On today’s episode of Academic Freedom on the Line, we’re talking about students, labor, migration, and what happens at the intersection of all those categories. We talk about how and why higher education workers must resist the rising tide of fascism on and off campus, and get organizing lessons from the front lines. 

Our guests today are: 

A. Naomi Paik, the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016). She is a part of the Migration Scholars Collaborative and a founding member of the Sanctuary Campus Network and Sanctuary for All UIC.

Abbie Boggs, who teaches in the department of sociology, college of education studies, and program in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University. Her first book, Degrees of Empire: Noncitizen Students and the Making of US Higher Education, is forthcoming this year from Fordham University Press. 

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández holds the Gregory Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Ohio State University College of Law. His most recent book is “Welcome the Wretched” and he publishes Immigration Law Unhinged, a free weekly newsletter on Substack.

William I. Robinson, distinguished Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  His latest book is Epochal Crisis:  The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (2025) 

Sources mentioned in the podcast

• Degrees of Empire - Abigail Boggs 
• Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation 
• Rightlessness by A. Naomi Paik  
• Sanctuary Campus Network
• The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (The McCarran-Walter Act) 
• Migra: A History of U.S. Border Patrol by Kelly Lytle-Hernandez 

Helpful Resources for Deeper Dives

• Interview with William i Robinson on his latest book, Epochal Crisis 
• Covering Surveillance, Struggles and Solidarity in the Arab American Community - MERIP 
• One Million Experiments 
• Schools Drop ICE 
• Debt Collective

This episode of the special series “Academic Freedom on the Line” includes an excerpt from the webinar announcing the release of the AAUP’s Report On Title VI, Discrimination, and Academic Freedom last year. Committee A Chair Rana Jaleel and former General Counsel Risa Lieberwitz share big picture findings and key takeaways from the report. 

Following the excerpt, CDAF host Vineeta Singh is joined by 3 academics who have faced professional challenges for their support of students organizing in defense of Palestinian rights: 

Anna Feder is an educator, curator, organizer, and documentary filmmaker with nearly two decades of experience in higher education. Her termination from Emerson College and the cancellation of her series have become the subject of a lawsuit, alleging that the college violated her free speech rights.

Andrea Brower is an activist-scholar whose work on capitalism, colonialism, and the environment is embedded in movements for collective liberation and ecological regeneration. She recently resigned from her position of Associate Professor and lead instructor of Solidarity and Social Justice at Gonzaga University after facing harassment and repression for her Palestine solidarity activism. 

Judith Norman is a professor and chair of the department of philosophy at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX.  She teaches topics in the history of philosophy and also works in prison education.  She has organized with local organizations and also with Jewish Voice for Peace San Antonio.  

 Links to resources mentioned in our conversation: 

AAUP’s Report On Title VI, Discrimination, and Academic Freedom

Andrea Brower's Open resignation letter

On the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism

Middle East Studies Association's findings on 60+ cases of retaliation 

Jewish Voice for Peace

US Campaign for Palestinian Rights

Anna’s list of films

Israelism documentary

The Unmaking of a College

The Five Demands

The 9th episode of our special series “Academic Freedom on the Line” is a conversation among 4 authors who contributed to the recently published University Keywords, a volume on how universities operate as social and economic engines that shape society beyond their traditional educational roles. Andy Hines, the volume editor,  Senior Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, and author of Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University; Jennifer Ruth, professor in the School of Film at Portland State University, and co-director of The Palestine Exception, who serves on the steering committee of Coalition for Action in Higher Education; and Ellen Schrecker, renowned historian of McCarthyism and US higher education, and most recently the co-editor of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom with Jennifer Ruth and Valerie C. Johnson; and interviewer Vineeta Singh, a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. 

We share this conversation with you in the hopes that it helps you leverage your curiosity, drive for knowledge, and research skills in the service of creating more just universities and more just societies. 

Links to resources mentioned in our conversation: 

To read/watch with your study group:
University Keywords
The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom
No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities
Vietnam: history, documents, and opinions on a major world crisis
Palestine Exception (documentary)

To connect with other academic workers:
Historians for Peace and Democracy
Starting an AAUP Chapter, Step By Step
Upcoming AAUP events and trainings
Coalition for Action in Higher Education  or email CAHE at DayofAction @ proton.me 

In this special episode of our series Academic Freedom on the Line, Vineeta Singh interviews Anna Feder, an organizer, curator, and cinema exhibition consultant who serves as the Director of Programming for the Resistance of Vision Film Festival. Anna has collaborated with the Palestine Anti-Repression Network and the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom to create a series of video testimonies from educators who have faced backlash for standing with their students or for questioning the Palestine exception. We also hear the testimony of one of her interviewees, MIT professor Michel De Graff. 

You can find the rest of the series here. 

You can learn more about Anna’s case on the Academe blog.

And you can read the AAUP’s new report on Title VI, Discrimination, and Academic Freedom here.  

Update: Judge William G . Young ruled in favor of the AAUP and its fellow plaintiffs in the case. The full ruling is here. In this episode we discuss case AAUP v. Rubio, the lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration's policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting non-citizens, students and faculty who participate in pro-Palestinian activism, with Ramya Krishnan, the lead attorney for the AAUP  in the case. We also hear from Todd Wolfson, the AAUP's president, about the AAUP's broader legal work and strategy as it fights to protect higher education from the onslaught of attacks by the Trump administration. 

The guests are ​​Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, and Todd Wolfson, the AAUP president. The episode is hosted by Mariah Quinn.

Episode links:

• Ruling in AAUP v. Rubio
• Summaries about AAUP v. Rubio and arguments by the Knight Institute
• Summaries of the current AAUP litigation against the Trump administration

A new episode of our special series Academic Freedom on the Line with the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom focuses on university governing boards and their workings. Raquel Rall, Associate Professor in the School of Education at UC Riverside and Demetri Morgan,  Associate Professor of Education at University of Michigan Marsal School of Education and CDAF fellow, join us to explain the differences between public and private boards, what an “advisory role” actually means, and how to create meaningful communication between board members and academic workers and community members. 

Be sure to visit the website of the Center for Strategic and Inclusive Governance, the Rall’s and Morgan’s new project designed to equip higher education boards and leaders with research-informed tools for mission-centered decision-making. The website includes open access resources and rapid-response guides bridging scholarship and practice. And you can submit suggestions for additional resources or areas of investigation! 

Further Reading for the Board-Curious: 

• Boards Must Fight for Institutional Independence (opinion)| Inside Higher Ed
• Decision-Making for the Public Good: Leveraging Higher Education Governing Boards for Equitable Student Success |Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning  
• Introducing boards to the equity conversation: State-level governing boards and discourses of social justice| Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. 
• New national center supports higher education governance | UCR News

We’ve all heard about the changes to federal research funding since the beginning of the Trump administration. This episode of our special series Academic Freedom on the Line takes a deeper look at the landscape of federal research funding. How is research funding allocated? What is disrupted when these funds are precipitously cut? What could this mean for the future of research in the United States? To help us answer these questions, we call on experts in the fields of federal bureaucracy and legal studies. Our guests are Mary Feeney and Ethan Prall. Feeney is the Frank and June Sackton Chair and Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University and Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Prall is an environmental legal scholar and scientist, a Harvard Law School grad, and currently an Abess Fellow, Society of Conservation Biology Graduate Student Fellow, and doctoral candidate in environmental science and policy at the University of Miami. 

Links to resources mentioned in the conversation: 

• AAUP Action Report: Understanding the Law and Policies for Grant Terminations for the National Science Foundation
• NSF Funding breakdown by state:  Workbook: NSF by Numbers
• NIH in your state: NIH In Your State - United For Medical Research 
• Science is US: Do science and engineering drive economic growth?
• Grant Watch tracker compiled by Noam Ross and Scott Delaney: https://grant-watch.us/ 
• 75th anniversary edition of The Endless Frontier by Vannevar Bush  

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 

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 understand why changes to accreditation threaten academic freedom in the United States. 

Links: 

• CDAF’s Executive Power Watch Fact Sheet on Accreditation 
• Robert Shireman’s June 2024 report“Academic Freedom Is Under Attack. College Accreditors May Be the Best Line of Defense” 
• Robert Shireman’s March 2025 Article in the Chronicle “How an Accreditation War Could Start” 
• “AAUP Testimony to NACIQI”
• “Accreditation and Academic Freedom: An AAUP and Council for Higher Education Accreditation Advisory Statement”

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 autonomy, and shared governance, and then we get to hear from the students about what this has looked like on their campus, and how they have mobilized against these attacks. 

The episode guests are:

• Clare Carter, the Program Assistant for the Freedom to Learn Program at PEN America where she and the Freedom to Learn team work to combat state legislation that would censor higher education. You can reach her at ccarter at pen dot org 
• Dionicia Berrones, a Texas Students for DEI member who supports the collective with Administrative + Operational Tasks, Onboarding, and Outreach. She is completing an Ed.M. in Education Leadership, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship with a concentration in Identity, Power, and Justice in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  
• Angel Yongyin Huang, a senior at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in Sociology and minoring in Social Work. Angel is also the Economic Opportunity Fellow for Every Texan and a leader in Students Engaged in Advancing  (SEAT), where she has been at the forefront of protecting students' rights by opposing educational censorship bills. 
• Laysha Renee Gonzalez, a proud daughter of Mexican immigrants and a first-generation college student. With the support of the Terry Foundation Scholarship, she achieved her dream of studying at The University of Texas at Austin, majoring in Race, Indigeneity, and Migration and Plan II Honors, with minors in Government and Women’s and Gender Studies, set to be the first in her lineage to graduate from a U.S. university this May.
• Savannah Dowell, a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Louisville double-majoring in history and gender studies with a minor in humanities. She’s also an organizer with the Kentucky Student Coalition for DEI focusing on student outreach and collaboration between public universities across the Commonwealth.
• Bradley Price, from Lexington, Kentucky by way of Natchitoches, Louisiana, is a junior undergraduate student at the University of Louisville, double-majoring in Pan-African Studies and English Literature with a minor in creative writing. She’s an organizer with the Kentucky Student Coalition for DEI, focusing on social media and collaboration between public universities across the Commonwealth.  

Links: 

• Get involved with Texas Students for DEI 
• Students for DEI at the University of Louisville 
• Follow these orgs on social media through the handles: 
  • @txstudentsfordei
  • @kystudents4dei
  • @students4deiuofl
• PEN America’s work on Education Censorship
• America’s Censored Classrooms 2024 is an excellent introduction to the work of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn Team