Toward a Democratic Academic Freedom
Will Clark | 22 January 2025 | Inside Higher Ed
Right now, fear is taking hold over the threats universities will face from a hostile Trump administration. We’re advised to relinquish diversity as a framework, dismantle recently built DEI infrastructure or emphasize thinking with the enemy. Such postures take the shibboleths attributed to university liberalism and shrink their presence. They capitulate to a right-wing political movement intent on remaking the university in a regressive image. We need not look further than universities in Florida and Indiana to see our future.
But in the coming crisis, our work cannot just be defensive. Rather, our future lies in collective action—in work modeled by an academic unionism currently thriving in graduate education but eschewed by elite faculty ranks—that will allow universities not just to survive but to thrive as collectives of labor and scholarship after decades of neoliberal austerity…