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 happening in the US in broader geographical, historical, and political contexts. Our guests: Audrey ...
Jun 18, 2025•48 min
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 the Century Foundation joins us to demystify the role of accreditation agencies and help us understa...
May 15, 2025•36 min•Season 5Ep. 6
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 team to help us understand how state legislatures have attacked the principles of academic freedom, institutional a...
Apr 30, 2025•46 min•Season 5Ep. 5
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 of Education is for, why the right perceives it as a threat, and how the right uses “polarizing” langu...
Mar 25, 2025•33 min•Season 5Ep. 4
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 education system, rooted in institutional autonomy, workplace democracy, and freedom from coercion and ext...
Mar 25, 2025•42 min•Season 5Ep. 3
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 in anticipation of them. Instead, we must vigorously and loudly oppose them." Henry Reichman, a professor emeritus of hi...
Mar 25, 2025•52 min•Season 5Ep. 2
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 essential to sound decision-making and the protection of those who dissent. Our guests are the report's coau...
Feb 12, 2025•39 min•Season 5Ep. 1
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 Civic Engagement, and Michael Rosenblum , professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University and...
Sep 30, 2024•19 min•Season 4Ep. 8
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 Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Risa L. Lieberwitz, a professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and La...
Sep 20, 2024•34 min•Season 4Ep. 7
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 Black private institutions, Black public institutions, and white public institutions in the period approache...
Jul 11, 2024•36 min•Season 4Ep. 6
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 supported students as they came to a negotiated solution to end their encampment, and Nivedita Majumdar at J...
May 10, 2024•51 min•Season 4Ep. 5
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. Isaac Kamola, an associate professor of political science at Trinity College in Connecticut guests. H...
May 03, 2024•53 min•Season 4Ep. 4
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 Hybrid Pedagogy: The Journal of Critical Digital Pedagogy. In a recent article for the AAUP's Academ...
May 03, 2024•43 min•Season 4Ep. 3
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 faculty governance, labor solidarity, and protection of the freedom to teach and learn are crucial to the...
Apr 08, 2024•50 min•Season 4Ep. 2
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, teach, and conduct research. In this episode we look at member-led efforts to fight legislative int...
Feb 28, 2024•36 min•Season 4Ep. 1
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 professor of Sociology at Connecticut College and a co-chair of the special committee, Henry Reichman, pr...
Dec 05, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 3Ep. 6
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 resources on diversity in higher education The Legal Defense Fund website...
Nov 29, 2023•30 min•Season 3Ep. 5
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.” The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn, AAUP's digital organizer. Episode links: Rutgers AAUP-AFT web...
Oct 02, 2023•30 min•Season 3Ep. 4
In this episode we talk to Atia Sattar, an associate professor (teaching) in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California, about the article she wrote for AAUP’s Academe magazine entitled “Academic Motherhood and the Unrecognized Labors of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Women of Color.” In it, she wrote, “while women in higher education often face a career penalty for their struggles with infertility and motherhood, women of color do so within an institutiona...
Oct 01, 2023•34 min•Season 3Ep. 3
In this episode we examine the changing higher ed landscape after the Supreme Court decision in the case Students for Fair Admissions, INC, v. President and Fellows of Harvard College which effectively ended effectively end race-conscious admissions. The guests are Charles Toombs and Risa Lieberwitz. Charles Toombs, a Professor of Africana Studies at San Diego State University and president of the California Faculty Association. He is the immediate past chair of AAUP's Committee A on Academic Fr...
Sep 12, 2023•45 min•Season 3Ep. 2
In this episode we focus on AAUP’s work around racial justice. This is the first in a series of podcasts this season that will examine issues around the fight for greater racial equity in higher education. Tune in to hear our discussion about efforts to restrict teaching about race, the racial equity initiative at the AAUP, and what's ahead. The guest are Irene Mulvey and Glinda Rawls. Irene Mulvey is the president of the AAUP. She taught mathematics for 40 years, first at Swarthmore College and...
Sep 08, 2023•33 min•Season 3Ep. 1
We’re returning to the topic of student debt after this week’s arguments before the Supreme Court over the Biden administration’s student debt relief program. Risa Lieberwitz, AAUP’s general counsel and a professor of labor and employment law in the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Jenna Sablan, AAUP’s senior program officer for government relations, weigh in on what happened at the high court this week and what's next. In August, the Department of Education annou...
Mar 02, 2023•34 min•Season 2Ep. 2
In this episode we discuss the AAUP’s new investigative report on the summary suspension and dismissal of Dr. Mark McPhail, at Indiana University Northwest. In September 2021, the administration dispatched campus police officers to McPhail’s home to inform him that he had been dismissed and banned from campus, supposedly for making racially charged threats of physical violence. No accuser was identified, and no criminal charges were filed. An AAUP investigation found that, in acting against McPh...
Feb 15, 2023•37 min•Season 2Ep. 1
As student debt has grown astronomically over the past few decades, topping $1.7 trillion in federal and privately held debt, there seemed a moment of (limited) hope over the summer after years of activism and pressure when the Biden administration announced a federal plan to cancel $10K of debt for most federal loan holders and $20K of debt for those who had received Pell Grants. That plan ground to a halt in November when Republican-led courts halted the program. In this episode we discuss the...
Dec 21, 2022•40 min•Season 1Ep. 11
In this episode we sit down with Professor Lori Latrice Martin, an associate dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Louisiana State University, to discuss her article “Black Out: Backlash and Betrayal in the Academy and Beyond,” which examines what Professor Martin describes as the "predictability of efforts to silence conversations and actions related to combating anti-Blackness in America and the continue...
Dec 20, 2022•28 min•Season 1Ep. 10
In this episode of the podcast we discuss the issue of the massive transfer of wealth from tribal nations who underwrote the founding of land-grant universities and how institutions are beginning to address and contend with difficult questions about their relationship to Indigenous communities. The issue is the topic of a recent article in AAUP’s Academe magazine entitled “Confronting the Wealth Transfer from Tribal Nations That Established Land-Grant Universities” written by today’s guests, Ste...
Aug 03, 2022•44 min
On April 28 the AAUP released a report of the Special Committee on Governance, Academic Freedom, and Institutional Racism in the University of North Carolina System . The report considers the influence of the North Carolina state legislature on the systemwide board of governors and campus boards of trustees. It discusses how political pressure and top-down leadership have obstructed meaningful faculty participation in the UNC system, jeopardized academic freedom, and reinforced institutional rac...
Apr 28, 2022•34 min•Season 1Ep. 8
In this episode we discuss AAUP’s recently released statement from Committee A, Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism, which addresses partisan efforts in state legislatures to enact bills targeting teaching about Israel and about the history of racism in the United States, in ways that present a significant threat to academic freedom. The guests are Rana Jaleel, an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the University of Cali...
Apr 13, 2022•40 min•Season 1Ep. 7
The AAUP’s Kelly Benjamin talks to Michele Rayner, a member of the Florida House of Representatives, about attacks on academic freedom, the motivation for anti-critical race theory bills, and the state of the broader political situation in Florida. Episode update: When the episode was recorded, a bill Kelly and Rep. Rayner discussed that would make public college presidential searches in Florida secret had not passed the state legislature. It has since passed and Florida governor Ron DeSantis is...
Mar 08, 2022•23 min•Season 1Ep. 6
After the University of Florida administration blocked faculty from testifying in a voting rights case, a battle over academic freedom broke out in the state, garnering national attention and a court case. Paul Ortiz, professor of history at the University of Florida and president of the United Faculty of Florida -UF, talks to host Mariah Quinn about how faculty in the state are geared up to protect academic freedom and the first amendment. Episode links: AAUP President Cautions Against Lack of ...
Mar 03, 2022•36 min•Season 1Ep. 5
