%20(2).jpg)
AAUP Presents
A podcast by the American Association of University Professors on issues related to academic freedom, shared governance, and higher education. Visit aaup.org for more news and information.
AAUP Presents
Academic Freedom: Thinking Transnationally
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 Truschke is Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. For the last three years, she served as chair of the Rutgers Faculty and Graduate Student Union Academic Freedom Committee. Her latest book, India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent was published earlier this month (June 2025).
Fatima El-Tayeb is Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her research interests include Black Europe, comparative diaspora studies, queer of color critique, critical Muslim studies, decolonial theory, transnational feminisms, visual culture studies, race and technology, and critical European studies. The English translation of her book Un-German: Racialized Otherness in Post Cold-War Europe comes out this month (June 2025).
Eve Darian-Smith is a Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine as well as a fellow at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. She is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in law, history, and anthropology. Her book Policing the Mind: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters has just been published by Johns Hopkins University Press in May, 2025.
Links to sources mentioned in the conversation:
- “Fighting on Three Fronts” by Hank Reichmann
- Legal and Academic Resources for Academic Freedom and On-Campus Protests - Rutgers AAUP-AFT
- Policing Higher Education by Eve Darian-Smith
- Un/German by Fatima El-Tayeb Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer
- India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent by Audrey Truschke
Further reading:
- Academic Freedom in India in 6 tables— IAFN
- Punched, choked, kicked: German police crack down on student protests | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera
- Peace Petition Scholars, Turkey –Scholars at Risk
- Hungary broke EU law by forcing out university, says European Court
- Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire
W e often speak, usually privately. about what cost are you willing to accept? Like, is it worth it to sign this letter? If you might have your name added to an extra scrutiny list, next time you enter the country, is it worth it to speak out about this issue If you're gonna be on a visa ban list. What country are you a citizen of or would they be willing to revoke your access to? How much do you need archival access? Are you willing to risk your physical safety? Are you willing to risk imprisonment? Goons showing up at your dad's house? Right? and one doesn't have academic freedom or really any other kind of freedom under those conditions, right? Right. You know, to me that that's a sign that we've really entered a new, very much authoritarian kind of situation here.
Vineeta:Welcome to the fifth episode of Academic Freedom on the Line, a collaboration between A A UP presents and the AA UP's Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. I'm Center fellow Vineeta Singh, your host for this conversation, rethinking Academic Freedom in a transnational context. We are joined today by three scholars whose work on international law, political history, migration, identity, and social movements requires them to question the Eurocentric and universalist ideas embedded in our understandings of the world. I And for today's conversation, we've asked them to help us do the same with our understanding of academic f reedom.
Vineeta:Audrey, Eve, and Fatima, thank you so much for joining us today. Could I ask you to begin with a brief introduction so our listeners are able to put a voice to each name?
Audrey:Sure. So, hi everyone. I'm Audrey Truschke. I am professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. I have faced a fair amount of attacks personally in terms of my academic freedom. That's part of how I got into this. For the past three years, I have also been the chair of the Academic Freedom Committee for the Rutgers full-time faculty and graduate student Union,
Eve:I'm Eve Darian Smith. I'm a professor at the, in the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California Irvine. Um, I have been very much interested in the rise of authoritarianism for, for quite a while now, and I have just published a new book called Policing Higher Education in the critical University studies series with Johns Hopkins. I'm delighted to be here.
Fatima:Hi, I am Fatima El-Tayeb. I'm professor of ethnicity, race and Migration, and women's gender and sexuality study at Yale. Yale. I'm also a non-citizen, I work on, um, race racialization diasporic communities in Europe, including, um, Muslim communities. So the, the kind of intersection of academic freedom and anti-Muslim and anti-black racism has been a topic for me for quite a while. I wrote a book about that 10 years ago that it's coming out in English now and unfortunately it's not really outdated yet. it's called Ungerman Racialized Otherness in Post Cold War Europe.
Vineeta:Thank you all and thank you again for agreeing to be a part of this conversation. Now at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, we're a bunch of academics. So, you know, we're very concerned with whether the language that we're using is precise and accurate, And whether it is the right tool for the right job. So. You know, we've been, um, talking about academic freedom, that term itself, what it does and doesn't mean. Um, and we've definitely sort of centered US law and custom and us higher education's history in, in those conversations. So could you, uh, help us maybe think about what that term can and does mean in. Uh, maybe a broader context.
Eve:Uh, I think there is a lot of confusion. Amongst scholars, amongst those, even within the academic world, around what academic freedom means. we can talk at length about that sort of ambiguity, but I also think it is important to underscore freedom in academic life as much as the terminology itself is a little opaque. Um, my concern that the term academic freedom to the degree it's used in the United States is very much conflated with the notion of free speech, constitutional rights of free speech, individual constitutional rights. And I think that is a big problem and sort of constrains us often to thinking about the big kinds of questions Vineeta, that you raised in terms of how does higher education and academic life relate more generally to societal, uh, common goods and benefits? I.
Audrey:I think academic freedom, it's the cornerstone of the modern academy in many ways. That said, I think we are at this particular moment where whether we like it or not, it is getting reframed. I don't, I don't think we come out of what we're go still very much going into right now with academic freedom, unchanged as, as a concept. Um, some of the big areas where, where I see it sort of being challenged both externally and internally, um, would be one is sort of where the primary locus of attacks comes from.
Audrey:When the foundational academic freedom documents, you know, for like the A A UP were written back in like the forties, the idea was to protect scholars from undue, inappropriate, you know, retributive actions from their own institution. We've still got that. That's still a problem. We still need protection against that. But a huge number of academic freedom assaults are now coming from outside of universities, from, you know, everything from sort of online mobs to who is in charge and, and particular parties and that sort of thing. Um, and many of, much of that was just not even conceived of as a possibility I think 80 years ago, right? Like the concept of a Twitter mob, you can't blame people in the forties for not foreseeing that. So I think we need academic freedom to be broader in that sense. Um. I think the, the free speech Academic Freedom line, to the extent it's there, that's definitely something that's being challenged.
Audrey:Um, and I will say, you know, as, as the, the now former head, I just stepped down, you know, this month, um, of the Academic Freedom Committee at the Rutgers Faculty Graduate Student Union. We faced this issue at the beginning of this past academic year where we found more and more of what we were doing was really free speech stuff, especially around protest rights on campus. And I sort of raised it to my committee. Do we wanna keep doing this? Like, this is not like, in a narrow sense, really academic freedom. It's definitely adjacent, definitely intersects, but it's a little different. And the, oh, I mean, it was a hundred percent yes. This is what we care about. We wanna do this stuff now. I remain uncertain exactly how to articulate and frame that free speech, academic freedom relationship right now.
Audrey:But in a world in which we cannot even peacefully walk along a campus bearing a certain flag or a sign that calls attention to a genocide, or just articulating our political views, no matter how upsetting they may be to the other people on that campus, if we can't do that stuff, we don't have freedom of any sort, academic or otherwise. Um, so whatever's happening, I think academic freedom, it, it needs, it needs to be a little broader somehow than it has been historically.
Fatima:I think academic freedom in the, in, maybe the more traditional sense means that academics have the right to understand their profession, however they want I through certain what, to certain limits, right. I think universities are incredibly important right now is a space that if it keeps academic freedom, can speak and should speak truth to power. And of course that is very much under attack. So, so an approach that focuses on the idea of institutional neutrality and claims to protect its faculty through this approach, um, will backfire, I think, because on the one hand, institutions are never separate from society and attacks on basic rights in society should concern us. But right now, universities themselves are under direct attack. So this conservative approach to academic freedom, we are, you know, we are dealing with the truth. And you all deal with politics, just doesn't work anymore. If it ever did, but now it's very obviously, you know, beside the point.
Eve:I think Fatima makes such a great point. Um, but thinking about historically, you know, in the forties and under previous red scares and so on, then McCarthyism in the, in the forties, fifties, it was an attack on, you know, on, on individual scholars for perhaps being, uh, you know, having communist uh, associations or for other kinds of marginalized perspectives. We are seeing today an attack on higher education as a sector of society more generally. And so. The attack is it, it it is on individuals, but individuals within a, the space of the university, college life. And so it's also an attack as we are seeing more expressly on actual institutions of higher education, be it Harvard or Rutgers or the University of California. So it is an unprecedented attack that we're seeing in the us even though there are moments historically that have echoes with the current moment. I think this is, this is a challenge and a crisis in higher education that is truly, truly unique. and I would argue, of course, the, the parallels with it occurring in other parts of the world make a global scale attack on the freedom to study and analyze and think and challenge the status quo. It is a global phenomenon just as rising authoritarianism is a global phenomenon.
Fatima:Yeah, and I would add that it started, um, way before the attacks on, on Harvard and Columbia. Right. With, um, in Florida, for example, with, with attacks on institutions there and on particular theories or, you know, very, I think, um, knowingly wrong understandings of concepts like critical race theory. So obviously it's part of a, of a broader attack really on education. I think it's also really, really important to point out that, uh, primary target before universities were schools and the impact there might even be worse than what we go through at, um, at universities.
Audrey:Yeah, I agree. I agree very much. And I think, well, one thing that has come up in my, my professional life for, you know, what, about a decade, maybe a little bit more now, um, I work on South Asia and there, you know, we, we have a number of South Asian nations that are not especially tolerant of descent right now. Um, India especially has grown in their intolerance of descent. And so for the past decade plus, we, like in the field collectively, we often speak, usually privately. In fact, almost always, we do this privately about what cost are you willing to accept? Like, is it worth it to sign this letter? If you might have your name added to an extra, you know, extra scrutiny list, next time you enter the country, is it worth it to speak out about this issue If you're gonna be on a visa ban list. What country are you a citizen of or would they be willing to revoke your access to? How much do you need archival access? Are you willing to risk your physical safety? Are you willing to risk imprisonment goon showing up at your dad's house? Right? And I mean, these are the sorts of mechanisms that have been available in some South Asian nations for, for quite a while. Um, and one doesn't have academic freedom or really any other kind of freedom under those conditions, right? At the point at which you're saying, okay, for articulating these ideas that I genuinely in good faith believe this is going to be the horrific real world cost in my lives and potentially the lives of my family.
Audrey:Whereas those conversations have been largely confined to South Asia in the last year. I've really seen a shift in that and I've seen many, many more academics in America start to talk about those costs. Right. Is it worth risking your green card? Is it worth risking your visa status? Right. What about ICE showing up? Right. You know, to me that that's a sign that we've really entered a new, very much authoritarian kind of situation here.
Fatima:Yeah. And the focus has shifted. As I mentioned, I'm a non-citizen, but I'm a citizen of Germany, so I was never particularly worried. 'cause you know, it's a very privileged citizenship. But in the current situation, suddenly it's not as comfortable anymore because. The attack on even academic freedom in the, in the traditional sense in, in Germany is extreme right now. Meaning that institutions itself, administrations put a lot of pressure on both students and faculty, and that is echoed by the state. Something that is very unusual in Germany is for administrations to call the police on students. I think it's somewhat more common than in the US that students go on strike, uh, stage protest and so on. In Germany, when I was a student with, we occupied the university for months and, and the administration certainly didn't call the police, and when now they do it after, you know. Minutes and the kind of of violence that's happening there is, um, of a totally new scale.
Fatima:So you have this shift from, in the case of Turkey, I don't know how much, how many years ago, um, the really, I think, unexpected violence of the attack on academics who basically signed a statement was a huge shock. Shock. And many of them had to leave Turkey, came to the us, came to the European Union, then you had, um, Hungary, you had Orban, um, kicking out the Central European University. That was already different because at that point Hungary was part of the European Union. And despite, you know, being verbally censored for. Violating basic democratic rules. There was no real pushback by the EU against Hungary. Also for reasons of its, uh, strategic importance at the eastern border of the European Union and its role in, um, illegal pushbacks of, of refugees. And, and by now that has, has really moved to nations that consider themselves the democratic center of the European Union, such as Germany, where we have, uh, a level of repression, um, that we haven't seen for a very long time.
Vineeta:Right. So when Media, uh, frames attacks on higher education right now in the United States, as, you know, Trump versus Harvard or the Trump administration versus US higher education, that might be a really impoverished, uh, framing of what's going on in a broader geographical and historical context.
Eve:I don't know whether people had an opportunity to see it, but Hank Reichman wrote a very good piece in the Academe blog, and he talked about there being, at least in the US context, what he recognizes and, and acknowledges as three distinct, um, conflicts that are going on. So one is, you know, the MAGA Trump Republican party against higher education, right? So it both private and public colleges, small liberal arts colleges, big research one university. So it is, it is a full on assault by the Republican parties on higher ed. And of course. K through 12. He talks about another sort of front of the conflict. It's higher education and a public that is, um, being trained to think of, uh, academic life as very privileged, elite woke, somehow problematic and not necessarily reflective of the wider society's concerns.
Eve:And then he talks about a third front, which is students and faculty fighting their own administrators, uh, within their own individual institutions. And I just thought that was a very nice way of thinking about the, the current moment, at least in the US if we are just talking about the us, um, as much more complicated and sort of different ways of this attack and how it's emerging, right? And it's not simply Harvard versus Trump, which Vineeta I agree with you, is a lot of the, the mainstream, you know, news cycle, it's Harvard versus Trump all the time right now in the current moment every day. There's some other, you know, Trump accusation and threat, but it is much, much, much, much more complicated both in the, in the current moment, but also deep historical roots featuring in an emerging, in the current moment as well.
Audrey:Yeah, I think that's really helpful. Um, I would sort of add to the list of things we're seeing. Um, I think one is just sheer unadulterated racism. Right. I mean, that, that is the most important thing to understanding Trump and the MAGA agenda is straightforward racism. And for reasons that remain unclear to me, the media has a problem with this, right?
Audrey:The media's always trying to like nuance this or dress this up or look for something deeper. And like, it's not deep, it's not complicated, it's just straightforward, disliking people with different skin tones. Like that's all really what it is. Um, I would also put on the list is sort of this, this anti specialist knowledge thing. And I think this helps us explain, like, I don't know that many people saw coming that the opening kind of plays of the Trump administration against the academy were going to be against the hard sciences as opposed to the humanities, right?
Audrey:They went after the NSF before the NEH. Um, but I think what what explains that continuity, um, is, is that. Uh, there's this, this sense in America's far right and I guess normal right, whatever, just the right. Um, that, that they don't, they don't want to bow to any sort of, kind of specialized knowledge that you need to know stuff and that you have to know it deeply. And I think this kind of fundamental reason behind that has to do with the, the sort of, um, base appeal of maga, right? I mean to, to me, what is appealing about MAGA to a fairly broad range of people?
Audrey:And keep in mind, Trump was elected with a notably more diverse coalition than we saw the first time around. What, what's appealing, I think, to a lot of people there is that it's easy, right? You don't have to think critically. You don't have to make yourself better. You don't need to reflect on things just given to base human kind of instincts or desires, like the, the worst of humanity, the hatred, the othering, right? Things that, if we're honest, we all have felt at some point. And so when, when scholars come along and say, wait a minute. Let's talk about this, right? Whether it's the humanity scholar that's saying, let's talk about race and how it's a construct and where it comes from. Or it's the scientist who's like, actually, when you say that, you know, people of a certain race are more prone to a certain disease that's not actually like truly accurate. Like let's look at the DNA, however you approach it, whatever it is, it is cracking the very thin facade of that maga. It's all about us versus them, right? And so I think like there's no real answer to that from the MAGA perspective.
Fatima:Yeah, I agree with all of that. Um, I think part of the reason that the NSF was attacked first is that it just. Stops everything. I mean, scientists are much more dependent on their labs than we are, uh, on our funding as, as people in the humanities. And in terms of specialist knowledge, that is true. But there's also particular kind of specialist knowledge, right, that is, uh, kind of idealized. Um, obviously, you know, the, the idea of tech, but more than than tech, the, the idea of AI, these bizarre ideas to basically, um, have AI regulate everything is in some ways an answer to this MAGA frustration with how can you make sure that everybody thinks the same thing?
Fatima:It just doesn't work no matter how much you repress them. But if it's ai, then that problem is solved and there's a, there's a kind of convergence that is, is really scary. And also I think. unexpected by many because, um, I feel like the reason that that, that the media find it hard to identify racism is because it's so much a foundation of also the world that they create and that they, they are very invested in. And I mean, one of the dangers of the, of the responses to, to the rise of the right that has started a few decades ago is the mainstreaming of racism. And that works well because it's not coming from the edge It's already in the center. And sometimes it's out there and sometimes it's not.
Fatima:So there this refusal of. Um, the Democrats or the mainstream media to name racism as a driving force is, is part of the, of the problem. And of course, um, there was this illusion for a long time that tech presents progress and all those tech bros must be super liberal. They're not, they're absolute racists. Um, and that's nothing new, right? Science, science is often been being racist. and, my work focuses in Europe, in particular in Germany, and, and, and one kind of important point that I see not only Germany globally is the, the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the Soviet Empire, right? And the, the shifts in society, kind of the end of the, of the welfare model of capitalism that you had in Western Europe. Um, and one of the, one of the things that was, um. Surprising and noticeable was that the extreme right was very well organized, trans nationally, and very savvy in using new media. And I think that is a process that started then that, um, kind of went under the radar and now comes to, full force. And there's been a lot of failure, um, by politicians, by media, but also by academia in really paying attention to that.
Eve:Absolutely agree about race and racial discrimination being at the sort of core of the MAGA appeal to a general public. I totally, totally agree, but I also don't wanna let corporations off the hook here because there is corporate backing and power that actually is. Uh, part of the machinery that for two decades has been promoting these think tanks and conservative networks of dark money. Um, that, and corporations feeling that I think that they could control Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And so long as there was this, you know, uneasy but also coalescence between corporate power and greed and political power and greed based on and fueled by and driven by racial, uh, prejudice, that that was a sort of. a coalition made in heaven for some, but you know, I think we're also beginning to see some of the cracks in that, um, with the tariff wars and so on. But I just wanted to just put on the table that corporations and particularly, particularly big oil have been very much part of the support mechanisms over decades for the, for the emergence of the extreme far right. At least in the United States.
Vineeta:In this miniseries we kind of keep coming back to this idea of expertise and expertise as a threat to entrenched interests. Right? Uh, how certain kinds of insurgent knowledges are such a threat to the political order that they have to be sort of expunged not just from the university, but from any public space at all.
Fatima:Right. I mean that's, um, that's in some ways maybe the, the slightly hopeful aspect of this whole mess, namely that I see it as a response to gains both in the US and in Europe. Right? In the us there were fundamental. Changes to the institutions based on liberation movements within the us but also they gained, of course, power because of the global liberation movements, the anti-colonial movements that were also, uh, a big driver of the student movement of the sixties in Europe. Right? In Germany, for example, the student movement started with the protest of Iranian students against the visit of the Shah to Germany because Germany, west Germany had a very cozy relationship with the Iranian dictatorship. Um, so there was this interest in the global south and in liberation, but in the US there was a push to institutionalize certain disciplines, like ethnic studies, even if they were, you know, then integrated in the institution. But they opened the doors to, to ideas and people.
Fatima:Whereas in Europe, that did not happen. And that's also one of the things that I look at in, in this book, how in the early nineties, Europe had to recreate. Its future, but also its past right to somehow contain the memory of fascism, of socialism. And they came up with a, with a really nice capitalist success story about how western Europe basically defeated two totalitarian regimes that weren't really European, the Nazis and the Soviets. But what was completely left out of the story was colonialism, right? In which Western Europe was the perpetrator, not the victim. But you can't push that out because you have a growing population in Europe that does not descend from the colonizers, but the colonized. So what do you do with these people and their perspectives and their memories of Europe, right?
Fatima:Either you integrate that into the dominant narrative, or you repress those ideas and those people more and more violently because they're not going away, they're just growing. So I think that's part of the reason. I mean, that's why honestly, um, the US academia as of now is so much more vibrant than in Europe because Europe has a very narrow view of what needs to be included in European knowledge of itself. Um, so, it was clear that this would not work much longer. Um, also because of a generational shift, both bringing more racialized communities into the universities, but also, um, opening up new, um, or not even so new impulses. -- I mean, Aime Cesaire wrote probably the most important book about Europe and colonialism, um, in 1951, I think.
Fatima:Um, but where that relates to Islamophobia and antisemitism is, um, I think because of this larger attempt of Europe to rewrite its history and to both claim that fascism is totally over and, um. That's a problem, especially with Germany, right?
Fatima:The United Germany, because unfortunately Nazism originated in, in Germany. So you have a narrative where on the one hand there's a really, really a kind of perverted ownership of the Holocaust narrative that those Germans claim who are the descendants of the perpetrators because in this whole, very extreme repression of anything that is pro-Palestine in Germany that is, um, accused of antisemitism, of course many of the, of the targets are actually Jews. So I think that's, particularly, um, honestly disgusting effect of this kind of, of projection of this disavowed past on, on the one hand Muslims.
Fatima:So this narrative of Muslims as the new anti-Semites started at least in '91 with the, um, Iraq war and um, a part of the European left, which was in a total crisis after the fall of the Soviet Empire. Then, um, kind of shifting to the US needing a new hero. So, Saddam Hussein's claim that he would, um, attack Israel after Kuwait was then reframed as the US as a kind of anti-fascist force and the potential of Germany to be on the right side in this conflict.
Fatima:And then you had the, the war in, in Yugoslavia where again, the Serbs were kind of positioned as the new Nazis and the NATOs, the new allies. So you have various things coming together, much larger attempts to, to kind of rewrite history in a way that allows to continue with the old model. And you have something similar, of course in the, in the US you attempt to just rewrite history and erase the voices of racialized communities and, and push a narrative that has nothing to do with reality, but is also. Um, driven by this idea that you can just create one story that everybody has to adhere, adhere to.
Fatima:I think it's also really, really important to point out that neither the German government nor the US government really cares about antisemitism. It's about anti whiteness. So antisemitism becomes a standard for anti whiteness. But then of course, Jews can very easily also become anti-white,
Audrey:Um, I think we're, we're actually at a very dangerous moment, I think with antisemitism in America because due to the American far right, the word has become basically meaningless, right? It doesn't mean anti-Jewish sentiment anymore for, for most usages we see right now. Um, but anti-Jewish sentiment is actually very real in the United States, right? and so like real antisemitism and Islamophobia sort of coexist as these kind of like dual hatreds of the far right. Um, and I think it is important to, to state. I think it's been implicit in a lot of our remarks that the attacks kind of structurally on a social level in the us on academic freedom and perhaps worldwide really as well. Do come from the Right, right. This is a right wing issue.
Audrey:Um, I mean, I think antisemitism and Islamophobia both go back centuries, literally. Um, in Western history. It's not always the same, but there is this sort of fundamental grammar for each one that then, you know, the next generation can tweak in important ways, but still sort of like, in a sense, pick up where we left off kind of thing.
Audrey:That said, um, we actually have a fair amount of data on US college campuses from the last two years in terms of like how both like student perceptions and how students feel in terms of safety as well as kind of hard data of what the, like hate crimes have been. Both sets of data overwhelmingly show that Islamophobia is the far bigger issue, right?
Audrey:And so, I mean, again, our media doesn't like this. They want both sides, everything. But, but Islamophobia, that's, that's like the real, real core issue right now. And I think one place that we see that come out is with the Palestinian exception, right?
Audrey:And this idea that even just presenting like honest, straightforward facts about Palestine, like starvation numbers and what is included in Israeli blockades, the use of human shields, the death toll, the fact that most, um, victims have been women and children in Palestine, the fact that the land was stolen, right?
Audrey:So, you know, these sorts of basic historical realities that this is somehow not okay. And I think the harshest thing, the most visibly easy kind of attack to see there on college campuses in the US of the last two years has been the criminalization of student protestors. Right?
Audrey:And, you know, the, we've all seen the images of the violent arrests and the handcuffing. Um, you know, and some of us have, have seen the images and in person of like, you know, the bloodied heads and the bruises and the police brutality and, and all of that. Um, but I think it goes far beyond actually the, the criminalization of students. That's sort of the worst excesses in a sense. But I mean, there's been a lot of administrations that have tried to intervene, tried to shut down classes and education, right?
Audrey:It's like this embrace of ignorance about, you know, the, the Israeli-Palestinian situation, the land, its history, all of that. Um, and I think. That's a huge problem for all kinds of reasons. You know, on the on the right they love to talk about viewpoint diversity, and yet this is one issue that we actually have true viewpoint diversity in any sense of that term, right? We have staunch defenders of Israel and staunch defenders of Palestinian human rights on basically all college campuses. And it's the right that doesn't want to allow honest debate and education and facts and learning, right?
Eve:I absolutely agree with, with Fatima and Audrey in in their comments. It is though incredibly difficult, this attack on uh, or denial of facts of historical contemporary facts. When you have a president who makes up. Disinformation deliberately. So even about South Africa, right. So, you know, as Audrey, you are the historian, you know, uh, and Fatima too. But there, there's, there's a real problem today to the degree to which the public is not even hearing from their elected by some president, very basic facts. There is not an attack on, on, on white Afrikaners, you know, to justify they're getting fast tracked into asylum processes in the United States. And yet there's, there's, there's, you know, there's very little news and pushback So we're, we're facing this kind of. Extraordinary disinformation propaganda campaign. Of course, we know that's endorsed and furthered and accelerated by the tech bros, but it is, it is difficult to think about how to proceed when actual facts that are very, very well established are denied.
Fatima:Yeah, that's, that's totally true. But I think that's also where universities, and actually schools are so important, right? Because there's a saying, whatever, if you, if you were always privileged, equality feels like oppression. Um, those lies, even if they're factually wrong, resonate because they're true on a level of feeling, right? So that's the problem. If you, if you feel. Hurt by the fact that somebody can push back against what you say and you know, you can't do anything about that, which is actually what we are supposed to teach our students as something to value. Right? The ability Audrey, as you said, you have viewpoint diversity and you live with that, but that, that, um, that's exactly what both the tech bros and the MAGA people, um, absolutely can't handle. But I think there's an emotional level that needs to be addressed. It's not enough to say, well, you are factually wrong.
Vineeta:Right. So if we're reformulating the Trump attacks Harvard headline, uh, Harvard really is being used as a stand in to refer to expertise in the broadest sense. Right? Um, and more specifically expertise that challenges status quo, racism, sexism. And then could we speak a little bit more about, um, what we understand on the other side of that sentence? If we're thinking about transnational parallels to what, uh, the Trump administration is doing in the United States. It seems like Islamophobia might be quite prominent in that.
Audrey:I can say something very briefly. Um, I think in some ways coming at this from an American perspective, it can be useful to look to Modi's, India as potentially one path that America might take, right? 'cause a lot of people in the US believe in American exceptionalism. Even if they say they don't, they really do internally, right?
Audrey:And so, oh, you know, we don't have to worry. It's never gonna get to X here. And I show them, you know, example, well this is what's happening in India and like, it was fine 15 years ago. Right?
Audrey:Um, so I think that can be one, one way to see it. the one that's probably the scariest for me personally, um, is so I have a lot of colleagues in India and there are a, a, there are some that have managed to continue and remain untouched, but honestly the vast majority of my colleagues have taken one of two paths over the last 10 years in South Asia. They have either become Hindu nationalists, Muslim haters themselves. So they have they've drank the Kool-Aid that, that they claimed to have opposed a decade ago, or they have just been very quiet and really not said or published anything. Right?
Audrey:Um, I criticize the first path. I'm less critical of the second path because people do have to survive. I, I understand and and respect that. Um, but my fear is that that's what's gonna happen to most of us here. to the extent that there's like a hope here, it's that we all need to wake up earlier, like, and act sooner rather than later, right? You can't wait till they come for you. You have to fight early on. Right?
Audrey:And I think that that can be really hard for people because honestly, when you're fighting against fascism or authoritarianism or you know, a decline of civil society, however you wanna word what's happening in America, you don't get to choose always the exact issues that you fight on, right? This is what I'm saying. You can't wait for your issues, right? You have to fight on sort of, you know, whatever the grounds are at the time.
Vineeta:Yes. And so where do you all see those grounds right now? What are, um, other people doing that you want to draw attention to? What are we not doing that we should be doing?
Eve:I think in the most immediate sense the faculty and the teaching instructors and so on who are very concerned about the attack on higher education, are few compared to the numbers of people at university. So at my university, a large, large research university, there's the few, you know, faculty in the humanities and social sciences who are out there on the barricades, as it were.
Eve:But we're a tiny, tiny group compared to the rest of the campus, which is really, you know, stem, STEM is the power of most research universities. If we're just talking about big, large research universities, and I don't see faculty and postdocs and all the, all the personnel associated with, uh, the STEM research, which have been decimated with the defunding of, of grants taking, um, a position that pushes back.
Eve:It just seems there's crickets at my campus. It's, it's very strange to me. Why. Many, many scholars who have had as, as Fatima said, have had their whole, you know, research agenda, devastated, are not marching, not protesting, not voicing, discontent So I think we, we have a, a, a very big steep uphill battle to communicate to our fellow scholars, to communicate to our students, um, what is at stake in terms of these attacks on higher education and how it actually impacts everybody, whether they're on or off campus. That being said, I'm incredibly, incredibly. Um, sensitive to the fact that 70% of the teaching faculty at universities and colleges across the United States are on short term contracts who are very, very vulnerable. Uh, and really, you know, it's the, it's the faculty who have tenure that are really the most, I think, disappointing, but also have the most capacity in terms of their, um, less precarious position to speak up.
Audrey:I I agree with all of that. Even you put it, you put it beautifully. Um, I think I would sort of hit on a couple of things. One is organize. Right. I mean, you know, we, we created this academic freedom committee for the Rutgers AAUP-AFT Union four years ago, and it's been a huge boon. Um, we deal with individual cases of academic freedom infringement. We liaison with the administration, we collect resources, we run a, you know, an event or two every semester. Um, and it just, it gives, it gives people events and spaces and if nothing else, a small committee of people to go to with their questions. Right.
Audrey:I mean, I have fielded questions ranging from, you know, I am a ta. I'm a, I'm a graduate student, ta. Um, can I let students out of my discussion section early to go to this protest? I've, you know, dealt with everything from that to the administration is threatening to fire me over my social media, right? How do I deal with this? Um, and it helps, it helps to have people to bounce ideas off of, right?
Audrey:And, and just to be together in difficult moments. The second thing I would say is, is I think we can all focus more on empowering people to sort of, to do what you can do and, and to some degree what you're willing to do. So, you know, you have a professor who, you know, they were gonna take some controversial subject off their syllabus because, you know, why, why talk about, you know, critical race theory or, you know, the Antebellum South or whatever in the current environment, maybe you can incentivize them not to do that, right? And sort of talk about it. The last I think, is really on a classroom by classroom basis having to do with the next generation, right?
Audrey:And our teaching. You know, I mean the far right always accuses, accuses us of indoctrinating students. And I mean, personally I'd love to be able to indoctrinate students to like, turn in assignments on time. That would be actually like really great. Uh, but you know, so far I'm massively failing at that. Um, but one thing I think we can do in the classroom is normalize, dissent, and normalize the feeling of being challenged and feelings of discomfort. And this is something that, I mean, I have had to do basically by, by force of what I teach, um, you know, south Asian history, we've got everything from, you know, swastikas to mass religious violence to, you know, nation states arguing over areas of land. You can't even show a map of cashmere without somebody screaming at you. Um.
Audrey:And I think that this is part of a broader humanities education as part of equipping students to just like exist and be like, you know, people in the world like thoughtful, caring, well adjusted people. Um, but I also think it can help with some of the academic freedom attacks because right now we're seeing so much of this from the far right, where it's sort of like, oh, I'm offended by what the academy says, or by what this scholar says, or by what Harvard says. Er go, let's shut it down. Whereas to me, it should go, oh, I am offended by what Harvard or the academy or the scholar says, big whoop. Right? So like it should end there.
Fatima:Yeah, I, I agree a hundred, a hundred percent with that, with everything. We should exactly do that in the classroom and we should get our butts out of the seats and into the streets. But I don't think that was ever professors who, who led those movements, but often it is students. So I think one thing we have to do is protect our students.
Fatima:Um, I think they're immensely brave and they're under a lot of unfair attack, uh, on many, many levels. Uh, so I think what we can do within the institution and to a broader public is really defend them and also let them know that they do what we taught them. And that is also our power. And I think what if we do what we actually good at doing? That's, that's already something.
Fatima:But beyond that, I, I feel like we are in a, uh, I wouldn't say an unprecedented situation, but a situation that escalates so fast that, that I feel at a certain point, that's one thing, but then I'm not only an academic, I'm also thinking about the communities that I, I'm part of and what happens to them. Um, and that requires, that requires a larger movement. I still think that we have certain space to push for that, but I, thankfully, I didn't get to talk about my favorite topic of how white liberals are our worst enemy. But, uh, I think there's just something in the so-called middle of society that. It is very dangerous right now, and it's willful ignorance of, of what is really happening and how dangerous this is.
Vineeta:thank you to Audrey Eve and Fatima for joining us for this conversation. And thanks to you for listening to this episode of A A UP Presents Academic Freedom on the Line. in our show notes for this episode, you'll find links to Hank Reichmans Academe Post fighting on three fronts, legal and academic resources for on-campus protestors, compiled by the Rutgers AAUP-AFT chapter, and links to new books by each of our panelists, policing Higher Education by Eve Darian Smith; UnGerman: racialized otherness in post Cold War Europe by Fatima El-Tayeb; and India: 5,000 years of history on the subcontinent by Audrey Truschke. I'm Vineeta Singh, and this has been AAUP Presents: academic freedom on the line.