As the new academic year begins, the dominant story of the summer was that of Jason Arday, a Cambridge professor who studied education. Arday, accused of being a fabulist and plagiarist, and was found dead a week after resigning. The particulars of his case were so aggressively reported that I don’t have much to add beyond the fact that the degree of coverage itself was remarkable.
In a macabre example of the dark nature of the feeding frenzy, The Telegraph deleted after Arday’s death, and without an editorial note, the word “living” from a headline implying that he got what he deserved.
The media deemed this an important story, partly because people on X pushed it aggressively. The researcher who broke the story of Arday’s misdeeds, Nathan Cofnas, has argued that race is related to IQ and that in a merit-based world “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” It seems reasonable to infer then that Arday was targeted because he was Black by Cofnas and that many, (but by no means all), who pushed this story shared some of Cofnas’ views on race and inclusion.
Some of Arday’s critics have now moved on to one of his PhD students, a Black woman, arguing that her dissertation is insufficiently scholarly and that Cambridge is involved in some sort of cover-up by embargoing the dissertation. An embargo would be justified given the continued pattern of targeted harassment, but in fact it is pretty standard practice, especially if the student is planning to turn the dissertation into a book.
Again, I don’t want to adjudicate Arday’s record, but will provide some context and sources if you want to dig in. If not, just skip ahead. Multiple passages from his dissertation were the same as another dissertation published some years earlier, though his granting institution suggested they were probably the result of honest error. The Times Higher Education undertook an intensive audit of his work which made the most damning and compelling allegations of data fabrication and failure to follow university ethical procedures, which are grounds for dismissal. It is also the case that Arday had been pursued for a number of years by a network that included right-wing activists and others who held racist views. This pursuit investigated not just claimed academic misdeeds, but also what appeared to be fabulist claims that Arday had made about his private life. However, contemporaneous reporting offers evidence to support some of these claims.
In the fallout of Arday’s death, Cofnas was suspended from his research position at Ghent University in Belgium, nominally for failing to fulfill the terms of his contract. The Arday story became the Cofnas story, about racial targeting and academic freedom. Some professors signed a petition saying that Cofnas was “being punished for exercising his academic freedom.” The US Ambassador to Belgium intervened to to petition Ghent to remove the suspension, although Cofnas must still work remotely pending an investigation.
So I want to ask those signatories to the pro-Cofnas petition, who are mostly English and American men: what the hell do you think is happening to academic freedom in America? Is this, really, the case that caused you to step up? When the administration that is dismantling academic freedom and removing Black people from positions of power is on your side, are you sure you are on the side of academic freedom?
Today, the societal forces that pushed the failures that led to Arday’s hiring - whether you call it wokeness or DEI - are in retreat. Meanwhile, more powerful forces are engaged in more aggressive threats to academic freedoms. If you want more detail, I’ve written a working paper that details the ways the second Trump administration has sought to use its power to control higher education.
Here is the big point: when we talk about speech and academic freedom, we also need to talk about power. The way the Trump administration has approached institutions is via processes of delegitimization, deconstruction and control. The rhetorical attacks that fueled delegitimization of higher education from his first term remain, but are joined by much more successful practices of deconstruction. These involve tools like purges, threats, investigations, defunding, all of which create environments of anticipatory compliance, where fear and uncertainty cause faculty and students to self-censor.
According to the the V-Dem/Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Index, the US is seeing significant erosion in its academic freedom as reflected by institutional autonomy. The measure is based on expert ratings, but certainly feels consistent with the broader erosion I’ve seen in academia in the last couple of years, but which remains obscured behind ongoing debates of wokeness.
Many of those complaining about academic freedom seem to see it only in the context of saying controversial things (or very specific controversial things, usually related to race) not to the institutional autonomy of academics. For example, the Trump administration is advancing a plan to remove tax-exempt status to any higher education institution offering targeted support for Black or other minority students. The use of tax law to force institutions to accept the Trump administration’s definition of inclusion is a clear attack on institutional autonomy, but presumably one that those who think of academic freedom as the right to say racist things would applaud.
In this context, what do we pay attention to? The Arday case certainly deserved to be covered, but the volume of attention was disproportionate click-chasing. The feeding frenzy around Arday served to highlight how much structural threats to academic credibility and freedom are given relatively short shrift by comparison.
Let me give you some examples of stories that are more important and examples of threats to academia, but which have received a tiny fraction of the attention given to Arday. Just as important, I want you to understand these stories as stories of structural power: who has it, and how they are using it.
Purging military instructors
Adam Kalkstein, a long-time professor at West Point was fired for refusing to engage in climate change denialism. He says that officials told him he could not tell his students that humans contribute to climate change, and that colleagues were warned that talking publicly about their concerns could lead to the dissolution of their department.
Other professors in military academies have sued for an infringement on their ability to teach, or simply left because of the new censorious environment, which comes from the top. Secretary Hegseth has called for purging ideas and research from libraries and classrooms, reducing the number of civilian professors, and removing tenure protections that he says “leads to stagnation, complacency, and inflexibility.”
Authoritarians systematically target higher education as part of a broader attack on the independence of institutions that might question their power. That is what Orban did in Hungary. In Turkey, Erdogan did not just purge military academies; he abolished them. And the West Point case connects these dots more clearly than the assault on other parts of American higher education.
I read about the story in Stars and Stripes, a media outlet supported by the Pentagon which has, nonetheless, operated as a credible and relatively independent source of information about life in the military. The editor, publisher and top reporters of Stars and Stripes were recently fired for “insubordination” after raising concerns about censorship of unflattering coverage of the administration.
The Trump administration wants to turns Stars and Stripes into state media, in the same way that they have turned Voice of America into a loudspeaker for the administration. They want to purge media institutions and educational institutions in the same way that they have targeted government institutions.
In the military, Hegseth has purged more than 80 generals and admirals, about 10% of top military officers. Women and Black officers and those deemed ideologically suspect have been disproportionately targeted. At the same time, the ideologically aligned are promoted. Hegseth is seeking to promote Parnell, who led the purge of Stars and Stripes, to be the new Army Secretary.
This case vividly illustrates how authoritarian assaults on government, media, and educational institutions are connected. Our military students cannot be given expertise that is not vetted by political commissars, our military leadership is purged of anyone viewed as disloyal, and the traditional media that specialized in covering the military will be purged if they continue to show independence.
Who has power and how are they using it?
The Trump deconstruction of higher education reflects a playbook. For example, in a post published in December 2024, Max Eden, a higher education contributor at the American Enterprise Institute, outlined many of the actions later taken by Trump: cutting research funding, overhead rates, and foreign funding; focusing on DEI and race in admissions; targeting accreditation; revoking foreign student visas; and using antisemitism as a justification.
These ideas did not originate solely with Eden, but his post showed there was a clear game plan, and a willingness to implement it. Eden even recommended early targets: “To scare universities straight, McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.” And Columbia became the first major target of the new administration.
The Trump administration has banned words identifying forbidden research topics, barred all federal funds to particular universities, put political appointees rather than scientists to make decisions on science, and defunded entire areas of research. For example, the National Science Foundation plans to eliminate its directorate for the social, behavioral and economic sciences, which will gut federal training funds for economists, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists.
We see examples of censorship trickling into professional meetings.
The Department of Health and Human Services removed one fifth of previously-approved research presentations at a conference on early childhood.
The American Diabetes Association conference organizers called the police to forcibly remove researchers at their annual meeting. Their crime? Handing out paper copies of an editorial in the association’s journal that criticized the Trump’ administration’s policies affecting their research. The editorial represented a response to a Trump administration official who was giving a talk at the event. The organization said that as a nonprofit organization, they sought to ensure a nonpartisan environment, which meant barring its own scientists from providing an unintrusive counterpoint to a partisan spokesperson.
The “fire your professor” button
To be clear, it’s not just Trump. The assault on academic freedom is happening across the country. State governments use different tools. This includes educational gag orders restricting what can be taught, undermining governance structures to centralize power into the hands of political appointees on campus, and hollowing out of tenure to ease the purging internal critics.
Between federal and state governments, pretty much every university is vulnerable if they do not align their research, teaching, personnel and speech policies with the ideological goals of one political party that has declared higher education to be “the enemy.”
Let’s take one example from red states, where politicians gave conservative students a button to fire liberal professors. And those students have been pushing that button. This kills classroom trust, and drains the curriculum of anything that might challenge student views.
An Indiana University instructor was fired after a Republican Senator contacted the campus because she had used a graphic in class that a student alleged connected “Make America Great Again” to white supremacy (the instructor disagreed). She was investigated and removed under a law that claimed to expand “intellectual diversity” while also preventing students from experiencing political views unrelated to their course. The course? “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice” a graduate level course in the field of social work.
At Texas A&M a student secretly recorded an instructor, objecting to content about gender in her class on children’s literature, then met with the President of the university to complain, and recorded those meetings, and released the recordings to friendly politicians, who then forced the firing first of the instructor, the removal of two administrators, and next the resignation of the President. The controversy led to a system-wide review of courses and fueled new restrictions on how they can teach race, gender and sexuality. Faculty cannot engage in advocacy, without any guidance as to what “advocacy” means. The regents also cut more than 200 courses from core curriculum, focusing on classes related to race, gender, the environment, literature and culture.
An English college instructor at South Florida State College was fired after assigning an award-winning short story she had used for more than a decade featuring a fictional teacher who engages in bad behavior. A student expressed “mild discomfort.” God forbid adults going to university should experience mild discomfort. The University president told her that the short story “is political” and that “Florida has restrictions too.” As she noted “The calipers on curriculum control in the State of Florida had been steadily closing.”
Even in private institutions, academic leaders and their boards are looking for ways to signal their alignment with a movement that censors faculty. With “The University And Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles” the leadership of Vanderbilt University continued with the hallowed tradition of using “first principles” as a signifier of indifference to complexity. They seek to extend the (reasonable if debatable) policy of institutional neutrality to individual faculty. For example, they say:
Faculty—individually and through academic units—fail in their responsibility if course offerings, syllabi, or class discussions suppress or promote ideas and perspectives that are rooted in political or personal commitments as opposed to academic merit.
I’ve read that sentence several times and I still do not know what it means. You can be punished if you “suppress” or “promote” political views. Which is it — suppression or or promotion? And what is suppression or promotion? Not specified. For example, I don’t know how to teach my classes in public policy that describes political views behind policies without being vulnerable to the claim that I was promoting some of those views, or that I was suppressing some view that a student might prefer to see promoted. There is no clear standard, which is the point. As with “advocacy” at Texas A&M, the ambiguity generates a chilling effect because faculty assume they will be used to retroactively punish when the occasion demands.
Who is politicizing campus?
The Vanderbilt leadership also calls for “focused hiring” investments as part of their “first principles.” What does this mean? It mostly likely means following the path of other universities, where “civic centers” that are centered on conservative values essentially operate as separate institutions imposed on the campus by outsiders. They are not subject to faculty governance, have funding resources not available to the rest of the university, have their own hiring standards and processes, and are led by politically connected scholars or former politicians. It does not matter if the students want this or not. In Iowa, students are forced to take their classes.
So much for the marketplace of ideas and principled opposition to DEI!
It’s not unreasonable to argue that including underrepresented groups is useful in broadening the array of ideas and insights into scholarship. But recognize that is the logic of DEI. This argument for inclusion seems more persuasive to me when it adds historically underrepresented voices compared to the voices that run most state governments, all three branches of the federal government, and most corporations. But again, power is the point. The political dominance of the Trump administration and red state legislatures, and the money of private donors, ensure they will be heard because of their power, not because they lack power.
The game is further given away when the Vanderbilt policy calls for replacing department leaders that do not go along with their views, and reorganizing or closing departments. This is the type of top-down and centralized governance we see among institutions that believe that upper-level administrators or political appointees are better placed to protect academic freedom than actual academics. In other words, the commanding heights of the university will fire the faculty they want, and shut down voices that are politically inconvenient, and invest in faculty as demanded by the powerful.
You cannot have freedom to learn without a freedom to teach and a freedom to ask questions. The Trump era assault on these freedoms extends to students. Here are two examples:
The Trump administration argues it can deport foreign students solely on the basis of their speech, and has attempted to do so based on some fairly innocuous examples that seemed to be narrowly targeted at speech critical of Israel’s actions.
When Florida International University students sought to raise concerns about their campus co-operating with ICE, they first sought to meet with the university president. They were denied. So they held a silent protest at a presidential event. FIU said this violated a campus policy that “expressive” activities cannot take place indoors.
Indoors? This is Florida! Where the hell are you supposed to protest?
The students were told to record a video explaining why they were wrong, a classic case of state-coerced speech. Parents of the students who were FIU alumni noted that when they protested on campus as students, they enjoyed much more freedoms.
For anyone thinking “the students should keep politics off campus” there are two responses. First, it is not possible to keep politics out of campus! Part of being on campus is learning how to engage with speech and politics. Second, the actors most aggressively politicizing campus are not students or faculty, it is Republican politicians.
While campuses broadly honor traditions of free speech, making the right to debate central to their identity and using institutional norms to correct when they get it wrong, the political approach to speech is more nakedly partisan, protecting and platforming speech and people they like, and sanctioning those they don’t.1 If you trust politicians, rather than faculty, to protect the values of academic freedom, you have not been paying attention to what has been happening in the last year.
FIU trustees are almost all appointed either by Governor DeSantis or a board he appoints. They selected, as President, a former Republican lobbyist, legislator and Lt Governor. She had no higher education administrative experience, but is imposing radical and unpopular constraints on campus speech to prevent students from engaging in the most minimal protest of her political party’s policies. Her base salary is $900,000 as part of a compensation package worth about $1.5 million per year.2
Fred Hawkins, the South Florida State College president who fired the English instructor for her short story, had no higher education background. And yet he was chosen two days after he submitted his application. The board of trustees changed the selection rules to allow someone without an advanced degree to serve as President. Hawkins has no advanced degree, but was a close ally of Governor DeSantis. A former rodeo cowboy, Mr. Hawkins was arrested for impersonating a police officer just three years before becoming university president. One of the trustees explained why he would not support more qualified candidates who had actual experience: “You have to understand that we are political appointees, and they were all Democrats, The governor doesn’t appoint all Republican trustees and expect us to select a Democrat.”
To succeed in the upper echelons of higher education in Florida that you have to be a part of, or approved by, the dominant political regime, which hands out well-paid positions to unqualified officials. In this respect, Florida is not meaningfully different from, say, China, with the exception that China puts more emphasis on merit for the most senior positions.
The law vs. the facts on the ground
If you are looking for reasons to be optimistic, it is that in many cases the courts are pushing back.
The Stars and Stripes reporters are suing. So are some of the instructors who were fired. A federal court agreed that the FIU punishments are unconstitutional. A student newspaper at Stanford sued against Marco Rubio’s claimed right to deport students based on speech, noting that staff had resigned and contributors withdrew articles because of fear of government punishment. A judge agreed with them, saying
In the United States, free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength. That strength is diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation.
But when the governing regime does not believe in the underlying values of the constitution, they can enforce conformity in other ways, by threatening and intimidating students, faculty and institution. Florida’s Stop Woke Act was clearly unconstitutional. But that did not stop DeSantis from creating a regime of censorship that constrained what people said or did on campus because of the fear of political punishment.
Universities fired a slew of faculty in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death, in some cases for saying nasty things about Kirk, and in some cases just for quoting the nasty things Kirk said when he was alive. This was, again, clearly unconstitutional, but many universities preferred to pay out the lawsuits rather than defend free speech. The law is one thing, the practice is another.
The trickle down effect of these actions has been to create fear, even as many of those formal actions have been successfully challenged in court. What people have learned was that the political class could decide they wanted to teach your institution a lesson, make up a reason, and then use government resources to attack.
What is the story we tell about higher education?
So much of narrative-making is not about facts but about salience. For those that drove the Arday story, he was a beneficiary (and perhaps a victim) of aggressive inclusion by an institution that neglected merit. This was not just a case of a individual fraud, they say, but of institutional failure on the part of Cambridge and other universities for not excluding Arday. It was not about Arday, but about DEI, and the inappropriate inclusion of Black scholars at elite institutions. In this respect, it echoed the Claudine Gay story.
All of the stories I’ve detailed in this post are, I think, more important than the Arday story. They involve systematic structural threats by the government to free speech, or by private actors undermining academic freedom in the shadow of those threats. And to be clear, these are all stories the media has covered — that is how I am sharing them with you. But it is also clear these are stories that have generated a fraction of the attention and interest that the Arday case brought.
Back in 2017 I wrote in the New York Times: “Free speech on campus has survived and will survive challenges from students and other members of civil society. Its fate is much less certain when the government decides to censor discomforting views.” This was the minority view, at least if you judge media coverage around campus speech at the time. And its fine to care about both - that is how campuses adjust their norms and practices - but you cannot weigh where to focus your attention if you don’t recognize the greater threat.
What has made it harder for many is that they genuinely bought the idea that the right was sincerely interested in protecting speech on campus. They appropriated the banner of free speech and academic freedom. They do it still. For example, even as it polices speech on American campuses, the Trump administration is sending millions overseas to far right political allies that declare themselves part of the Free Speech Union International.
But it should be crystal clear now that the biggest threats to academic freedom come from government and cowed administrators controlling speech for ideological reasons. The first step to restoring these freedoms will be to recognize, and call out, this pattern with a fraction of the attention that is devoted to the anti-wokeness stories. What the Arday case shows is that regardless of the weight of harms coming from a government assault on academia, plenty will be willing to distract themselves, and you, with other stories.
I know lots of people might scoff at this, but here is a thought experiment. Which other institutions welcome their critics? Chris Rufo, who has done more to dismantle higher education than anyone, charges five figures sums to share his views on campus. Which institutions routinely allow its members to criticize and protest their bosses? If you are not sure, try this at your place of work and see how it goes.
Speculation here, but one effect of Florida’s legislative term limits is to create a lot of former legislators looking to stay on the gravy train, and higher education has become a spoils system for them.