Covering Academic Freedom Before It Disappears

To K-12 reporters, academic freedom may sound foreign. 

In public elementary and secondary education, states traditionally set standards and teachers are expected to teach to them. Districtwide instructional material adoptions, combined with teaching workloads and other job demands, may further limit how far educators veer off from a set curriculum into their own creative directions. And K-12 teachers aren’t expected to conduct research and publish academic journal articles. 

U.S. higher education has a different tradition, one of academic freedom in teaching, scholarship and even extramural speech. That last category, encompassing faculty’s speech as normal citizens, outside of their jobs, includes the right to post on social media about political issues. But academic freedom—which has been respected for decades in public colleges, secular private universities and even many religious institutions—is under threat. 

Republicans are increasingly legislating constraints on teaching. The Trump administration has canceled research grants that deal with diversity, vaccines and climate science. On the right, conservatives have long alleged that left-leaning faculty have themselves restricted academic freedom internally within universities and scholarly journals by blocking conservatives from advancing in academic careers and refusing to publish research when its findings don’t match a liberal consensus. 

The debate over academic freedom’s limits has now reached a fever pitch concerning faculty speech criticizing Israel’s deadly attacks in Gaza.  

Here’s a guide to covering academic freedom in this tumultuous time. It includes some comments from a panel I moderated at the Education Writers Association’s 2025 National Seminar held in St. Louis in May, plus my additional thoughts and those of others not on the panel. 

“The culture war is such that we’ve lost sight of the things that make this country unique, that make this country a home for scholars worldwide” said Will Creeley, a panelist and legal director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.

“These are some of the darkest days that I’ve seen,” Creeley said.

Call the American Association of University Professors, and Shout FIRE

The AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which it wrote alongside the American Association of Colleges and Universities, is the seminal definition of academic freedom. Many colleges have incorporated it into their own policies.

Read it, and you’ll begin to understand some of the controversies that continue to this day over what academic freedom should, or shouldn’t, protect. It discusses how tenure supports academic freedom; it cautions against using classroom time to teach irrelevant controversial material, and it defends faculty members’ rights to speak as citizens. 

The AAUP defends academic freedom and tenure to this day. It has some state-level conferences, such as in Texas and North Carolina, plus local chapters on many college campuses. Often, these chapters are also unions affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, whose leaders have joined AAUP officials in defending academic freedom on the national level. 

Calling AAUP national or the state conferences and campus chapters is a good way to get a pro-academic freedom, on-the-ground perspective for a story. The campus chapters are often quicker and more willing to respond to media inquiries than faculty senate leaders. 

But the AAUP has been criticized by the right for allegedly not defending academic freedom equally for all scholars—including since the organization dropped its categorical opposition to academic boycotts amid increased calls within academia for boycotting Israeli universities. FIRE is another organization that speedily provides interviews. Calling both groups for stories is useful; often, one or the other is representing and in contact with the professor who’s in trouble. 

Put a PEN in It

PEN America is another organization that advocates for academic freedom, and it tracks proposed state bills and new laws that threaten this right. 

“As the federal landscape is shifting in really dystopian tilts, things are also happening in state capitals across the country that are going to have long-term and immediate impacts on all of us,” said Amy Reid, a panelist and PEN America’s Freedom to Learn interim program director. “And they’re going to be a lot harder to roll back because you’re dealing with smaller systems.” 

Reid noted that PEN’s annual publication, “America’s Censored Classrooms,” analyzes this legislation. And she cautioned that the frame of targeting diversity, equity and inclusion is actually being used to more broadly attack academic freedom. 

“Where the laws get really bad is because they’re very vague,” Reid said. “And so people on campuses can’t tell what it is that they can, or can’t, talk about.” 

Understand How Tenure—and Unions—Protect Academic Freedom

The tradition of tenure makes it difficult, and highly controversial, for universities to fire tenured faculty over their expression or scholarship. Tenured faculty have a continuing appointment, not a contract that expires at a certain date, and it must be renewed.

When writing about faculty whose words, writing or research are facing scrutiny, find out whether they’re tenured, on the tenure-track or a non-tenure-track faculty member. And the same goes for fellow faculty you’re trying to reach for comment on their colleague. A tenured professor is more likely to speak publicly and candidly than someone without such protections. 

Tenure-track professors typically go through a seven-year process, from their start as assistant professors, to earn it. Generally, associate professors and full professors (who are just called professors) at four-year colleges and universities are tenured. A tenure-track faculty member may feel skittish to rock the boat before they’ve earned tenure, but, generally, policies and tradition provide more protections for both tenured and tenure-track faculty than for those on the non-tenure-track. Those faculty—often with amorphous titles such as lecturer or adjunct—can simply be let go when their contract expires, without reappointment, and without further explanation. 

Tenured professors are a shrinking share of the professoriate; the AAUP says about 68% of U.S. faculty outside of medical schools held what it calls contingent (ineligible for tenure) appointments as of fall 2023, compared to about 47% in 1987. That may be why faculty are increasingly unionizing to protect their rights. 

Examine Shared Governance, Too

The AAUP recommendations on protecting academic freedom stress that faculty who are in trouble deserve a hearing before their fellow faculty, in which the burden of proof is on the university. Shared governance also intersects with academic freedom when it comes to departments’ and other groups of faculty’s rights to set curricula and general education requirements. State lawmakers are increasingly setting curricula themselves. 

“If a faculty member says something that a donor finds objectionable, the president or board should not be able to simply fire that professor,” said Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, in an email. “Rather, each campus should have clear policies—which include due process—for allowing faculty to determine whether a sanctionable offense has taken place.”

Remember Where the First Amendment, or Internal Policy, Rules

At public colleges and universities, faculty are government employees. While that has subjected them to attempts in Florida, Indiana and possibly elsewhere to restrict their speech based on the idea that it’s government speech, mostly their status as government employees means their expression is protected by the First Amendment. There’s court precedent that suggests the First Amendment highly favors academic freedom. 

“These are not close legal calls,” Creeley said. 

At private institutions, on the other hand, academic freedom is often protected by the policies universities wrote long ago, including in their faculty handbooks. These policies are often available on universities’ websites, or a faculty senate member can provide them to you.  

See Where the Battle Lines Are Over What Academic Freedom Means 

The AAUP’s 1940 statement says academic freedom should defend extramural speech, and it makes no exception for faculty saying controversial things on political issues that are outside their realm of expertise—though it recommends they “exercise appropri­ate restraint.” It’s easy to see how a professor with this broad understanding of academic freedom might get into trouble on social media with a public that doesn’t share this view.  

But Kamola, who’s also a political science associate professor, said that “when a faculty member’s social media becomes a national story, this is because there are political interests pushing that story into the national press, and doing so for political gains. Rather than simply running with the story that is being fed to the media, ask instead: ‘Who is pushing this story and why?’”

“Rather than assuming that the faculty being hated on by right-wing operatives have done something wrong, try to understand what they are saying and why,” Kamola said. “For example, many faculty were slandered in the press because of statements they made about Gaza. However, a year and a half later, it seems that this really is a genocide.” 

Grasp the Dual Pressure on Colleges to Investigate and Protect Free Expression

If academic freedom allows faculty to say and write controversial things, some of those things may offend students or even make them believe the professor won’t grade them fairly. The federal government is pressuring universities to address complaints of on-campus discrimination. Yet merely opening an investigation into a professor over their in-classroom speech or something they posted can have a chilling effect on academic freedom across the institution. 

And, Do Students Have Academic Freedom?

Often, students’ rights to speak freely and to protest are considered in the realm of free expression, not academic freedom. But Miguel Luna, a panelist and student at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, pushed back against this dichotomy. He shared a definition of academic freedom that includes a student’s right to learn.

“To me, academic freedom involves a teacher’s right to instruct and a student’s right to learn,” Luna said. “It includes institutional autonomy and faculty self-governance, but, most crucially, it entails the right to use professional opinions and research for political and social critique.”

“This really isn’t just a policy dispute,” he said. “I think it’s a challenge to universities as central societal spaces for democratic inquiry or the exchange of free ideas.” 

He asked reporters to remember how state laws restricting academic freedom impact students, faculty and society as a whole.

Creeley said the First Amendment doesn’t necessarily protect trespassing, a protest encampment or a building takeover. 

“But peaceful protest met with stormtrooper-like phalanxes … should chill everybody,” he said. 

And when it comes to graduate students, they’re often both students and instructors. Multiple unions, such as the UAW, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and the AAUP, represent them.

Reid said that “academic freedom matters not just because it protects what faculty want to research or what faculty want to publish on, but because it ensures that our students have an access to an education free from government censorship.”