If you’re having trouble keeping up with the news implicating academic freedom and viewpoint diversity in higher ed, you’re not alone. Let me catch you up some.

On Wednesday, the New York Times published fresh reporting from Anemona Hartocollis under the headline, “Professors in Trouble Over Protests Wonder if Academic Freedom is Dying.” Taking stock of canceled classes, terminated faculty, and disciplinary measures taken against professors—including criminal charges—Hartocollis sketches out cases of faculty caught in campus struggles over the war in Gaza, writing, “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has intensified what many faculty members and their allies believe is part of a growing assault on ideas of academic freedom, a principle that most American colleges and universities hold dear.”

A day later, the Harvard Crimson reported that, in a case of “extraordinary disciplinary action taken by the University against its own faculty,” Harvard Library has slapped a two-week ban on a couple dozen faculty from Widener Library. The faculty were guilty of staging a “study-in,” with “professors silently read[ing] materials on free speech and dissent while placing signs related to free speech and University policy on the tables in front of them.”

Per the Crimson, “administrators charged the faculty members with gathering in the library with the purpose of capturing people’s attention through the display of tent-card signs, which administrators said violated library policies.” The faculty protest followed the library’s two-week suspension of students who “conducted a pro-Palestine study-in last month.”

Covering the education beat at The Hill, Lexi Lonas Cochran reported Thursday that “Colleges and universities find themselves increasingly trapped with the politics of the state where they reside.” Cochran quotes Katharine Meyer, a Brookings Institution fellow, saying, “I think we are in a place and a time where colleges are increasingly being seen as political places, and so it makes every sense that students would be aware of this as they’re making decisions about where to enroll, and that they would factor that into whether or not this is an institution they want to apply to.”

According to a poll conducted by a higher ed marketing research group, over a quarter of students avoid applying to schools “because of the politics, policies, or legal situation in the college or university’s state. Prospective students are taking note of how state governments’ decisions will shape their college-year experiences.” For example, Cochran writes, “DEI offices are banned at state universities in Florida and Texas, which also have two of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws.” I gotta wonder if for some the chief concern is weed legality. In any case, the poll suggests a sizable number of students are self-sorting according to statewide politics.

Speaking of which, in case you missed it, this week Heterodox Academy Director of Policy Joe Cohn took a close look at a new Indiana law that’s the subject of a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Indiana. The suit names policies at Indiana University and Purdue University enacted because of the law.

Joe spells out for us how the law–which seeks “a reformation of the tenure system at public colleges and universities throughout the state,” does contain provisions for open inquiry and intellectual diversity that HxA supports. But it relies on “punitive and overly vague criteria to promote open inquiry and viewpoint diversity.” The legislation requires boards of trustees to create policies denying tenure and promotion if the trustees find that “based on past performance or other determination,” a professor is “unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution.”

Meanwhile, institutional neutrality remains a hot topic of debate nationwide. Staff of the student-run Duke Chronicle polled faculty at Duke University and found that about two-thirds are in favor of the university adopting a policy of institutional neutrality. Reporting for the paper, Audrey Wang reports, “Duke faculty members recently launched a petition advocating for institutional neutrality, which collected over 110 signatories as of Oct. 7. Several faculty members have advocated for the policy at University events, and the Academic Council approved a committee to reexamine the University’s academic freedom policy in April.”

But not everybody is jumping on the institutional statement neutrality bandwagon. Writing in Slate, Wesleyan University President Michael Roth says, “Now, as one of the most consequential elections in American history approaches, we must do everything we can to help students work on campaigns and facilitate voting. And we must call out the threats to higher education.”

As Roth (who is a Heterodox Academy member) sees it, “the fear of offending students, faculty, and, especially, lawmakers and donors has led many academic leaders to retreat from the public sphere” at a time when “threats to higher education made by former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance are not subtle….Trump has promised to close down the Department of Education and fire the accreditors who now certify which schools are eligible for government support. The folks who brought us the fraudulent Trump University now threaten to dismantle a higher-education ecosystem that is still (for now) the envy of the rest of the world. We must not be neutral about this.”

Sophia Arnold, a student at Cornell’s Brooks School of Public Policy, used her school paper column this week to blast her university president for carrying out “an agenda wrapped in a thin veneer of impartiality,” adding, “If [Michael] Kotlikoff truly believed in the neutrality he’s espousing, he wouldn’t cherry-pick when to apply it. Instead, Cornell’s leadership has shown a willingness to take sides—always the side of the donors, trustees and corporate interests they aim to mollify.”

Arnold isn’t the only one thinking about the potential political influence of money on academia. And that concern is leading to more calls for examining university endowment investments, sources of funding, and budgetary decisions. At HxA, this week we discussed the approach being taken by the University of Toronto’s School of the Environment with regard to “funding and partnerships with the fossil fuel industry.” Their policy aims, “as an academic unit, to dissociate from fossil fuel companies, while protecting the academic freedom of our faculty and students.” We don’t often see these kinds of financial policies so explicitly speaking to the protection of academic freedom.

Finally, we mark the coming end (thank heavens) of the political polling season by noting that fully 96% of the more than 1,100 faculty who took Inside Higher Ed’s recent poll say they plan to vote in the presidential election, with 78% supporting Kamala Harris and 8% for Trump.

Reporting the result of the studies, Ryan Quinn noted, “But while their personal support for Democrats was overwhelming, almost no respondents said they plan to tell students which party or candidate to vote for.” In this case “almost no respondents” meant four percent, a number I figure to be about four points higher than it ought to be if we’re talking about classroom teaching. Per Quinn, most respondents “said their personal politics don’t affect their research or teaching very much.” Of course, that doesn’t mean that statewide and national politics aren’t affecting their jobs and psyches; see above.

A few programming notes:

Time is running out to submit proposals for HxA’s 2025 conference, happening in New York City next June. Abstracts need to be submitted by next Thursday, October 31.

Looking to do a lot more with HxA than the conference meet-up allows? You’ve got until the end of the year to apply for a 2025-26 faculty research fellowship or postdoc research fellowship at HxA’s Segal Center for Academic Pluralism. The fellowships pay $100,000 for faculty and $75,000 for postdocs and they come with medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance benefits. Plus, you get to have an office near Bryant Park, where you can do outdoor yoga with a few thousand of your closest friends when the weather is nice.

And if you’re not a member of HxA, please do consider joining.