Debates around academic freedom and freedom of speech in UK higher education have often revolved around a small number of high-profile cases involving individuals with views that can cause offense – like those of Kathleen Stock or David Miller.
Following the recent fine levied by the Office for Students (OfS) against the University of Sussex, the regulator has written to universities to urge them to focus on these areas.
It seems like attention will remain firmly fixed on the shades of difference in the tensions inherent in the law, institutional inclusion policies, and the various framings of academic freedom.
These are important questions on serious issues and we collectively need to explore them in productive ways. But debating them now to the exclusion of all else – at this moment in global history – is a vast mistake with consequences that will be felt for generations.
Those consequences will be felt not only by academics researching in controversial areas, but they will be felt by members of the public around the world.
Trump uprising
In the short period since Donald Trump was returned to the US presidency, we have seen an assault on the independence of the academy that is unprecedented in scale or speed.
The Trump government opened by issuing a series of shocking demands to Columbia University while threatening $400 million in federal grants – this has now mounted to hundreds of millions more in cuts.
What does this mean? Every grant – every grant – held by researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health has been frozen or cancelled. All of them.
The Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department has been taken into “receivership”, which is a polite way of saying that outspoken academic departments now are to be led only by professors approved by the Trump government.
Columbia leadership has been made to hire a private security force with arrest powers. Disciplinary matters are to be investigated and dealt with by the university’s president, attacking a principle of collective governance that has grown and developed over a millennium.
And most shockingly, students like Mahmoud Khalil are being arrested and transported without due process on the basis of their alleged political speech and activities: without judges, lawyers, trials, or charges. There can be no more clear violation of academic freedom than this.
While Columbia has nominally been threatened because of its approach to tackling alleged antisemitism on campus, other universities are also in serious trouble. The University of Maine system has had funding withheld because the governor of Maine has contested Trump’s anti-transgender executive orders.
Trump’s own alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has been hit with threats of $175 million in cuts allegedly because they permitted a transgender woman to compete in swimming – in 2022.
The Johns Hopkins University – one of the world’s leading universities, especially for medical research – has been hit hard by the unprecedented dismantling of USAID, with the university shedding more than 2,200 jobs around the world in the face of $800 million in cuts.
Freedom fails
As the weeks go by, news breaks almost daily with stories about further cuts and threats.
We have to be clear that we are in a new world now. These attacks on the US academy will have two global effects that should be very worrying to everyone.
First, these actions effectively dismantle the notion of academic freedom worldwide. If the wealthiest, most prestigious, and most influential universities on the planet can be cowed in two weeks, no other university will see themselves as able to resist any demand from Trump – or any other authoritarian leader.
The current wave of demands will lead to further restrictions and policing, especially now that Trump has seen how easy it was to roll powerful institutions. Trump learned from autocrats like Orban. This is not a problem exclusive to the United States and we need to address it from a global perspective.
Second, the chilling effect of these actions on research and teaching will have dramatic, complex, and far-reaching consequences that we will not fully understand for decades.
Federal grant recipients have been instructed to remove mentions of words like “women”, which will have an almost-inconceivable impact on research on topics like cancer, childbirth, and domestic violence. Colleagues in the US tell me about departments in total chaos – lab cultures spoiling in refrigerators, clinical trial patients going without medication or observation, and doctoral funding wiped away mid-project.
The impact on climate science, on public health, on any number of existential areas of research will be incalculable. These are not problems that can be solved by a future administration – even if we act right now, we will feel the damage of the Trump’s war on universities for decades to come. What may have seemed inconceivable two months ago has happened.
There are some glimmers of resistance in the US – and there certainly are many brave colleagues and students organizing directly against Trump and the shameful collaboration of university leaders.
In the UK, we need to learn from the failures of the US academy and understand that Trump’s authoritarianism will affect us too.
We have to learn that we cannot trust politicians, regulators, or the state to respect the logic of academic freedom. We must protect staff and students by warning against travel to the United States. We must work together urgently to decentralize power in universities so that dictators like Trump cannot pressure individual university leaders.
While institutional policies will not stop fascism, we must see our efforts as an attempt to delay and mitigate the impact as much as we can manage. While we should work with the government and unions, protest, write letters, and shout, we should also be clear-eyed that we cannot rely on the systems and institutions that failed to prevent the return of fascism.
Engage in direct action. We must learn from activists and movements that have been fighting for a long time – use what power you have. Protect your most vulnerable colleagues and students. Fascism requires a politics of helplessness and fear. Respond with care and courage. Things will get worse before they get better.
