AAUP Presents

On today’s episode of Academic Freedom on the Line, we’re talking about students, labor, migration, and what happens at the intersection of all those categories. We talk about how and why higher education workers must resist the rising tide of fascism on and off campus, and get organizing lessons from the front lines.  Our guests today are:  A. Naomi Paik, the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctua...

This episode of the special series “Academic Freedom on the Line” includes an excerpt from the webinar announcing the release of the AAUP’s Report On Title VI, Discrimination, and Academic Freedom last year. Committee A Chair Rana Jaleel and former General Counsel Risa Lieberwitz share big picture findings and key takeaways from the report.  Following the excerpt, CDAF host Vineeta Singh is joined...

The 9th episode of our special series “Academic Freedom on the Line” is a conversation among 4 authors who contributed to the recently published University Keywords , a volume on how universities operate as social and economic engines that shape society beyond their traditional educational roles. Andy Hines , the volume editor,  Senior Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore C...

In this special episode of our series Academic Freedom on the Line, Vineeta Singh interviews Anna Feder , an organizer, curator, and cinema exhibition consultant who serves as the Director of Programming for the Resistance of Vision Film Festival. Anna has collaborated with the Palestine Anti-Repression Network and the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom to create a series of video t...

Update : Judge William G . Young ruled in favor of the AAUP and its fellow plaintiffs in the case. The full ruling is here . In this episode we discuss case AAUP v. Rubio, the lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration's policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting non-citizens, students and faculty who participate in pro-Palestinian activism, with Ramya Krishnan, the lead attorney for the...

A new episode of our special series Academic Freedom on the Line with the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom focuses on university governing boards and their workings. Raquel Rall, Associate Professor in the School of Education at UC Riverside and Demetri Morgan,  Associate Professor of Education at University of Michigan Marsal School of Education and CDAF fellow, join us to explai...

We’ve all heard about the changes to federal research funding since the beginning of the Trump administration. This episode of our special series Academic Freedom on the Line takes a deeper look at the landscape of federal research funding. How is research funding allocated? What is disrupted when these funds are precipitously cut? What could this mean for the future of research in the United Stat...

This episode of our special series in partnership with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom  zooms out from the “Trump versus Harvard” headlines to situate attacks on US higher education institutions in a transnational context. We ask an interdisciplinary panel of scholars studying different parts of the world to help us set aside American exceptionalist frameworks and understand what is...

This episode of our special series “Academic Freedom on the Line” takes a look at accreditation, a seemingly complex but essential mechanism for safeguarding both the quality of education our institutions offer as well as the institutional and disciplinary autonomy that allows them to create and enforce standards of rigor without direct interference from the federal government. Robert Shireman of...

In this episode, we speak with a coalition of student leaders actively organizing against state-level DEI bans in Texas and Kentucky. This is the third episode in the special series, "Academic Freedom on the Line," being produced in conjunction with the AAUP's Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF).  Host Vineeta Singh also speaks with Clare Carter at the Freedom to Learn...

This  is the second episode  of the limited series AAUP Presents : Academic Freedom on the Line. Our guest Dr. Stephanie Hall is a leading expert on college accountability and the for-profit higher education industry. Her research and advocacy in these areas have been instrumental for federal and state legislation, congressional oversight, and federal agency action. We ask her what the Department...

In this episode we discuss the AAUP's statement "Against Anticipatory Obedience" which offers guidelines about how to respond to attacks on higher ed like those being launched by the Trump administration and its right wing allies. The statement says in times like these, "it is the higher education community’s responsibility not to surrender to such attacks—and not to surrender...

This episode kicks off a new limited series hosted by the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF), AAUP Presents: Academic Freedom on the Line. CDAF serves as a resource and knowledge hub for all people—including faculty, students, campus workers, alumni, administrators, trustees, parents, journalists, policymakers, and business leaders—seeking to build a flourishing higher educat...

In this episode we discuss the AAUP's new statement On Institutional Neutrality . As college and university communities begin to suffer the consequences of unchecked power, the statement reaffirms that institutional neutrality is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it—and that respect for faculty voices and shared governance procedures is ess...

In this episode we discuss the Nonpartisan College Voter Registration and Education Project, a student voter registration project that aims to increase student voter registration and turnout by asking faculty to devote five minutes of class time to voter education and on-the-spot voter registration. The guests are Sam Novey ,  Chief Strategist at the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and...

In this episode we discuss  academic boycotts and the AAUP's revised policy on boycotts, released this August. We’ll hear more about the statement, how it came about, and where it fits in the current debates about academic freedom in higher education. The guests are Rana Jaleel, an associate professor at the University of California at Davis and chair of the AAUP's Committee A on Academi...

In this episode, I discuss the AAUP’s involvement in the Black Freedom Struggle in the 1950s and 1960s as it related to higher ed with Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, dean of the graduate school and professor of social and cultural foundations in the College of Education at the University of Washington. Drawing on her recently published article of the same name in AAUP's Academe , we discuss how Bla...

As campus protests in support of Palestine are met with often violent and repressive crackdowns, we talk to three faculty members, all AAUP members, who report on what's happening at their respective campuses.  We speak to Annelise Orleck at Dartmouth College, whose arrest at a May 1 protest at Dartmouth garnered significant press coverage, Todd Wolfson at Rutgers University, where faculty su...

In this episode we dive into how data, educational technologies (or “EdTech”), and other technological forces are shaping and sometimes harming higher education. The guests  are Martha Fay Burtis, an associate director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University, and Jesse Stommel, a faculty member in the writing program at the University of Denver and cofounder of...

As violent, militarized responses to protests on campuses across the country continue,  in this episode we look at how political interference in higher education has expanded in dangerous ways. We discuss how the right (and increasingly the center) have demonized higher education as a public good, and examine the historical origins of the current onslaught of political interference in higher ed. I...

Faculty and student groups at more than 50 U.S. college and university campuses will hold a National Day of Action for Higher Education on Wednesday, April 17 in a coordinated nationwide counterprotest against the sustained right-wing assault on American higher education as a public good. Organizers say the Day of Action for Higher Education will demonstrate how cross-rank organizing, robust facul...

From Florida to Texas to Ohio to Indiana politicians in some states are trying to substitute their own ideological beliefs for educational freedom by passing legislation that interferes with how colleges and universities operate. They’re introducing bills that  mandate or prohibit content in the classroom, empower partisan political appointees to determine campus policy, limit the freedom to learn...

In this podcast we discuss the AAUP's special report Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System .  The report offers an in-depth review of a pattern of politically, racially, and ideologically motivated attacks on public higher education in Florida, which have largely occurred during the term of Governor Ron DeSantis. The guests are Afshan Jafar, a...

In this episode, Michaele Turnage Young, a senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, discusses this summer’s Supreme Court affirmative action decision and talks about how creating equity in higher ed requires reimagining and reexamining what the education system can do to expand access to higher education. The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn, AAUP's digital organizer.  Show Notes:   AAUP re...

In this episode, we discuss the unprecedented strike earlier this year at Rutgers University with Todd Wolfson, the president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Of the strike and their common good model of organizing, he had this to say: “For 50 years, I’d say public universities have been on the defensive.”  Now, he said, “I think we turned the tables and we moved the ball perceptively in the other direction.”...