Academic freedom under fire

This little bit of writing is not what I had planned for this morning. Last week I had scheduled a post that focused on one year ago, the Spring semester of 2025. Its first day was also Trump’s inauguration day and the day he began a barrage of executive orders targeting trans people and so-called “gender ideology.”

The post I had planned reflected on the graduate course I was teaching and how its very premise had become the target of our federal administration.

But then I woke up at 2am over the weekend, having read the day before about Texas A&M shutting down its Women’s and Gender Studies Program. I’ve got to change my Substack was my middle of the night thought. Sure it’s a very small readership, but why take the risk?

I had already read the details of the Nebraska legislature’s proposed budget bill for the university that forbids state money from being used for any program considered to promote diversity, education, and inclusion (DEI). Specifically, this includes, among a long list, anything related to “gender theory,” “transgender ideology,” “heteronormativity,” “intersectionality,” and “systematic oppression.”

The bill could easily be used to justify closing Women’s and Gender Studies, a program with which I’m an affiliated faculty member, along with our Institute for Ethnic Studies and my home department of Sociology. Of course this is the point, as our governor has declared one of his top priorities to remove “woke” from our university.

Each time I publish a piece of public writing about my research on gender and sexuality, I hold my breath, waiting for the backlash. It has come in fits and starts, from the relatively benign (emails assuring me I am headed to hell) to the more severe (legal threats that affected the publication of my latest book). I have gone to therapy, gotten a prescription for Xanax, and deleted my social media accounts (though I’m now trying out this occassional Substack along with Instagram), all so I could manage to keep doing the work, because I want to keep doing the work and because, until very recently, I felt confident that I could keep doing the work.

Academic freedom is a principle that has guided higher education for well over a century, and it is supposed to ensure that I have the right to teach and discuss topics and issues relevant to my scholarly field without the oversight of administrators or politicians.

But I no longer have any confidence in the future of my job at a public university in a red state. Especially since my university has recently approved closing entire programs and firing tenured faculty members based on faulty metrics that have been widely criticized.

For now, I am trying to remain committed to my students, to the book that I am writing (that has a contract and a deadline), and to the other parts of the job I value. Without a horizon for the future (of higher ed, of democracy), we can only do the best we can, day after day.

If you’re concerned about higher education and academic freedom in Nebraska, please subscribe to the UNL AAUP chapter’s substack / blog, The Bugeater.