Resisting Attacks on Academic Freedom and Inquiry

How power, politics, and fear are undermining the heart of higher education.

Demoralized, Defunded, Delegitimized

In a recent conversation for the The New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom spoke about the Trump administration's attacks on higher education, noting those attacks are part of a wider campaign to discredit higher education. Tressie argued that elite universities have become politically vulnerable because of increasing diversity, and resentment is an expression of underlying anxieties about social and economic change rather than ideological opposition to higher education: “Our current crisis is an amalgamation of two tensions: We want the elitism of prestigious universities and yet we do not want them to have any control of our culture or status.”

The Trump administration's targeted attacks on universities, including federal grant cuts and threats to foreign students, pose a dire threat to institutions without massive endowments:

Here is the brutal reality. Only a few universities possess the kind of eye-popping endowments that make them politically immune. Many others ride out the loss of state funding by admitting foreign students who pay full freight and winning large grants. That's why Trump singling out a student on a green card, demonizing foreigners and cutting grant dollars is an existential threat.

Tressie described the passive strategies employed by many university leaders and administrators as anticipatory obedience and warned that those who comply with the administration’s pressure are unlikely to be rewarded for their efforts: “Our profession has never selected leaders on courage, but the lack of even basic survival instincts is an embarrassment. Anticipatory obedience, indeed. Donald Trump is not loyal enough to reward obedience should it conflict with his own interests.” It is not simply an issue of academic freedom or campus politics — it is a threat to the very existence of universities as agents of social mobility, knowledge creation, and cultural progress: "No institution wins if the sector is demoralized, defunded and delegitimized."

According to Meghan O’Rourke for The New York Times, these attacks represent a coordinated campaign to dismantle universities by defunding projects, targeting projects on diversity, and discrediting research that challenges conservative ideology. O’Rourke described how these measures, coupled with public skepticism fueled by conservative rhetoric painting universities as elitist indoctrination camps, threaten to dismantle the university's core mission as a forum of free inquiry and critical thinking. "If the battle over universities were only about budgets, the fight might be different. But what is being targeted is something more profound: the ability of institutions to sustain the freedoms that form the foundation of our democracy." This attack not only threatens scientific progress and cultural progress, but it threatens to silence scholars through intimidation and fear.

The erosion of tenure has left universities particularly vulnerable to these attacks, as well. In 2022, Adam Sitze for The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote that tenure was meant to maintain academic freedom just as judicial tenure protects judges from political interference. With tenure under siege, universities feel pressured to dismantle diversity initiatives, cut funding to research projects, and redesign curricula to reflect conservative values. This strategic campaign is what Tressie warned is an ongoing, broader campaign to demoralize, defund, and delegitimize higher education.

These actions are part of larger authoritarian tactics to silence opposition and consolidate power. Authoritarian regimes, as described in Authoritarian Politics: How to Understand It and How to Resist It by Marie Heřmanová and Kristóf Szombati, target intellectual domains as a means of power consolidation, presenting universities as elitist and using social fears to legitimize destruction. The guide suggests that the tactics involve spreading fear to enable self-censorship and conformity — a tactic that resonates with what Tressie called anticipatory obedience. By forcing universities into retreat, authoritarian tactics not only aim to compromise higher education, but to disassemble its role as a platform to question power and inform public discourse.

For many, the consequences of these tactics are already a reality. Tressie described how two researchers had been awarded funding to conduct biomedical research that included women, saying "That research has been canceled because they lost N.I.H. funding. The price we will pay for Pyrrhic victories will burn us all."

Pushing back on a peer's contention that fear from professors, students, and universities was possibly hysteria, Cottom outlined the lived reality of scholars who were facing the pressures: “My colleagues have lost their jobs, their decades-long research projects, are receiving death threats, and their students are concerned about being surveilled and deported. Hysteria — if that is what we will call protest, outrage and fear — seems reasonable.”

American higher education now faces a perfect storm of demoralization, defunding, and delegitimization​. These attacks are not random or isolated; they follow a classic authoritarian playbook, and go beyond ordinary policy disagreements and have become an existential threat to the academic sector. The urgency of this crisis cannot be overstated: higher education as we know it is disappearing before our very eyes. If we allow our universities to be gutted, we risk losing one of democracy’s fundamental pillars – the cultivation of knowledge, critical inquiry, and informed citizenship that sustain a free society.

While there are no clear answers, drawing on his experiences in Hungary, Kristóf Szombati told CITAP and the Knight Research Network in December how important it is for researchers to craft a public narrative, understandable to the everyday person, about the public value of institutions of higher learning and freedom of inquiry.

Now is the time to work on that narrative.

Now is the time to reinvest in your relationships with your colleagues, students, universities, and the academic fields you are a part of to steel them for what's ahead.

Now is the time to fight for your universities.

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Join CITAP for Black Twitter: Talking Back and Transforming Television

If you’re in the Triangle, don’t miss CITAP’s upcoming event on Wednesday, March 26 from 12:00pm-1:30pm for “Black Twitter: Talking Back and Transforming Television,” a conversation between Dr. Meredith D. Clark and Dr. Sherri M. Williams on the power of Black digital communities in shaping media, activism, and cultural discourse. RSVP here!

Clark, author of We Tried to Tell Y’All: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives, examines how Black social media users have created vital spaces for resistance and storytelling. Williams, author of Black Social Television: How Black Twitter Changed Television, explores how Black Twitter has transformed the television industry by challenging traditional gatekeepers and shaping representation. Together, they’ll discuss the legacy of Black digital activism, the evolving role of social media, and the future of Black online communities.