et al. (2026) published details about the effects of Texas Senate Bill 17 (2023) on one campus. Administrators at the public university they studied could not tell what the new bill’s vague terms covered, so they handed decisions to the institution’s legal counsel. In general, counsel’s professional duty is to minimize legal exposure, so they read each unclear term in the bill restrictively. The result was a set of campus rules that restricted teaching, research, and student activities that the law itself actually did not prohibit.

These researchers called the pattern “suppressive compliance”, as the institution’s compliance process, not the bill’s actual text, produced most of the suppression. Their evidence came from nearly 100 interviews with administrators, faculty, and student leaders. PEN America’s Index of Educational Gag Orders documents the undefined terms that appear in many similar bills with “divisive concepts” and “promote” among them. See chilling effect. The AAUP (2025) issued a formal statement against the same behavior under the name anticipatory obedience, which the statement defines as acting to comply in advance of any pressure to do so.

Institutional over-compliance is the existence of anticipatory or extra restriction: the difference between what a law requires and what the institution removes. For example, a university might close a mentoring program for first-generation students because a statute bans DEI offices, even though the statute never mentions mentoring programs.

Why would an institution restrict more than it must? Penney (2022) answered from First Amendment scholarship. When a law’s coverage is uncertain, risk-averse people comply past its limits, and they give up lawful conduct that the law never reached. An institution is a risk-averse actor with lawyers, donors, and alumni. A person under the same uncertainty restricts their own speech and teaching, but some roles on a campus may have decision-making power that restricts others’ activities. See self-censorship.

What if the majority of what institutions present as legal necessity is choice? Soucek (2026) examined institutional decisions made after the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (2023), and he argued that many of those decisions were choices that the law did not require. See anti-DEI legislation.

Some scholars defend the caution. Whittington (2024) examined the constitutional protections for teaching at public universities and concluded that the protections are thinner than faculty assume. Legislatures hold real authority over public institutions, and courts have said little about where that authority ends. On this account, a counsel who reads an unclear statute restrictively is responding to genuine legal exposure, because a wrong guess can cost the institution funding or a lawsuit. Pedota et al. (2026) noted this pressure directly. Administrators in their study acted under legislative hearings and public threats of funding consequences.

Thin is not the same as absent. The protections Whittington (2024) describes exist because courts have read them into the First Amendment over time; thin means their edges are uncertain, not that a public university operates with no constitutional law over it.

Penney (2022), Pedota et al. (2026), and the AAUP (2025) treat the extra restriction as a harm. The answering position treats it as management of real risk. How much legal risk an institution should accept to keep lawful work running is the key question.

What have courts previously ruled around this? A court can act only when the over-compliance is written down as an enforceable policy. In Austin v. University of Florida Board of Trustees (2022), the university used its own conflict-of-interest policy to bar professors from testifying as expert witnesses in a lawsuit against the state. No statute required the bar. A federal court granted a preliminary injunction, blocking the policy while the case proceeded, and the court found that the university had suppressed the professors’ speech because it anticipated the displeasure of state officials. The university then revised the policy. But much institutional over-compliance isn’t written down.

For each restriction on a campus, name the statute and section that requires it. A restriction with no citation was a choice, and a choice can be reversed without any change in the law.

Sources
American Association of University Professors. (2025). Against anticipatory obedience. https://www.aaup.org/report/against-anticipatory-obedience
American Association of University Professors, Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. (n.d.). Trackers [Ongoing trackers]. Retrieved July 5, 2026, from https://www.aaup.org/about/programs/protecting-academic-freedom/center-defense-academic-freedom/
Austin v. University of Florida Board of Trustees, No. 1:21-cv-00184 (N.D. Fla. Jan. 21, 2022).
Chronicle of Higher Education. (n.d.). DEI legislation tracker [Ongoing tracker]. Retrieved July 5, 2026, from https://www.chronicle.com/article/here-are-the-states-where-lawmakers-are-seeking-to-ban-colleges-dei-efforts
PEN America. (n.d.). Index of educational gag orders [Ongoing tracker]. Retrieved July 5, 2026, from https://pen.org/educational-censorship/index-of-educational-gag-orders/
Pedota, J., Garces, L. M., Epstein, E. M. B., Ngaosi, N. C., & Khalayleh, N. (2026). Understanding the construction of compliance with anti-“DEI” legislation (EdWorkingPaper 26-1463). Annenberg Institute at Brown University. https://doi.org/10.26300/wkdb-4k52
Penney, J. W. (2022). Understanding chilling effects. Minnesota Law Review, 106(3), 1451–1530.
Soucek, B. (2026). The opinionated university: Academic freedom, diversity, and the myth of neutrality in American higher education. University of Chicago Press.
Whittington, K. E. (2024). You can’t teach that! The battle over university classrooms. Polity Press.

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Lack of Job Safety for Educators

Ask most people to picture a college educator and they will picture a professor with a promised job for life. That picture actually describes a minority of the people teaching on US campuses, and it never described the staff who work alongside them. In this glossary, lack of job safety means working without formal protection against non-renewal, discipline, disfavor, or elimination of the position. Tenure, which itself has come under fire, provides that protection to some faculty. Most instructors, and nearly all staff, post-docs, graduate workers, and administrators, have no equivalent. For example, an adjunct instructor who teaches on a per-course contract basis can lose every course in a one-line email before the semester starts, with no stated cause.

Job insecurity makes it harder to protect classrooms and co-curricular spaces from the myriad threats facing higher education at the current moment. In fall 2023, more than two-thirds (68%) of US faculty members held contingent appointments ineligible for tenure, up from about 47% in fall 1987, and nearly half of all faculty members worked part time (Colby, 2025). The pattern differs by campus type. In fall of 2023, contingent appointments ranged from about 51% of faculty at Research I universities to as many as 83% at community colleges (Colby, 2025).

Staff and administrators generally work on at-will or annual terms. A person whose position renews every year depends on the decision of whoever renews it.

Institutional finances threaten positions of every kind, even tenured ones. Scholars disagree about why college costs have risen so much. Archibald and Feldman (2011) argued that higher education is a labor-intensive service whose costs rise with the wages of educated workers across the larger economy. Ginsberg (2011) argued that growth in administrative positions drove the increases, and that instructional budgets were reduced to pay for that growth. The disagreement matters for this entry because reduced instructional budgets are one standard explanation for the shift to contingent hiring: an instructor on a per-course contract costs less than a tenure-line position, and the contract can end in any term.

The number of students who are enrolled creates more pressure on employment. Grawe (2018) projected that the number of college-aged students would begin dropping in 2026 and fall almost 15% within five years, because US birth rates dropped after the 2008 recession and stayed low.

If enrollment falls far enough, institutions begin to cut programs or close, and a closure ends every job, tenured or not. Tenure itself contains recognized exceptions for financial exigency and formal program discontinuance, so tenure guards against dismissal for cause but not against the loss of the program or the institution.

Whether tenure is the right protection is itself debated. Reichman (2021) writes that tenure, is the central protection for academic freedom, and described its shrinking coverage as the profession’s largest unsolved problem. Brennan and Magness (2019) criticized tenure from an economic standpoint, arguing that it protects incumbent faculty, reduces institutional flexibility, and stretches the academic freedom rationale into a general job protection.

How did higher education become so reliant on contingent instructors? Bousquet (2008) argued that universities built this economic situation deliberately by producing more doctoral graduates than jobs, and then hiring the surplus cheaply per course. Kezar, DePaola, and Scott (2019) call this a gig labor system. Childress (2019) traced the same outcome to many small budget decisions rather than to a coherent plan.

Figlio, Schapiro, and Soter (2015) found that at Northwestern University, students learned more in introductory courses taught by contingent instructors than in the same courses taught by tenure-line faculty. Ehrenberg and Zhang (2005) found that institutions relying more heavily on contingent faculty had lower graduation rates. The first study measured individual teaching at one wealthy institution with well supported contingent instructors. The second measured whole institutions, where heavy contingent hiring often marks underfunding. Together, the two studies suggest high competence of contingent instructors.

There is also a pay difference, and it is larger than many outside academia know. Part-time faculty members earned an average of $4,093 per three-credit course section in 2023–24 (American Association of University Professors, 2025). So for many people, staying in academia is already a pay cut compared to industry, accepted in exchange for a job that may not renew, in a labor market with few openings per field per year and therefore little choice about where to live. Leaving usually means leaving the profession, and that exit cost keeps people in insecure positions and weakens their bargaining power inside them.

The behavioral consequences follow directly. For a contingent instructor, the cost of a complaint, a screenshot, or a legislator’s attention is a contract that likely will not be renewed. A person on an annual contract may take fewer teaching risks, avoid conflict, and stay quiet in disputes. That is why self-preservation may be a strategy used among contingent educators. See self-censorship. See conflict transformation. Faculty are also leaving. In an April 2026 survey of 4,003 researchers at US four-year institutions, one in ten faculty members working in states that restrict academic speech reported seeking a job in another state, 6 percent reported trying to leave higher education entirely, and 4 percent had looked for work in another country (Ithaka, 2026). For the constitutional limits on employment consequences, see free speech. See external threats.

Any account of academic freedom that ignores employment structure misses most of the people in classrooms, and any account of campus pressure that counts only faculty misses the staff with even fewer protections. When you weigh a campus’s protections, ask three questions: whom they cover, which pressures they cover against, and what happens to the people they leave out.

Sources
American Association of University Professors. (2025). The annual report on the economic status of the profession, 2024–25. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/annual-report-economic-status-profession-24-25
Archibald, R. B., & Feldman, D. H. (2011). Why does college cost so much? Oxford University Press.
Bousquet, M. (2008). How the university works: Higher education and the low-wage nation. NYU Press.
Brennan, J., & Magness, P. (2019). Cracks in the ivory tower: The moral mess of higher education. Oxford University Press.
Childress, H. (2019). The adjunct underclass: How America’s colleges betrayed their faculty, their students, and their mission. University of Chicago Press.
Colby, G. (2025). Data snapshot: Tenure and contingency in US higher education, fall 2023. Academe, 111(2). https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/spring-2025/data-snapshot-tenure-and-contingency-us-higher-education-fall-2023
Ehrenberg, R. G., & Zhang, L. (2005). Do tenured and tenure-track faculty matter? Journal of Human Resources, 40(3), 647–659.
Figlio, D. N., Schapiro, M. O., & Soter, K. B. (2015). Are tenure track professors better teachers? Review of Economics and Statistics, 97(4), 715–724.
Ginsberg, B. (2011). The fall of the faculty: The rise of the all-administrative university and why it matters. Oxford University Press.
Grawe, N. D. (2018). Demographics and the demand for higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ithaka S+R. (2026). The impact of state and federal policies on academic researchers. https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/the-impact-of-state-and-federal-policies-on-academic-researchers/
Kezar, A., DePaola, T., & Scott, D. T. (2019). The gig academy: Mapping labor in the neoliberal university. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Reichman, H. (2021). Understanding academic freedom. Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Norms of Behavior and Culture

Rules for how members of a campus should behave are often accidentally written from outside sources: internet discourse norms, other familiar schools’ policies, civility clauses in system policy, conduct provisions in state statutes. But actual norms of behavior are different from imposed rules or assumptions about how to engage. Norms of behavior are the expectations a campus community itself treats as normal (Tankard & Paluck, 2016): how much reading is generally expected, whether cheating is common, how people handle conflict, how colleagues treat one another or speak about and to students, what members do when they disagree, whether colleagues openly mock one another, and whether that behavior draws consequences. See bullying.

A campus has norms about everything: about whether submitting a colleague to a watchlist is treated as acceptable conduct or as a breach. See watchlists. A campus also has norms about disagreement itself: whether people discuss hard topics regularly, or only when a controversy forces the discussion. See flashpoints. See open disagreement.

It’s not just the leadership or handbook authors who create norms. Evidence connects healthy norms to regular practices. Thomas and Brower (2018) studied nine campuses through focus groups and interviews and found that habits of political discussion, in and beyond the classroom, separated politically healthy campuses from disengaged ones. Similarly, a campus that authentically offers regular dialogue and debate about tough topics builds that habit before a flashpoint tests it. See flashpoints.

Dialogue about the campus community itself can also make the norms themselves an object of empowered change. Zúñiga, Nagda, Chesler, and Cytron-Walker (2007) codified an intergroup dialogue model in which participants critically reflect on the group patterns and institutional arrangements they operate inside, rather than only exchanging positions. Sustained Dialogue, one form of intergroup dialogue, builds this reflection into its structure: Saunders (1999) designed Sustained Dialogue’s five-stage process in which the same participants meet over time, map the relationships and patterns driving their situation, and design actions they can take themselves. Applied on a campus, the norms the group names become what the group works to change. See dialogue in practice.

The research on changing norms also points to perception and to influential community members. Tankard and Paluck (2016) found that norms shift when members’ perception of what is typical and approved shifts, which institutions can influence through public signals and through the visible behavior of well-connected members. Paluck, Shepherd, and Aronow (2016) tested this in a randomized experiment across 56 schools: when influential students publicly modeled anti-conflict behavior, disciplinary reports of peer conflict fell at their schools. The experiment took place in secondary schools, so it transfers to campuses as informed caution rather than proof. See relationship-building. See conflict transformation.

Leaders also influence norms through what they model, reward, and do. Keashly and Neuman (2010) found that bullying in higher education persists where supervision and evaluation permit it, so what a manager tolerates becomes part of what the campus treats as acceptable. Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, and Whitt (2005) studied twenty institutions with stronger-than-predicted student outcomes and found a common feature: espoused values were matched by incentives, policies, and handbooks, so that the practices the institution said it valued were the practices it funded, staffed, and rewarded. A stated value with no incentive behind it does not become a norm.

What are the other ways campuses influence these norms? Relationships with staff are one of the channels through which students absorb political norms. Binder and Kidder (2022) studied campus activism on both the left and the right and found that students are sorted into separate political channels: progressive students build close ties with student affairs offices, cultural centers, and academic departments, while conservative students are drawn toward outside organizations that involve them. These researchers found that the closeness affects activist identity development: progressive students embedded in staff relationships tend to grow cynical about university leadership when they observe the gap between what the institution espouses and what its staff experience, so the disconnect itself teaches a norm about not trusting the campus leaders. Binder and Kidder (2022) also identified dialogue programs, Sustained Dialogue among them, as a studied alternative to the two channels, with the caveat that such programs are an alternative to these funnels toward contentious activism. See dialogue in practice. See affective polarization. See campus unity. See civic trust.

Kuh and Whitt (1988) described how campus cultures are transmitted: through orientation, ceremonies, traditions, and the stories members tell others about what the institution is. A new student learns what is normal here in the first weeks from what returning students model. Clark (1972) documented a related mechanism, the organizational saga: a shared story about institutional identity, such as “we are a place that asks questions,” that members repeat until the story shapes conduct. Tierney (1988) argued that leaders can read this culture and work on it deliberately, because a culture is a set of practices an institution maintains, not a fixed trait.

Sources
Binder, A. J., & Kidder, J. L. (2022). The channels of student activism: How the left and right are winning (and losing) in campus politics today. University of Chicago Press.
Clark, B. R. (1972). The organizational saga in higher education. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(2), 178–184.
Keashly, L., & Neuman, J. H. (2010). Faculty experiences with bullying in higher education: Causes, consequences, and management. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 32(1), 48–70.
Kuh, G. D., Kinzie, J., Schuh, J. H., & Whitt, E. J. (2005). Student success in college: Creating conditions that matter. Jossey-Bass.
Kuh, G. D., & Whitt, E. J. (1988). The invisible tapestry: Culture in American colleges and universities (ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1). Association for the Study of Higher Education.
Paluck, E. L., Shepherd, H., & Aronow, P. M. (2016). Changing climates of conflict: A social network experiment in 56 schools. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(3), 566–571.
PEN America. (n.d.). Index of educational gag orders [Ongoing tracker]. Retrieved July 5, 2026, from https://pen.org/educational-censorship/index-of-educational-gag-orders/
Saunders, H. H. (1999). A public peace process: Sustained dialogue to transform racial and ethnic conflicts. St. Martin’s Press.
Tankard, M. E., & Paluck, E. L. (2016). Norm perception as a vehicle for social change. Social Issues and Policy Review, 10(1), 181–211.
Thomas, N., & Brower, M. (2018). Conceptualizing and assessing campus climates for political learning and engagement in democracy. Journal of College and Character, 19(4), 247–263.
Tierney, W. G. (1988). Organizational culture in higher education: Defining the essentials. The Journal of Higher Education, 59(1), 2–21.
Zúñiga, X., Nagda, B. A., Chesler, M., & Cytron-Walker, A. (2007). Intergroup dialogue in higher education: Meaningful learning about social justice (ASHE Higher Education Report, Vol. 32, No. 4). Jossey-Bass.

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Open Disagreement

Open disagreement is the practice of stating and defending conflicting positions in the same room, with each position judged on its evidence and reasoning, and with the expectation that positions can change based on what is shared. It is distinct from debate, which aims to win, and from avoidance, which aims to prevent conflict by saying nothing.

Open disagreement counteracts the negative aspects of groups. Sunstein (2002) showed that groups of like-minded people move toward more extreme versions of their shared view when they deliberate only with each other, and that encountering disagreement counteracts this effect. Mason (2018) showed why that corrective is rare: partisanship has become a social identity, so many in the US increasingly avoid people who disagree with them, and members of the two parties feel more hostility toward each other, even though their policy positions differ no more than they differed before. A person who avoids disagreement won’t hear influential reasons to reconsider, so that person is at risk of becoming the extreme version Sunstein (2002) describes.

Universities are among the few institutions that practice disagreement on purpose. Peer review is a formal process in which experts state and defend conflicting judgments of the same work. A well-run classroom is a setting in which students state and defend conflicting positions under a structure the instructor provides. Gurin, Nagda, and Zúñiga (2013) measured what happens when students practice structured, sustained disagreement with peers from different backgrounds: those students learn to hold a position, hear the opposing position, and change their minds when the evidence warrants it. See dialogue in practice.

That practice is now seen as risky for some. When a stated position risks a screenshot, a complaint, gossip, or a legislator’s attention, students, instructors, and staff who participate in or lead discussions stop stating positions. See self-censorship. See chilling effect. When no one states positions, there is no disagreement in the room. The movement toward extremity that Sunstein (2002) described then continues with nothing to correct it, and universities stop being a source of reasoned disagreement. Clearly facilitated expectations can provide cover. For example, students can take risks when stating and defending a position that is different from others is the assigned task. See clear classroom expectations.

For the work each person involved in higher education does, it’s worth reflecting. Where is the expectation of open, reasoned disagreement clearly stated and incentivized for all to avoid slipping into groupthink?

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Outside Funding

Outside funding for higher education typically includes appropriations, federal grants, tuition supported by federal aid, and philanthropy, and each comes with conditions.

The dependence on outsiders is not itself the problem. Outside funding is how US research colleges came into existence, including land-grant acts and postwar federal research funding above all. See democratic mission of higher education.

However, US scholars see coordinated attempts to abuse influence from donors and governments. Wilson and Kamola (2021) found that a Koch network funded both websites listing disinformation about higher education as well as think tanks who built bills to control campuses through legislation. Douglass (2021) described the state-side version across countries: governments using funding control to steer or punish universities that produce inconvenient findings. See autocratic government interference in academia.

The analytic line is in the terms: funding that builds capacity the institution governs, against funding that buys outcomes the institution would not otherwise choose. Ask of any money which side of that line it falls on, before the agreement is signed.

Sources
Douglass, J. A. (2021). Neo-nationalism and universities: Populists, autocrats, and the future of higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
UC Irvine International Justice Clinic. (2026, May). Report on the impact of state and federal policies on academic freedom in the United States. https://ijclinic.law.uci.edu/2026/05/28/ijc-publishes-report-on-the-impact-of-state-and-federal-policies-on-academic-freedom-in-the-united-states/
Wilson, R., & Kamola, I. (2021). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.

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Political Not Partisan

Institutions under pressure are now treating everything political as forbidden: cancelling civic programming, scrubbing the word democracy from materials, declining to teach elections. In doing so they abandon work no statute prohibits. See institutional over-compliance.

Political not partisan is the distinction that rescues that work. Politics is the shared work of self-government: how communities decide, disagree, and live with decisions. Partisanship is allegiance to a team contesting power. Teaching the first requires no position on the second.

The distinction has been developed into teachable practice. Thomas (2010) and Thomas and Brower (2017) developed political learning as content: discussing public issues, examining power, practicing deliberation, with the instructor’s discipline located in how questions are framed and evidence handled, not in concealing that the questions are political. Gurin, Nagda, and Zúñiga (2013) measured the effects of structured dialogue pedagogy that teaches disagreement across difference without asking anyone to change teams.

The distinction is hard to hold in public, and Mason (2018) explained why: partisanship is now a social identity fused with other identities, so audiences primed by identity conflict read political content as team signaling. That is a fact about the environment, not about the teaching. See affective polarization.

The distinction has to be stated rather than assumed. Announcing it, in the syllabus and in the program description, is what makes civic education defensible under scrutiny. See expectations of neutrality in teaching.

Sources
Gurin, P., Nagda, B. A., & Zúñiga, X. (2013). Dialogue across difference: Practice, theory, and research on intergroup dialogue. Russell Sage Foundation.
Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil agreement: How politics became our identity. University of Chicago Press.
Thomas, N. (Ed.). (2010). Educating for deliberative democracy [Special issue]. New Directions for Higher Education, (152).
Thomas, N., & Brower, M. (2017). The politically engaged classroom. In E. C. Matto, A. R. M. McCartney, E. A. Bennion, & D. Simpson (Eds.), Teaching civic engagement across the disciplines (pp. 21–33). American Political Science Association.

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Relationship-Building

Relationship-building is a restorative practice in which people have chances to understand each other and establish themselves as individuals, not just nameless outgroup members, before they disagree or experience conflict. Saunders (2005) was a diplomat who published extensively about the role of relationships in his career of negotiations and peacebuilding efforts amidst deep-rooted violent conflicts. He argued that the unit of political change was always the relationship rather than a resulting agreement or treaty.

Han (2024) reached the same conclusion as Saunders (2005) from fieldwork in a divided community. Participants in a church community formed relationships across racial lines, including with Trump supporters, through years of sustained practice, and those relationships made joint work possible among people who continued to disagree politically. See coalition building. See dialogue in practice.

Saunders (2005) created a working definition of relationship with five components, so that a person can examine a strained relationship one part at a time.

Identity is the life experience that each party brings to the interaction.
Interests are the things each party needs, which often reach beyond what each party says it wants.
Power is the capacity to influence the course of events, a capacity that Saunders (2005) argued people can build together as well as hold over each other.
Perceptions, misperceptions, and stereotypes that each party holds about the other.
Patterns of interaction, meaning the habits the parties have built for dealing with each other, including their habits for handling disagreement. See norms of behavior.

A person facing a community problem can ask which relationship is damaged, and within that, which component is strained. At the heart of many conflicts, there is often a dismissed identity, an unmet need, power held by one side, an inaccurate belief about the other party, or a habit, such as avoidance, that has itself become part of the problem.

Campus practice often treats flareups as something that can be solved, giving little attention to the relationships between the people involved. The people in a campus community keep studying and working together after each decision, so every decision is also a decision about relationships. A process that settles a flareup and ignores the relationships has addressed part of the conflict. The relationships remain strained, and the strained relationships will contribute to the next dispute.

Many campuses have begun building capacity for restorative practices that allow for community building, recognizing that higher education is often marked by difficult systems that result in unmet needs. Zehr (2002) proposed that formal systems, instead of enforcing rules and compliance, ask who has been harmed, what that person needs, and whose obligation it is to meet those needs when there is a violation of community safety. The alternative is force, and force does its own damage. When an institution brings in police to break up a protest, the people caught up in it experience that act as a violation, and on the principles of Zehr’s (2002) restorative work, a violation of that kind is a harm done to people that creates unmet needs. Because the force came from the institution, those same principles place the harm, and the responsibility to repair it, with the institution that used force against its own community. Relationship-building is at the heart of many alternative dispute processes. See conflict transformation.

There are practical questions that one can ask before the next conflict arrives: which relationships would a controversy test, and which practices can strengthen those relationships starting today? A campus that builds relationships in calm periods can make political strides when a dispute begins.

Sources
Han, H. (2024). Undivided: The quest for racial solidarity in an American church. Knopf.
Saunders, H. H. (2005). Politics is about relationship: A blueprint for the citizens’ century. Palgrave Macmillan.
Zehr, H. (2002). The little book of restorative justice. Good Books.

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Researcher Safety

Threats against researchers are documented and rising. Scholars at Risk’s Free to Think 2025 records harassment campaigns against scholars in the United States alongside global imprisonments and dismissals. Those targeted from US higher education institutions tend to work in climate science, vaccines and public health, gender, and the study of elections and disinformation (Scholars at Risk, 2025). The pattern of those who are harassed is based on the research topic, not the researcher’s behavior or actions.

Researcher safety is the physical and digital security a scholar needs to conduct and publish research: freedom from threats, harassment campaigns, and targeting that make a line of inquiry personally dangerous. It is a precondition for inquiry, not a legal right. Where safety fails, the freedoms treated elsewhere in this glossary go unused regardless of whether they exist on paper. See chilling effect. See self-censorship.

The campaign form has a scholarly record. Ferber (2018) detailed organized public targeted harassment of faculty: coordinated attacks intended to silence scholars and censor curriculum. Drawing on the experiences of targeted academics, Ferber (2018) established the pattern of the attacks, the unevenness of institutional responses, and the concentration of the attacks on scholars studying race, gender, and inequality. Her account supplies what the trackers cannot: the anatomy of a single campaign as its target experiences it, from the triggering circulation through the threat wave to the institutional response or its absence.

The instruments of targeting can be named. Doxing publishes a researcher’s home address, family details, and personal information to an audience assembled for hostility. See doxing. Watchlists convert research into a standing public listing. See watchlists. A third instrument is specific to public institutions: open-records statutes, written for government accountability, are used to demand years of a researcher’s correspondence. The requests are lawful, costly to answer, and effective at signaling that a line of research draws surveillance. The requests need not find anything; the years of compelled disclosure are the deterrent.

What institutions owe targeted researchers is the contested practical question. Reichman (2021) located institutional defense of faculty inside the academic-freedom framework itself. The 1915 and 1940 AAUP architecture assumed institutions would stand between scholars and external pressure, and a university that leaves a targeted researcher to face a harassment campaign alone has withdrawn part of the protection the framework promises, whatever its handbook says. Ferber (2018) showed the same gap from the target’s side: institutional responses ranged from public defense to silence, and the response received bore little relation to the severity of the attack. The open questions are operational and unevenly answered across institutions: whether security, legal support for records requests, and public defense of the research are provided, and whether they are provided equally to the tenured professor and the postdoctoral researcher whose exposure is greater and protection thinner. See lack of job safety.

The disagreement worth naming runs through the records-request instrument. Transparency advocates, including some scholars of public accountability, hold that public-university researchers are public employees and their correspondence is legitimately public, and that narrowing open-records law to protect researchers would blunt a tool journalism and watchdog groups depend on. The answering position is that requests targeting research content operate as harassment regardless of the requester’s formality, and that states can exempt scholarly correspondence, as some have, without touching administrative records. The dispute is real because both sides defend accountability instruments; they disagree about which institution the instrument is holding accountable.

For a reader assessing their own institution, the practical questions are concrete: whether a protocol exists before a campaign starts, who answers a records request aimed at research correspondence, and whether the institution’s public defense of targeted research arrives within days or not at all.

Sources
Ferber, A. L. (2018). “Are you willing to die for this work?” Public targeted online harassment in higher education: SWS presidential address. Gender & Society, 32(3), 301–320.
Reichman, H. (2021). Understanding academic freedom. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Scholars at Risk. (2025). Free to think 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2025/

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Self-Censorship

Faculty in the United States are declining to teach, write, and research things they are professionally qualified to address, at scale. A 2024 national faculty survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, drawing more than 8,000 respondents from a sample of roughly 165,000 faculty, found that 52% had altered written language to avoid controversy, 62% refrained from terms students might find offensive, 57% refrained from terms administrators might, 35% reported less freedom to teach without interference, and 53% worried their work made them targets (AAC&U & AAUP, 2024). The behavior is not confined to states with restrictive laws: faculty in states without anti-DEI legislation report it at close to the same rates, adjusting in advance of any enforcement. The fear is doing the work the statute would have done. See anti-DEI legislation.

Self-censorship is the practice of declining to say, teach, write, or research something one is professionally qualified to address, in response to a fear of consequences. The consequences may be formal (loss of job, denial of tenure, withdrawal of funding, legal exposure) or informal (loss of standing among colleagues, a social media attack, student complaints, administrator scrutiny, family safety). The decision may be deliberate or may operate below awareness as a habit of trimming, softening, omitting, and avoiding.

Self-censorship is not the same as discretion. Discretion is the professional judgment that a point is not worth making, or not here, or not yet; faculty exercise it constantly and should. Self-censorship is the same outward behavior produced by a different cause: not the judgment that the point should not be made, but the fear of what will happen if it is. The two are hard to tell apart from outside, often from inside, and that difficulty is part of the problem. For example, a faculty member narrowing her teaching for three years under political pressure may experience the narrowing as her own pedagogical evolution. The chilling effect is the climate of pressure that produces the behavior; self-censorship is the behavior itself, including the cases where the person has lost track of the cause. See chilling effect.

Schauer (1978) described the underlying mechanism. A speaker who cannot tell whether a law covers her words faces a gamble: if she speaks and guesses wrong, she may lose her job, and if she stays quiet, the cost falls on other people who never learn the choice was made. The risk makes silence a rational choice, and its effect is collectively invisible.

Self-censorship operates at multiple levels of formality. At the formal end, a faculty member removes a reading because the legislature has banned the framework it uses. At the next level, she removes it because she anticipates the state might, or a student might complain, or a screenshot might travel. At the next, she reframes the material so the framework is not named. At the next, she drops the unit entirely, having decided in advance it is too much trouble. At the most diffuse level, she selects a research question that never requires her to take up the subject at all. Each level is harder to detect than the one above, and each produces a smaller body of taught and published knowledge than would otherwise exist.

The role of surveillance is worth naming directly. Faculty watchlists, doxing campaigns, screenshot-driven targeting, and freedom-of-information requests aimed at public-institution faculty have created an environment in which any sentence in any classroom may, with low probability per sentence but non-trivial cumulative probability, become a viral artifact and then a threat. The rational response of someone who knows she may be recorded at any moment is to speak as if she is recorded at every moment. That is what self-censorship looks like operationally. See watchlists.

Scholars disagree about what the survey data show. In a 2024 survey of 6,269 faculty across 55 institutions, 42% said they were at least somewhat likely to self-censor in classroom discussions, and 55% of conservative faculty reported hiding their views to keep their jobs, against 17% of liberal faculty (FIRE, 2024). Pedota et al. (2025) found faculty pulling back from race-related scholarship before any bill had become enforceable law. The FIRE (2024) findings suggest self-censorship concentrates among conservative faculty inside institutions; the Pedota et al. (2025) findings suggest it concentrates among scholars of race facing external legislation. Both patterns are real. Whether the primary driver is internal campus culture or external state action determines which remedy applies.

The scholarly conversation about remedies runs in two directions, not always compatible. One emphasizes legal and policy infrastructure: clear handbook protections, robust tenure, and institutional commitments to defend faculty against external attack (Reichman, 2021; Chemerinsky & Gillman, 2026). The other emphasizes climate and relationship: self-censorship is partly a phenomenon of isolation, and faculty who feel they have colleagues and administrators to consult are less likely to disappear into voluntary compliance (Ben-Porath, 2023; Schwartz, 2024; Holt-Shannon & Mallory, 2014). The two are complementary rather than competing.

Self-censorship is a property of individuals trimming what they say; over-compliance is its institutional version, a university that bans more than the law requires. The two feed each other. An over-compliant institution produces faculty who self-censor because they see no protection, and self-censoring faculty produce an institution that does not hear the resistance it would otherwise hear and drifts further toward over-compliance because no one pushes back. See institutional over-compliance.

Critics make two points. The phrase is sometimes used to describe ordinary professional discretion: a faculty member who declines to air her political views in class is not self-censoring, she is teaching. And claims of self-censorship are sometimes deployed strategically, to avoid the harder work of defending a position. Both critiques are real; neither overturns the empirical picture.

For a reader assessing their own campus, the test is behavioral: compare this year’s syllabi, research proposals, and course offerings to last year’s. Self-censorship leaves evidence not in what people say but in what they stopped saying.

Sources
American Association of Colleges and Universities, American Association of University Professors, & NORC at the University of Chicago. (2024). Academic freedom and civil discourse in higher education: A national study of faculty attitudes and perceptions. https://www.aacu.org/research/academic-freedom-and-civil-discourse-in-higher-education-a-national-study-of-faculty-attitudes-and-perceptions
Ben-Porath, S. R. (2023). Cancel wars: How universities can foster free speech, promote inclusion, and renew democracy. University of Chicago Press.
Chemerinsky, E., & Gillman, H. (2026). Campus speech and academic freedom: A guide for difficult times. Yale University Press.
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. (2024). Silence in the classroom: The 2024 FIRE faculty survey report. https://www.fire.org/facultyreport
Holt-Shannon, M., & Mallory, B. L. (2014). The compost of disagreement: Creating safe spaces for engagement and action. Journal of Public Deliberation, 10(1), Article 22.
Pedota, J., Garces, L. M., Epstein, R., Ngaosi, T., & Khalayleh, A. (2025). “We’re on our own out here”: Faculty member responses to legislative threats to academic freedom and scholarship on race. The Journal of Higher Education, 96(7).
Reichman, H. (2021). Understanding academic freedom. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Schauer, F. (1978). Fear, risk and the first amendment: Unraveling the “chilling effect.” Boston University Law Review, 58, 685–732.
Schwartz, L. (2024). Try to love the questions: From debate to dialogue in classrooms and life. Princeton University Press.

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Sense of Belonging

Sense of belonging, as Strayhorn (2018) defined it for higher education, is a student’s perceived social support on campus: a feeling of connectedness and the experience of mattering to, being accepted by, and being valued by the campus community. Belonging is distinct from inclusion, which describes institutional practice, and from campus unity, which describes the community as a whole: belonging is one student’s perception. Because it is a perception, two students in the same seminar can differ sharply in belonging while their grades and their treatment on paper look identical. For example, a first-generation student who receives a curt reply from a professor might read the reply as evidence that students like her are out of place at the institution, while a classmate reads the same reply as ordinary busyness.

Social psychologists studied the need to belong before higher education researchers measured it on campus. Baumeister and Leary (1995) argued that the need to belong is a fundamental human motivation and that people who lack stable, positive relationships show measurable harm to health and functioning. Hurtado and Carter (1997) brought the measure to campus: in a national study of Latino college students, they found that students who perceived racial and ethnic tension on campus reported a weaker sense of belonging. In this line of research, the climate is the cause and belonging is the effect. See chilled climate for learning.

How widespread is belonging, and for whom is it weakest? Gopalan and Brady (2020) analyzed the only nationally representative U.S. survey of college students that has measured belonging, and they found that first-year students on average “somewhat agree” (p. 134) that they belong at their school. Belonging varied by group and by institution type: at four-year institutions, racial-ethnic minority students and first-generation students reported lower belonging than their peers, while at two-year institutions the pattern reversed. Students at four-year schools who reported higher first-year belonging also showed stronger persistence, engagement, and mental health up to two years later. Gopalan and Brady (2020) called these patterns descriptive: the data show an association but cannot separate cause from effect.

Walton and Cohen (2011) tested cause and effect with a randomized experiment: a one-hour reading-and-writing exercise that framed early social adversity in college as normal and temporary rather than as proof of being out of place. Black students who completed the exercise earned higher grades and reported better health over the following three years than students in control groups. Strayhorn (2018) synthesized the wider record across student populations and reached an aligned conclusion: belonging is associated with engagement, persistence, and mental health, and the association is strongest for students with the most reason to doubt that they belong.

Walton et al. (2023) then tested the same exercise at scale, in a randomized experiment with 26,911 students at 22 institutions, delivered online in under thirty minutes before college. Students who completed it finished the first year as full-time students at a higher rate, and the largest gains appeared among groups that had historically finished at lower rates. There is a condition on the result: gains appeared only on campuses where a student’s group had real opportunities to belong. Walton et al. (2023) narrowed the earlier claim rather than reversing it. A message can change how a student interprets a hard first semester, and the campus must then supply experiences that confirm the message. See community building. See inclusive excellence.

These scholars agree that belonging is real, that it varies by group, and that it can be influenced. They are less settled on measurement: Gopalan and Brady (2020) wrote that the field still needs better and more consistent measures, and studies that use different instruments resist comparison. For a reader assessing their own campus, the practical questions come from the research itself. From Strayhorn (2018): which students here have regular experiences of mattering, being accepted, and being valued, and which students have reason to doubt it? From Walton et al. (2023): when a program tells students that belonging grows with time, what on this campus confirms the message? Look at the places where the answer is written down: the syllabus, the first advising email, the first-week assignment.

Sources
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.
Gopalan, M., & Brady, S. T. (2020). College students’ sense of belonging: A national perspective. Educational Researcher, 49(2), 134–137.
Hurtado, S., & Carter, D. F. (1997). Effects of college transition and perceptions of the campus racial climate on Latino college students’ sense of belonging. Sociology of Education, 70(4), 324–345.
Strayhorn, T. L. (2018). College students’ sense of belonging: A key to educational success for all students (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science, 331(6023), 1447–1451.
Walton, G. M., Murphy, M. C., Logel, C., Yeager, D. S., Goyer, J. P., Brady, S. T., Emerson, K. T. U., Paunesku, D., Fotuhi, O., Blodorn, A., Boucher, K. L., Carter, E. R., Gopalan, M., Henderson, A., Kroeper, K. M., Murdock-Perriera, L. A., Reeves, S. L., Ablorh, T. T., Ansari, S., . . . Krol, N. (2023). Where and with whom does a brief social-belonging intervention promote progress in college? Science, 380(6644), 499–505.

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Shared Governance

Decisions that faculty bodies made for decades are currently being relocated by statute and board vote. Florida’s 2023 higher-education laws moved authority over general education and post-tenure review from faculty processes to boards. West Virginia University’s 2023 restructuring eliminated dozens of programs over its faculty’s formal objection. And legislatures in several states have made hiring and curricular decisions reviewable by political appointees. The relocations do not announce themselves as attacks on shared governance. Each arrives as an efficiency, accountability, or budget measure, which is why the concept needs stating.

Shared governance is the allocation of a university’s decisions among its faculty, administration, and governing board according to competence: each body holds primary authority in the domain it is best positioned to judge. The canonical allocation is the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, formulated jointly by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards. It assigns faculty primary responsibility for curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, and faculty status. Boards hold fiduciary and final legal authority. Presidents lead and mediate between them. Like the 1940 Statement it parallels, the 1966 Statement is not law: it binds only where handbooks, contracts, or collective bargaining agreements adopt it, and the unevenness of that adoption is where the present relocations find room.

Reichman (2021) stated the connection that makes governance more than administrative housekeeping: academic freedom depends on it. A faculty with no authority over curriculum cannot defend a course. A faculty with no role in hiring and tenure cannot defend a colleague. The professional right and the governance structure were built together in the same AAUP framework, and each erodes when the other does. See academic freedom. Scott (2019) grounded the faculty’s claim: disciplinary expertise is collective, since what counts as competent history or sound biology is determined by the discipline’s practitioners, so the authority to judge curriculum and colleagues follows from the same expertise that justifies academic freedom itself.

Poskanzer (2002) described the same link from the law’s side. In his account of how courts treat professors, a faculty member acts in several distinct roles, and one of them is the faculty member as an institutional citizen: a participant in running the university through senates, departments, and committees. That role, he argued, is where a faculty’s authority over curriculum and colleagues is actually exercised. Remove it, and the professional judgment academic freedom is meant to protect has no body left to act through. See academic freedom.

The disagreement over shared governance is real and runs in both directions. Boards, legislators, and some scholars of higher-education management argue that faculty governance is slow, self-interested, and unaccountable to the publics that fund institutions: a faculty senate can block but rarely build, and elected officials and appointed boards are the lawful channel of public accountability. The answering position is that speed was never the assignment. The faculty’s primary authority exists to keep academic judgments academic, and where that authority holds, a legislature that wants a program gone must persuade rather than direct. Both positions accept that boards hold final legal authority; the dispute is over what the word “primary” in the 1966 allocation is worth when the two conflict.

The condition matters for reading the present. Claims about what shared governance protects hold where shared governance holds, where handbooks carry the 1966 allocation and boards observe it. In institutions where statute has moved curriculum and tenure review to boards, the allocation no longer describes the decision path, and faculty objections become advisory. The 1966 Statement has no enforcement mechanism for that case; it assumed parties who accepted the allocation. See institutional autonomy. See institutional over-compliance.

For a reader assessing their own institution, the practical test is documentary: does the faculty handbook carry the 1966 allocation, and did the last contested academic decision actually run through it? A handbook clause that the most recent program elimination bypassed is describing a structure that no longer decides.

Sources
American Association of University Professors, American Council on Education, & Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. (1966). Statement on government of colleges and universities. https://www.aaup.org/report/statement-government-colleges-and-universities
Poskanzer, S. G. (2002). Higher education law: The faculty. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Reichman, H. (2021). Understanding academic freedom. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Scott, J. W. (2019). Knowledge, power, and academic freedom. Columbia University Press.

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Social Contract

The social contract between higher education and the public is an exchange. Universities provide four things, in Daniels’s (2021) account: access that makes social mobility possible, education that prepares citizens for self-government, facts the public can rely on, and campuses where pluralism is practiced rather than merely tolerated. The public provides the money and the independence that universities need: charters, land-grant acts, annual appropriations, federal research funding, and tax exemption. Each side keeps providing its part because the other side does. In political philosophy, the same term refers to a theory about why governments have authority; this glossary uses it only for the concrete exchange described here. See democratic mission of higher education. See truth, science, misinformation, and disinformation.

The public’s confidence has fallen in the US. In 2015, 57 percent of the country reported high confidence in higher education. In 2025, 42 percent did (Gallup, 2025). False stories about what campuses teach circulate widely, campuses are seen as expensive, and disinformation abounds. See decline in public trust. See disinformation.

The federal government is also changing what it provides. The UC Irvine International Justice Clinic (2026) documented appropriation conditions, research funding decisions, and tax-exemption threats used since January 2025 to control what universities teach and study. State legislatures have moved authority over curriculum and programs from campuses to boards and legislatures. See state legislative restrictions. See anti-DEI legislation. See autocratic government interference in academia.

Sources
Daniels, R. J., with Shreve, G., & Spector, P. (2021). What universities owe democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gallup. (2025, July 16). U.S. public trust in higher ed rises from recent low. https://news.gallup.com/poll/692519/public-trust-higher-rises-recent-low.aspx
UC Irvine International Justice Clinic. (2026, May). Report on the impact of state and federal policies on academic freedom in the United States. https://ijclinic.law.uci.edu/2026/05/28/ijc-publishes-report-on-the-impact-of-state-and-federal-policies-on-academic-freedom-in-the-united-states/

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State Legislative Restrictions

State legislatures are restricting higher education through bills related to:

Divisive concepts laws governing what may be taught;
bans on DEI offices, programs, and spending;
weakened tenure and mandated post-tenure review;
curriculum requirements;
and other governance interventions that move authority from campuses to boards and legislatures.

PEN America’s Index of Educational Gag Orders, updated monthly, documents the content-restricting family and its frequently undefined operative terms; the Chronicle of Higher Education’s DEI legislation tracker covers the DEI family. For the counts and the DEI statutes, see chilling effect and anti-DEI legislation.

Texas Senate Bill 18 (2023) was filed as a ban on granting new tenure and was passed as a way to define tenure, list the grounds that count as good cause for revoking it, and require a comprehensive performance evaluation of every tenured faculty member at least once every six years. Florida adopted a required post-tenure review every five years in 2022. Under these laws, a tenured professor’s protection against dismissal runs through a review process the legislature designed, and the grounds for removal are set by law rather than in faculty handbooks. See lack of job safety for educators.

Curriculum requirements work in two directions. Some bills remove content, and some add it. Florida Senate Bill 266 (2023) moved authority over general education courses from faculty committees to state university boards. See anti-DEI legislation. Other statutes require specific instruction, such as mandated civics coursework. See democratic mission of higher education.

In January 2023, the Florida governor appointed six new members to the board of trustees of New College, a small public liberal arts college. At its first meeting, the new board fired the sitting president without cause and installed a former Republican speaker of the Florida House in the role. Roughly 40% of the faculty left within a year (AAUP, 2023). In late 2024 and early 2025, the governor and the state Board of Governors appointed a new slate of trustees at the University of West Florida. The sitting president resigned that May, and the board then selected the governor’s former education commissioner as her successor.

In Texas, Senate Bill 37 (2025) makes faculty senates advisory bodies that governing boards can dissolve, requires university presidents to appoint senate officers, and permits boards to overturn any change to the general education curriculum. The law also created an ombudsman’s office within the state coordinating board, appointed by the governor, which investigates institutions for noncompliance and can recommend that the state withhold funding. Within months of the law taking effect, the Texas State University System dissolved its faculty senates. See shared governance. See institutional autonomy.

Notably, these statutes did not arise state by state. Wilson and Kamola (2021) traced a pipeline of templated legislation through which think tank drafts became bills in many legislatures at once. These laws are also built in ways that chill speech. See chilling effect. See institutional over-compliance. See free speech.

Sources
American Association of University Professors. (2023). Report of a special committee: Political interference and academic freedom in Florida’s public higher education system.
Chronicle of Higher Education. (n.d.). DEI legislation tracker [Ongoing tracker]. Retrieved July 5, 2026.
PEN America. (n.d.). Index of educational gag orders [Ongoing tracker]. Retrieved July 5, 2026, from https://pen.org/educational-censorship/index-of-educational-gag-orders/
Texas Senate Bill 18, 88th Leg., Reg. Sess. (Tex. 2023).
Texas Senate Bill 37, 89th Leg., Reg. Sess. (Tex. 2025).
Wilson, R., & Kamola, I. (2021). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.

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Truth, Science, Misinformation, and Disinformation

Truth and science name part of higher education’s side of a specific bargain with the public. In return for public funding, investment, and autonomy, universities produce findings by methods anyone can check, revise those findings when evidence demands, and teach people to weigh evidence for themselves. Daniels (2021) counts this stewardship of facts among the four things universities owe the democracy that charters and funds them. See social contract.

Misinformation and disinformation have raised the stakes. Disinformation, as defined in a 2017 Council of Europe report, is false information that someone creates or spreads with the intent to deceive, while misinformation is false information that people spread without intending to deceive (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017).

Both kinds of falsehood have grown prevalent due to the nature of online information. Sunstein (2017) writes about polarized echo chambers where truth is harder to come by: people sort into groups that already agree with one another, each group circulates the version of a story that fits its beliefs, and a false story that fits moves faster than truth. Benkler, Faris, and Roberts (2018) mapped the circulation of millions of news stories and found that the US media ecosystem has two parts that treat falsehood differently. In most of it, spanning outlets from the center-right to the left, outlets compete on accuracy. When one outlet publishes a false story, rivals check it, and the outlet pays a cost in credibility. In the insular right-wing part of the ecosystem, however, outlets repeated one another’s claims instead of factchecking them, and their audiences kept reading regardless, so a false story circulated there indefinitely with no correction. See affective polarization.

Every part of the university’s democratic work is harder in this environment. A false story can spread in hours. Research can take years. By the time the correction exists, the story has become what people know. Teaching has become harder as well, as students arrive expecting to have some misinformation confirmed, which pressures teachers to avoid provoking a complaint from a parent. See self-censorship. Thomas and Brower (2017) argued that truth about education, information, and democracy should not be considered partisan and that these facts should be able to be taught freely, the way chemistry is. But a subject can go untaught under enough suspicion, misinformation, and polarization in the environs. See political not partisan. See democratic mission of higher education.

And universities are subject matter in some politicized disinformation campaigns. Wilson and Kamola (2021) wrote that donor-funded organizations manufactured negative accounts of campus teaching and research years before legislatures passed bills now restricting both. For example, Campus Reform and The College Fix, outlets funded through the donor network described by the authors, produced a continual stream of stories portraying individual professors and courses as threats, while think tanks funded by the same network drafted boilerplate language that later became law. See anti-DEI legislation.

False information is free, fast, and agreeable, and checking it is slow work. Universities are the institution whose job is to build that critical thinking capacity regardless, teaching people to weigh evidence, check sources, and hear out disagreement.

Higher education’s future depends on doing this teaching and truth telling well, because a public that cannot identify misinformation and disinformation has no way to recognize which institutions are worthy of their trust, and, thus, no reason to keep funding or defending them. Campuses must collectively teach these skills well to secure the conditions of their own survival.

A university can claim truth-telling as a role only while it visibly maintains trustworthy methods: rigorous peer review, replication, and disclosure of funding and conflicts. But amidst interference from powerful actors and financial pressures, there is a lot at stake.

Sources
Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. Oxford University Press.
Daniels, R. J., with Shreve, G., & Spector, P. (2021). What universities owe democracy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #Republic: Divided democracy in the age of social media. Princeton University Press.
Thomas, N., & Brower, M. (2017). The politically engaged classroom. In E. C. Matto, A. R. M. McCartney, E. A. Bennion, & D. Simpson (Eds.), Teaching civic engagement across the disciplines (pp. 21–33). American Political Science Association.
Wardle, C., & Derakhshan, H. (2017). Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking. Council of Europe.
Wilson, R., & Kamola, I. (2021). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.

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Viewpoint Diversity

Viewpoint diversity is no longer just a slogan. Governments now write it into policy. In 2025 the federal government demanded that a major university accept an audit of its faculty for viewpoint balance, state statutes now require “intellectual diversity” in hiring and programming, and funding conditions are built on the phrase. The phrase’s several meanings therefore carry operational consequences: the same words name a scholarly concern, a compliance demand, and a political campaign, and which meaning a given invocation performs determines what is actually being asked of an institution.

In its plainest sense, viewpoint diversity is the presence in an academic community of meaningfully different positions on contested questions: methodological, substantive, theoretical, and political. Disciplines have always benefited from internal disagreement, and few scholars dispute the value of robust contestation within the academy. See open disagreement.

The phrase also functions as political shorthand, and the campaign usage has a genealogy. David Horowitz drafted the Academic Bill of Rights in 2002 calling for “intellectual diversity” in faculty hiring. AAUP Committee A condemned it in 2003 as a grave threat to academic freedom, and versions appeared as state legislation in more than a dozen states between 2003 and 2005. The frame, that liberal-to-conservative ratios among faculty constitute a structural problem requiring outside intervention, has anchored the phrase since. It now appears in the founding documents of a university built around it, in a presidential-transition policy blueprint, and in the 2025 audit demand above. Wilson and Kamola (2021) documented how donor-funded think tanks turned the frame into model bills and then state law. See donor pressure. See outside funding.

Between the plain meaning and the campaign usage sits a third: scholars and scholarly organizations treating ideological homogeneity within disciplines as a real concern and working on it from within the academy, through the cultivation of constructive disagreement rather than external mandate.

The contemporary scholarly critique comes from Scott (2019): academic freedom must be defended on the grounds of disciplinary expertise, and when viewpoint diversity is invoked to demand specific hiring or curricular outcomes from outside the discipline, the question of who determines disciplinary competence comes under pressure. Siraganian (2025) extended the line and named the structural moves: external imposition rather than scholarly deliberation, political balance substituted for disciplinary judgment, and advancement through structures (civics centers, donor-funded chairs, federal mandates) that bypass faculty governance. Post (2012) supplied the underlying standard: the measure of academic work is disciplinary competence, not ideological balance. A geologist who teaches a young Earth is not adding viewpoint diversity; she is misrepresenting her discipline. See academic freedom.

The substantive response comes from scholars who treat the empirical question as real. Teles (2024) argued that ideological skew in many humanities and social-science fields is recorded in surveys, that the skew is structural rather than a product of direct discrimination, and that it shapes what gets asked, taught, and heard within scholarly conversations. VanderWeele (2026) answered Siraganian’s theses directly. Survey data adds a lived dimension: in a 2024 survey of 6,269 faculty across 55 institutions, 55% of conservative faculty said they at least occasionally hide their political views to keep their jobs, against 17% of liberal faculty (FIRE, 2024). That gap describes a real condition, whatever its cause. See self-censorship. The disagreement runs through both the empirical question and the normative question of who has standing to intervene, and neither is settled.

The phrase used to name a scholarly concern about disciplinary breadth is one thing; the phrase appearing in a funding condition, compliance demand, or audit is another. Collapsing the meanings in either direction loses information. For a reader evaluating a viewpoint-diversity proposal on their campus, the test is whether it asks for intellectual challenge, which any discipline should welcome, or for ideological balance enforced from outside, which substitutes a political criterion for a disciplinary one.

Sources
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. (2024). Silence in the classroom: The 2024 FIRE faculty survey report. https://www.fire.org/facultyreport
Post, R. C. (2012). Democracy, expertise, and academic freedom: A First Amendment jurisprudence for the modern state. Yale University Press.
Scott, J. W. (2019). Knowledge, power, and academic freedom. Columbia University Press.
Siraganian, L. (2025, Fall). Seven theses against viewpoint diversity. Academe. https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/fall-2025/seven-theses-against-viewpoint-diversity
Teles, S. M. (2024, Summer). Beyond academic sectarianism. National Affairs. https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/beyond-academic-sectarianism
VanderWeele, T. (2026, March). Responding to seven theses against viewpoint diversity. Public Discourse. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/03/100366/
Wilson, R., & Kamola, I. (2021). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.

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Watchlists

A watchlist in higher education is a published roster of people, courses, or institutional affiliations framed as ideological offenders, maintained to invite public scrutiny of the people listed. These expose people in ways that create a likelihood of harassment, bullying, threat, or worse. They function to deter someone’s speech or actions, without needing any law at all. See chilling effect.

For example, Professor Watchlist, launched by Turning Point USA in 2016, publishes a roster of faculty it describes as advancing leftist propaganda, and Campus Reform runs a reporting pipeline that turns classroom moments into national stories. A listing is regularly followed by waves of threats and harassment.

Scholars at Risk’s Free to Think reports document the pattern in their United States coverage (Scholars at Risk, 2025). In a 2024 national faculty survey, 53% of faculty said they were more worried about becoming targets of online harassment than they had been six or seven years earlier (AAC&U & AAUP, 2024).

The mechanism has several stages. An organization or activist network compiles names, often from course catalogs, published syllabi, or public-records requests for faculty emails and course materials. The list circulates online, sometimes with institutional contact information. Recipients of the list then act independently: filing complaints, launching social media campaigns, or escalating to legislators. See doxing. See harassment.

Wilson and Kamola (2021) documented the infrastructure behind the major operations. The watchlist and story-pipeline organizations are funded and staffed: Campus Reform is a project of the Leadership Institute, with paid correspondents, syndication relationships, and a business model in which a professor’s viral moment is the product. The documentation matters because it distinguishes watchlists from organic public criticism. A listing is not an audience reacting to a professor but an organization producing an audience for one.

Two features distinguish these watchlists harms from ordinary controversy. The first feature is permanence: a watchlist converts one classroom moment into a searchable record that stays attached to a person’s name for the rest of their career. The second feature is the threat from outsiders: the organization that publishes the list does not itself threaten anyone. The threats arrive from the audience the listing assembles, which leaves the listed person with no counterparty, no one to answer, sue, or satisfy. Faculty on annual contracts and staff without tenure protections are exposed, with little institutional cover. See lack of job safety. See doxing.

Schauer (1978) writes that a professor named on a watchlist may drop a contested syllabus though no law touches it, because she fears exposure and harassment, not prosecution, and avoids the lawful work all the same. Colleagues watching the episode learn the lesson without receiving one. Students may even see this as a healthy use of their power, not as a problem. See self-censorship.

The disagreement over watchlists is asymmetric but real. The organizations and their defenders describe the sites as accountability journalism: faculty are public employees or public figures, classrooms are not private, and documenting what professors say is speech about speech, protected and arguably owed to the publics that fund institutions. Critics answer with the known consequences (threat campaigns, doxing, withdrawal from public engagement) and with the sites’ editorial practices: listings assembled from student submissions and short clips, without the verification or right of reply that the accountability framing implies. The two positions do not meet, because one evaluates the publication and the other evaluates what the publication predictably produces.

What do institutions owe an employee on a watchlist? Security, legal support, and public defense are each argued for in the AAUP framework Reichman (2021) describes, and each is unevenly delivered. See researcher safety.

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