The federal government is waging a war on higher education. The reason is obvious: universities are bastions of free thinking, deep thinking, critical thinking — and thinking, in all its forms, is what an authoritarian regime hates and fears the most. As soon as Trump took office, his administration began attacking the three elements of civil society that pose the greatest threat to authoritarian rule: the free press, which spreads knowledge of what’s happening in the halls of power; the justice system, which holds abusers of power to account and higher education, which teaches people to think.

Surprisingly, our institutions of journalism, justice and higher education haven’t really fought back. Instead, they’ve acquiesced, paid extortionist fines and accepted intolerable restrictions. CBS agreed to submit transcripts from 60 Minutes for government vetting. The New York law firm Paul, Weiss agreed to change its diversity policies and provide $40 million in free legal work to the White House. Columbia University hired a new administrative officer who ensures compliance with government restrictions. Cornell accepted a similar settlement. Harvard dismissed the leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies and eliminated its Women’s Center. At Stanford, the University closed our Office for Inclusion and Belonging, canceled a diversity-building doctoral fellowship (DARE) and announced there will be no student speakers at Commencement in an email to faculty.

Universities must stop acquiescing and fight back. I’m going to talk about three things that are essential to our struggle.

I. Solidarity

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), founded in 1915 to defend academic freedom, grew out of something that happened at Stanford in 1900. Jane Stanford, a founder of the University, and David Starr Jordan, the founding president, forced economics professor Edward Ross to resign after he criticized the railroad industry, the source of Stanford’s wealth. George Howard, a history professor, resigned in solidarity, beginning an exodus that grew to include 10% of the Stanford faculty. One of the academics who left was philosophy professor Arthur Lovejoy, the eventual founder of the AAUP. He and the other AAUP creators recognized that academic freedom requires collective action.

The current assault on higher education takes various forms: threats to revoke accreditation for ideological reasons, the harassment and kidnapping of international students, attempts to dictate curricular content, suppression of academic programs or methodologies, draconian funding cuts and extortionist fines. Our fellow California university, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), is facing a $1.25 billion fine and demands for a federal ideology monitor. In the face of these attacks, institutional solidarity is a strategic necessity and a moral imperative.

Solidarity begins with public statements — university presidents, boards of trustees and faculty senates should speak out when peer institutions are attacked — but that’s not enough. Professional associations must coordinate legal and advocacy resources. Accrediting bodies must refuse to become tools of political coercion. Alumni networks must mobilize. Students, faculty and staff must rally, protest, write and speak out. So far, this has largely failed to materialize. The schools facing billions of dollars in fines and funding freezes have each responded independently. The universities that received the offer of a “compact” requiring them to compromise their autonomy also responded individually. As Benjamin Franklin (may have) said, we must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

II. Integrity, not Neutrality

“Institutional neutrality” has become a pretext for institutional cowardice. The idea goes back to 1967, when, during a period of campus activism over the Vietnam War, the University of Chicago issued its “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action. Chaired by law professor Harry Kalven Jr., the Kalven Report stated that universities should maintain “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.” The report’s core principle was that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” The point was to allow competing views to coexist within a university community.

More than half a century later, in 2018, universities suddenly began officially adopting the Kalven principles. Dozens have followed, including Stanford in 2024. This recent rush to embrace “neutrality” reflects a self-protective impulse, but it’s misguided. The Kalven Report notably acknowledged that universities must speak when their “very mission and its values of free inquiry” are under threat.

The current moment throws the limits of institutional neutrality into sharp relief. Every university budget is a statement of values. Each hiring decision enacts priorities. All curricular choices embody commitments. When a university claims neutrality on all political questions while investing its endowment, designing its financial aid policies or determining which academic programs to expand or eliminate, it is disingenuous. The Kalven principle has value within limits, but we’re light years beyond them.

What we need now is institutional integrity. We must openly defend what we stand for: free inquiry, evidence-based reasoning, equal access to education, the protection of vulnerable community members. If we remain “neutral” while our core values are attacked, we will have nothing left to defend.

III. Student speech

Institutions have recently responded to student activism by banning student speeches at commencements. In April 2024, the University of Southern California (USC) canceled valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s commencement speech following criticism of social media posts in which she expressed support for Palestinian rights. In May 2025, at George Washington University, graduating senior Cecilia Culver used her commencement speech to call for divestment from Israel. The university banned her from campus. That same month, NYU withheld graduate Logan Rozos’s diploma after he delivered an unapproved speech denouncing Israel’s attacks on Gaza. And in June 2025, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology banned its senior class president, Megha Vemuri, from the graduation ceremony after she delivered a pro- Palestinian speech at an earlier event.

Now, Stanford has followed, quietly informing department chairs that there will be no student speakers at Commencement. This sends a terrible message to students: though your education has taught you to think freely, deeply and critically, we don’t trust you to speak publicly.

Let us act in solidarity and with integrity. Let us trust our students to speak. Let us hear them. Let us above all stand up and fight back to defend higher education. If we don’t, who will?

The American Association of University Professors, founded in 1915, is an association of faculty and other academic professionals based in Washington, DC with chapters at colleges and universities across the country devoted to promoting academic freedom. The Stanford chapter of the AAUP includes faculty and teaching staff from all seven schools at Stanford.  Its members hold a range of opinions on most topics but are staunchly united in defense of the ability to teach, learn and conduct research and scholarship freely.  In this column, members speak for themselves, addressing topics of urgent concern relating to academic freedom.

Jessica Riskin is a professor in the history department and the co-president of Stanford’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

Note: This text is a shortened and lightly edited version of Jessica Riskin’s remarks at the teach-in that took place on White Plaza on November 7th for the AAUP’s National Day of Action.