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academic freedom
The Battle Over Public Education Is Loud; the Work of Teachers Is Louder
Even when faced with pressure and threats from almost all sides, the actual, individual people shaping the education of our children will not let themselves be cowed.
Dec 18, 2025
There is a looming threat to K-12 public education in America, but it is not only the substantial amount of laws restricting what can be taught in classrooms. The equally profound danger is that we are allowing a narrow political narrative to overshadow what is actually happening inside schools.
National pundits and scholars frame “the law” as a singular force indoctrinating students, obscuring the fact that we are dealing with a patchwork of rapidly evolving laws. While these legal shifts are detrimental, a more comprehensive understanding requires considering the lived experiences of educators, students, and the organizations that navigate them. The threat is not simply complacency to this “silent majority.” It is also the refusal to recognize that our schools are not homogeneous battlegrounds, but diverse communities experiencing these political pressures in very different ways.
The problem is not “the law,” it is the laws, plural, rushed through statehouses by politicians eager to score cultural points without any clarity on implementation or impact. Political influence on standards is nothing new, but recent controversies have reached a fever pitch as conservative lawmakers push divisive-concepts bills restricting topics such as race, gender, and LGBTQ+ rights.
In 2022, the South Carolina legislature debated bills banning The 1619 Project and any content feared to make white students “feel guilty.” Today, 35% of K-12 students attend school in states with anti-critical race theory laws. By 2023, 65% of history teachers reported limiting political discussions. As one Ohio teacher put it, “It’s tough for teachers to stick their neck out… you just see the attack on teachers increasing over and over again.”
While the legislators passing these laws attempt to rally popular support behind a narrative that they are the “silent majority,” we can’t let them obscure their genuine presence as simply a highly outspoken minority.
For example, New Hampshire is facing restrictive “divisive-concepts” laws, dwindling public school funding, and bounties on teachers that Moms for Liberty hopes to “catch.” As much as Moms for Liberty promotes its bounty as protection for children, the bounty serves one exclusive purpose. To instigate fear among educators, parents, and the broader public.
But this fear is largely baseless. Despite its efforts to intrude into the classroom and attack teachers, Moms for Liberty has remained unsuccessful. Even with a $500 cash prize on the line, not a single teacher was “caught” and fired for Moms for Liberty’s agenda. It’s as if, when investigated, teachers are not posing dangers to students. Rather, they are trained educators fighting for the strong democratic education of the nation's children.
While the legislators passing these laws attempt to rally popular support behind a narrative that they are the “silent majority,” we can’t let them obscure their genuine presence as simply a highly outspoken minority.
Legislative activity across the nation is also propagating fear among educators. But these bills are poorly crafted, vague, lacking expert input, and inconsistent with the First Amendment and academic freedom. While these threatening bills infiltrate news headlines, most of them have no real power. In 2024, 56 educational gag orders were filed, but only 8 were actually implemented. These are also new lows for proposed and implemented gag orders compared with the last few years.
Instead, we continue to see bipartisan opposition to politicized state lawmakers making choices about the content in K-12 schools. In 2024, we saw the first successful challenges to K-12 gag orders in court. Groups like Moms for Liberty remain unpopular among the public. Moms for Liberty and the 1776 Project continue to suffer electoral losses, with their publicly endorsed candidates losing about 70% of their races nationwide in 2023.
Bearing this in mind, we must continue to hold strong against these loud (but little) groups. Although they’ve mastered the art of amplifying their voices and distracting us with frightening news headlines, we cannot succumb to their scare tactics and must continue to make informed decisions based on our own investigation.
Furthermore, beyond the failures of these scare tactics, perhaps one of the most profound places to look for hope is in the actions of individual teachers across the United States. Here, we will draw on the testimonies of three different teachers, whom we interviewed as part of an Amherst College course on the polarization of social studies education. Although they cannot single-handedly represent the entire nation, their words have been echoed throughout the sources and interviews we have examined in our class.
What these teachers can show us is that, even when faced with pressure and threats from almost all sides, the actual, individual people shaping the education of our children will not let themselves be cowed.
Even as some parents threaten the livelihoods and lives of teachers, a teacher in Florida makes the effort to reach out to the parents of the children he teaches, creating a parent-teacher relationship based on trust and respect, not hatred and anger. Even as legislators try to write teachers out of their laws, a teacher from Ohio continues to demand that his voice be heard and has ensured that, over the past six years, not a single bill has been passed that was not approved by the coalition of Ohio teachers. Even as the politicians in Washington squabble like children, a teacher in Arkansas crafts a classroom where the children she teaches learn to engage in civil debate and learn to disagree on a topic while still remaining friends.
All three of these teachers—and thousands more across the country—continue, quietly, to educate the nation's children with kindness and nuance, even as the politicians in the Capitol do their best to sabotage the fundamental educational structures of the United States.
So don’t give up, don’t let them win. Don’t let them write a story that places teachers as the villains.
Don’t let them make you forget how hope endures and that the strength of the educational system lies maybe not in the laws that politicians apply to it, but instead in the individuals who dedicate their lives to ensuring children can learn and play and will grow to shape the future of this country.
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The Fight for Academic Freedom Is a Fight for Justice
The right-wing effort to infringe on students' right to learn is an effort to hobble higher education as a force for creating a more just society.
Nov 27, 2025
We who believe in the value of academic freedom have been disheartened these past two years as quisling administrators at some of America’s once-great universities have caved to political pressure to quash protests, cancel courses, and limit professorial speech that is critical of inequalities in US society and US foreign policy.
These attacks on academic freedom are usually framed as threats to the freedom of faculty to conduct research, publish, speak, and teach, based on disciplinary expertise, without outside political interference. This portrayal of the threat, as true as it is, misses a key point: Also under attack are students’ rights to learn. The right-wing effort to infringe these rights is an effort to hobble higher education as a force for creating a more just society.
Long ago, as an undergrad in an introduction to physical anthropology course, I played a game we called stump the prof. It wasn’t a real game; it was just a few of us trying to liven things up by asking questions we thought would be hard or impossible to answer. The prof was young and upbeat, as I recall, and never seemed put out by our antics, though he no doubt saw what we were doing. I think he liked the energy. One time I asked if apes had orgasms. That got people’s attention.
In that class, taught 50 years ago at a public university, we as students felt free to ask whatever occurred to us (within the bounds of physical anthropology, of course). Our exercise of that freedom is part of what made the class memorable. We weren’t just amusing ourselves or bugging the prof. It might sound self-congratulatory, given that our motives weren’t entirely noble, but we were wringing a lot more knowledge out of the course than we might otherwise have gotten.
The worry is that students will develop the ability to question received truths, see through the ideologies that justify social and economic inequalities, and resist manipulative political rhetoric that bypasses rationality.
What was true back then is true today: How much students learn in college depends on the opportunities they’re given. When a course is scratched from the catalog, students miss out on the knowledge that would have been available to them in that course. Students lose out, too, when certain concepts are proscribed, or when faculty self-censor for fear that discussing those concepts and related topics might get them in trouble. That’s why interference with the ability of faculty to teach what they deem important infringes on the right to learn.
Suppose, for example, that students wanted to ask how conventional gender expectations constrain our humanity. That’s a serious question deserving a serious answer. It’s a question that might be asked in a sociology or gender studies course. But if no such course exists, or if an instructor feels compelled to say, “Sorry, a group of politicians has made it too risky to talk about such stuff,” students are kept from learning. That’s a betrayal of what higher education has promised them: freedom to ask questions, freedom to pursue their curiosity, freedom to grow through the acquisition of vetted knowledge.
Right-wing ideological warriors and politicians would like to leave students in the dark about many other troublesome things: institutional racism, white supremacy, the exploitation of labor, the global havoc wreaked by US imperialism, the domination of government by corporate capitalists and the very wealthy. In relation to these matters, there is much that needs to be faced up to and talked about if we hope to understand how our society works and how to make it work better. And, yes, some courage is required.
Suppose students asked how it is possible for racial disparities—in income, wealth, education, health status—to persist even when most people overtly disavow racism. That’s another question that deserves an answer. It’s also a question that can be answered based on decades of social science research. Students shouldn’t be denied the opportunity to ask these questions and get answers because the topic makes some people uncomfortable. We should not let discomfort be weaponized to protect ignorance.
Students might also want to know how it’s possible for some people to enjoy privilege and not know it. Or how racism has historically supercharged capitalism. Again, these are all legitimate matters for university-level inquiry. But they’re also threatening to politicians who, on the one hand, serve economic elites and, on the other hand, exploit popular prejudices to mobilize voters. That’s the real reason for right-wing attacks on the disciplines and courses where students can learn about our society’s inequalities, past and present.
Critics of intellectual spaces in which students can learn to think critically about US society often claim they want to protect students from liberal indoctrination. But it’s not really indoctrination they worry about. The worry is that students will develop the ability to question received truths, see through the ideologies that justify social and economic inequalities, and resist manipulative political rhetoric that bypasses rationality. Education that imparts these abilities is indeed “liberal,” in the classical sense of being liberating. Which is the opposite of indoctrination.
Universities are dangerous places—or they can be, when faculty are free to pursue the truth even if the results disturb political and economic elites; when faculty are free to teach what they have found through their research and scholarship; and when students are free to ask tough, even off-the-wall, questions. But of course the danger is not to those who want to inquire critically about social inequalities, or employ concepts that might upend common sense, or to teach and learn about these matters. The danger is not to those who seek in good faith to fulfill the promises of higher education. It is to those whose power and privilege depend on keeping these promises from being met.
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Teaching Social Justice Journalism at Trump's Columbia University
The university at large has sold out our students, but the university is not all of us. There are hundreds of faculty on this campus dedicated to the right of our students to learn, debate, protest, research, and report without fear.
Nov 16, 2025
On September 17, 2025, one month before I was to teach my annual social justice reporting class at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, the campus lowered its flag to half-mast in honor of far-right pontificator Charlie Kirk.
Nobody deserves to be murdered, as Kirk was, but to honor a man of his white supremacist, Christian nationalist, and misogynist beliefs was to spit in the face not only of all the women on campus, but of students and staff of color; the queer and trans students and employees whose identities he characterized as “abominations“; the Muslims whose religion, he said, “is a sword being used to slit the throat of America“; the immigrants he insisted will “replace us” with their “anti-white agenda”; and the Jews he accused of controlling America’s institutions.
Columbia did not have to lower that flag. President Donald Trump ordered federal institutions to do so, but the university is private, not part of the government. No, lowering the flag was a choice.
That Columbia made such a choice is nothing short of astounding, given that its past two years of capitulations to the Trump administration have rested upon the school’s promise to protect its Jewish students and staff from antisemitism. As our current acting president, Claire Shipman, wrote to the university community this past summer in classic Orwellian double-speak:
While Columbia does not admit to wrongdoing… the institution’s leaders have recognized, repeatedly, that Jewish students and faculty have experienced painful, unacceptable incidents, and that reform was and is needed.
So why honor a man who espoused Nazi conspiracy theories?
I bring this up because this flag business was only the latest example of the groveling submission Columbia’s trustees have shown toward this country’s proto-authoritarian government since the 2023 student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza gave Republicans the idea of using accusations of antisemitism to attack liberal arts colleges.
Allow me to illustrate with a brief history of this groveling.
The First Year of Capitulation: 2023
In 2023, not long after the horrific Hamas attack on Israeli citizens and Israel’s insanely outsized retaliatory slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, Columbia called in the police against our nonviolent student protesters, locked down the campus for the first time in history, and suspended both its own and Barnard undergraduates, most of them teenage girls, in punishment.
That same year, Columbia’s administration allowed Trumpian Christian nationalists to define who was antisemitic and who wasn’t. It succumbed to and accepted the right-wing false narrative that the campus was rife with Jew haters. And it refused to stand up for the Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and Jewish students who were being harassed, threatened, and doxxed on and off campus for protesting Israel’s murderous policies.
The Second Year of Capitulation: 2024
In 2024, Columbia groveled even more. It kept the campus locked down (as it does to this day). It put in place so many rules governing protests that it effectively squashed the ability of students to voice their opposition to Israel’s genocide, or even to the government of President Donald Trump. And it refused to offer any support to Palestinian students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi when they were arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in violation of their First Amendment rights, or when their visas were revoked.
Other universities have not been so cowardly. For example, when Bard College student and Afghan refugee Ali Sajad Faqirzada, who had fled the Taliban regime with his sister, was arrested and detained by ICE at his asylum hearing this October, Bard president Leon Botstein offered him instant support. He contacted the student’s family, mustered local officials to help the family, and sent a letter to the government advocating for Faqirzada’s release. He also issued a statement vowing to stand up for Faqirzada and informing other Bard students of their rights. These were the kinds of morally sound actions we have yet to see from any of our presidents or trustees at Columbia.
The Third Year of Capitulation: 2025
In 2025, after Trump and his minions snatched $400 million away from Columbia, crippling the ability of our scientists and medical researchers to do their work, the university’s capitulations plummeted to even greater depths.
It suspended and even expelled anti-war students for having protested on behalf of slaughtered and starving Palestinians by occupying the campus library.
It agreed to comply with Trump’s ban on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) by no longer using “race, color, sex, or national origin” when hiring anyone or even when admitting students, thus giving in to the Trumpian goal of creating a university largely filled with white, heterosexual, Christian men.
Columbia ought to haul itself up before the OIE for the act of lowering its flag for antisemite Charlie Kirk.
It put the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department under special provost supervision or receivership.
It agreed to pay more than $200 million over the next three years in blood money to the Trump administration to restore our funding. (Is it a surprise that my colleagues and I had our salaries frozen this year? And what will Trump do with our school’s money—build a villa in Gaza?)
Columbia also agreed to pay a further $21 million to—in the words of the White House PR machine—“resolve alleged civil rights violations against Jewish employees that occurred following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.” I am sure not a penny of that money will go to Palestinian employees and students whose family members were wounded or killed in Gaza, or who suffered from Islamophobic harassment from other students and outsiders. Nor is it likely that any of that money will be given to the many Jewish students who were manhandled, arrested, and punished for protesting genocide.
Columbia made other concessions as well, too numerous to list here. But among the most egregious was its incorporation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates any criticism of the state of Israel with hatred of Jews. This set off alarms among many of our faculty members, Jewish and otherwise, who know that scholars have long rejected the IHRA definition as restricting free speech and academic freedom, and as nakedly antidemocratic.
Yet, in a summer letter to Columbia’s faculty and staff, president Shipman not only proudly announced the school’s incorporation of IHRA, but made it clear that any of us who don’t comply with that definition could be brought before the University’s Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) and censored or even fired.
Under that directive, Columbia ought to haul itself up before the OIE for the act of lowering its flag for antisemite Charlie Kirk.
Adding insult to injury, Columbia’s Task Force on Anti-Semitism, a committee of professors who spearheaded the dubious claim that our campus was riddled with anti-Jewish sentiment, offered not a peep of objection to the campus lowering of that flag. When I asked one of the Task Force’s architects why, he told me that the committee “does not issue statements.” The hypocrisy of a university that forms a task force against antisemitism and then honors a man like Kirk is, to put it mildly, mind-boggling.
Faculty Fight Back
Columbia’s faculty members have hardly remained silent in the face of all these capitulations. Many of us, including a large cohort of Jewish professors, have protested, rallied, held vigils, and met with our rapid rotation of presidents, as well as with the school’s trustees, to try to urge academic integrity for our campus and protect our students’ right to debate, question, and protest.
One of the most recent of these faculty actions occurred on September 29, when a group of professors, most of them Jewish, gathered at the sundial in the center of campus to speak out against this adoption of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism. I joined to watch and listen, while the crowd around them grew.
The speakers explained why the IHRA makes it impossible for them to teach classes on the history of Israel and Palestine, on Islam, or even on Middle Eastern history in general, and leaves any of us who teach anything someone might deem critical of Israel vulnerable to being punished for discriminating against Jews—even if we are Jewish.
One of the speakers, Professor Emeritus Marianne Hirsch, a scholar of trauma and memory, pointed out the real-life dangers in IHRA’s conflation of criticism of Israel with the hatred of all Jews:
This conflation has made [IHRA] the preferred definition of the Israeli state, the Trump administration and authoritarian forces throughout the world who seek to silence those who stand in solidarity with Palestine. The IHRA definition has been cited as the basis for reporting international students, Trump’s travel ban, defunding universities, arresting protesters, and even targeting human rights organizations.
Hirsch then added, “Please note that the incorporation of IHRA was not part of Columbia’s deal with the Trump administration.”
In other words, its incorporation of IHRA was a preemptive concession. Like lowering that flag for Kirk, it was a choice.
Big Brother Is Watching
To top off all these concessions, Columbia made a truly chilling move. Last summer, it agreed to appoint an “independent monitor” to play the Orwellian Big Brother role of watching to make sure that we faculty comply with all of the above rules. The agreement states that this monitor, chosen jointly with the Trump administration, will have access to “all agreement-related individuals, facilities, disciplinary hearings, and the scene of any occurrence that the monitor deems necessary,” as well as “all documents and data related to the agreement.”
The reaction of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the closest thing we have to a union, was swift and dramatic. Calling the appointment of this monitor an unprecedented disaster, AAUP issued the following statement:
Allowing the government to monitor and ultimately dictate decisions about the hiring of faculty and admission of students is a stunning breach of the independence of colleges and universities and opens the door for the ideological control this administration so eagerly craves. This is an extremely dangerous precedent that will have tremendous consequences for the sector.
When You Give a Bully What He Wants
In a clear-eyed assessment of what Columbia’s concessions really mean, several authors at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia wrote this last August:
The settlement is an astonishing transfer of autonomy and authority to… an administration whose disdain for the values of the academy is demonstrated anew every day. It will have far-reaching implications for free speech and academic freedom at Columbia.
The authors went on to say in academic jargon what many of us had been saying all along: When you give a bully what he wants, he only demands more. “Indeed,” they concluded, “the settlement itself gives the administration an array of new tools to use in the service of its coercive campaign.”
It makes me wonder what comes next. Flags with Trump’s face on them all over campus? Forced pledges of allegiance to him? After all, Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein did it. Why not Donald Trump?
“Afflict the Comfortable and Comfort the Afflicted”
For now, however, we faculty are stuck with Columbia as it is. In my case, this means that I must teach social justice journalism not only under the cloud of the Kirk aftermath, with professors and employees being fired or chased out of the country for daring to criticize that purveyor of hate, but with the IHRA sword of Damocles dangling over my head.
Social justice journalism is essentially about covering the ways in which the powerless are oppressed by the powerful—that is, a manifestation of Joseph Pulitzer’s mantra that journalism should “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” This means that just about every topic my students will cover flies in the face of all that the Trump government wants to suppress and might well come up against Columbia’s new rules, too.
What if one of my students should want to cover the deportation hearings for Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, for instance? Or a speech by our former student, the once-imprisoned Mahmoud Khalil? Will even a mention of a Palestinian activist be deemed antisemitic now? Will quoting someone who criticizes Kirk or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be grounds for expulsion? Can we report on Planned Parenthood or transphobia, the ICE persecution of brown and Black immigrants, the ongoing climate catastrophe, environmental racism, violence against women, or Islamophobia? Can we talk about social justice at all?
Such students represent the generation that is going to have to claw back capitulations and hold onto integrity in the face of truly hard times.
However, the aspect of teaching that worries me the most is how Columbia’s capitulation will affect my students’ trust in one another. I don’t want anyone to be afraid that someone will snitch on them and get them punished, suspended, expelled, bullied online, deported, or otherwise silenced. I want to foster a culture of camaraderie and trust in my classroom, not suspicion and fear.
But students are afraid. Just a couple of weeks ago, I spoke on a campus panel to a group of young women undergraduates of color, several of whom are international students. They told us that (with reason) they’re afraid to protest, post anything political, or speak out at all. They’re afraid that their visas will be revoked, their degrees and futures whisked away. They’re afraid of being kidnapped from campus and disappeared by ICE.
This makes me worry that my students, too, will censor themselves out of fear, a dangerous scenario indeed. A journalist who is afraid to publish the truth or question power can’t be a journalist at all.
That said, there is nothing like sitting in a classroom full of journalism students to give one hope. It’s uplifting to know that there are still young people out there who want to be reporters, who are dedicated to evidence-based facts, who have compassion for the downtrodden and still see journalism as essential to upholding democracy. Such students represent the generation that is going to have to claw back capitulations and hold onto integrity in the face of truly hard times.
So, yes, the university at large has sold out our students. But the university is not all of us. There are hundreds of faculty on this campus dedicated to the right of our students to learn, debate, protest, research, and report without fear.
The task now is to keep up their courage—and our own fight.
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