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I repeat the refrain “unsurprised but devastated” way too often these days. The seismic shifts in our political, social, economic, and cultural landscapes disrupt any semblance of normalcy.
As a professor at a public university in Ohio, a state that recently codified one of the most harmful, sweeping, and divisive bills to “revolutionize” higher education, I am continuously struck by the rampant attacks on free speech, inquiry, and scholars and college students. Ohio’s Senate Bill 1 bans diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training, offices, and scholarships; admonishes professors from speaking about “controversial topics”; requires syllabi to be publicly available; prohibits renewing or creating partnerships with universities and colleges in China; mandates student evaluations of professors’ biases; limits Ohio State University’s student trustees’ powers; eliminates “underperforming” undergraduate degree programs; creates post-tenure reviews; and bans faculty strikes. It is among the most sweeping bills upending higher education.
As a Black feminist scholar, I see the onslaught of legislation such as SB1, Trump’s executive orders aimed at research at colleges and universities coupled with threats and enactments of funding freezes at prestigious universities such as Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard, and institutions’ defunding of any work considered DEI by its opponents as a full frontal legal-political-cultural assault on the work of me and my colleagues who research and teach about historical and contemporary injustices and inequities. We are being asked to whitewash history and to avoid topics deemed too controversial in our classrooms.
These policies, coupled with the fecklessness of far too many university presidents and trustees, repress our ability as faculty and staff to teach, advise, support, and encourage our students to be critical thinkers. For example, since Trump’s vitriolic attacks on higher education commenced, the University of Michigan shuttered its flagship DEI program; the University of Pennsylvania removed references to DEI from their websites; and the University of Alaska excised diversity, equity, inclusion, “or other associated terms” from its websites, job ads, and university communications. It is not merely a climate of anti-intellectualism assailing higher education, it is an authoritarian strategy to silence, demonize, and criminalize intellectual enterprises that dare to tell the world the hard truths about who this nation has been and chooses to be. It has always been perilous for those from marginalized communities within the U.S. to call out the roles the U.S. plays and has played on the global stage of displacement, oppression, and extraction. It feels even more terrifying now.
For those of us who fight to ensure all our students can use a bathroom that corresponds with their gender identities or to preserve scholarships that target underrepresented students, or to teach about gender beyond a binary in ways that improve health and well-being outcomes for gender-expansive, trans, and nonbinary people, the task before us is both arduous and dangerous. Many of us feel enraged as we witness Trump seeking to deport international students identified as having engaged in pro-Palestine protests at their colleges and universities such as Mahmoud Khalil and plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents abducting Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street. We bear witness to hundreds of students’ visas being revoked and more deportations being threatened. Beyond authoring and signing petitions and demanding that our universities stand up for our students, it’s easy to feel powerless.
The stark reality, however, is that capitulation and compliance to an anti–academic freedom agenda will not save you or your institution. The recent resignation of Columbia University’s president, Katrina Armstrong, exemplifies that conceding to demands that infringe upon the core principles of academic freedom will not protect you from the wrath of those hellbent on framing U.S. universities as bastions of liberal and progressive indoctrination. Columbia was among the most high-profile university targets of Trump’s threats to defund because of the pro-Palestinian protests that occurred on campuses across the U.S. in spring 2025. After the university agreed to create a new internal “security force,” to adopt a formal definition of antisemitism, and to appoint a senior vice provost to oversee the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department, Columbia’s reputation among potential students tanked and their brand has taken a palpable hit.
Although polls suggest a sizable number of people in the U.S. feel college/university campuses are “friendlier” to liberal viewpoints and ideas, the speed with which schools such as the University of Iowa, Grand View University, and the University of Cincinnati dismantled programs, initiatives, and units dedicated to equity, inclusion, and inquiry focused on race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and citizenship indicates a blaring gap between perceptions of our campuses’ priorities and values and the far more deflating reality.
As a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies — whose classes fill with students who have never thought about gender as a social construct or about why certain communities have less access to health care, housing, employment, or education — accusations from conservative elected officials and think tanks asserting that the majority of professors engage in “liberal indoctrination” stupefy me. Even in 2025, almost all our women’s, gender, and sexuality studies majors and minors at my university find our classes and departmental events because students are actively searching for courses that will challenge them to think critically, creatively, and perhaps more compassionately. They seek tools and skills that will prepare them for a world that is rapidly changing and where their humanity and the humanity of others is not routinely affirmed. Our classes aren’t mandated, and yet nearly 2,000 students seek out our courses every year.
These same students are now understandably fearful about speaking out with the knowledge they attain about gender, racial, class, and sexual oppression. Our students see attacks on LGBTQIA+ people via sports and bathroom bans or on their rights to protest and question their institutions’ commitments or lack thereof to freedom of expression and assembly when their universities do not fight back against student visa revocations. A recent USC survey suggests that U.S. adults do not support student protests on campuses and find them disruptive and unproductive. Our students must also contend with the intensification of surveillance of their activities on and off campus as well as the broader climate of criminalizing dissent.
Despite Trump’s and universities’ immediate focus on international students who took part in pro-Palestinian on-campus protests, it is not hard to imagine a more expansive dragnet emerging to quell protests against any number of injustices or to disappear people this administration deems disposable. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt recently remarked that Trump would deport U.S. citizens and noncitizens to be incarcerated in notoriously torturous and inhumane prisons abroad without due process. On April 14, Trump was caught on a hot mic in conversation with the president of El Salvador stating that “homegrown criminals” are “next.”
As a faculty member at a university that continues to comply and yield by closing its diversity offices and dismantling programs targeting and serving underrepresented students, staff, and faculty, I feel less equipped to advise my students on how to move in this moment. I do not know how to keep them “safe” from the cruelly watchful eye of elected officials who’ve deemed them disposable. How can I say with any confidence that my students, colleagues, and I have a right to express ourselves — to protest — when the potential consequences range from loss of scholarships and employment to abduction and deportation? What is that right without the will of our college and university presidents and trustees to object to the upending of higher education and the sanctity of academic freedom?
Currently, I inhabit a liminal space between hopelessness and tenacious fervor. I choose not to yield. I openly detest the ways universities are complying. I hope more faculty and staff will join efforts to say, “Not on our watch,” while noting how multiply marginalized faculty, staff, and students are at greater risk if they resist. Our students need us more than ever. We can be fearful, but we can’t afford to be inert in the battle to save academic freedom, the right to protest, and the pursuit of humane studies.
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