Volume 17: Academic Freedom as a Practice of Democracy
At a panel during the Coalition for Action in Higher Education’s April
2025 national protest, urban and cultural studies scholar Davarian
Baldwin made a rousing call for courage in the face of political and
material repression in US colleges and universities: “We are the power
that we have been waiting for.” Responding to this call, the 2026 volume
of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom seeks to showcase work of
students, educators, and activists—and of unions, scholarly
associations, and other governance bodies—in fighting back against
repression. We invite original scholarly articles grounded in a renewed
notion of academic freedom as not only an abstract value or principle to
be defended but also a living practice—as historian Joan
Scott, among others, has put it—of research, teaching, and public
engagement that articulates a democratic higher education and a
democratic society.
As a
practice, academic freedom is embodied in the free, critical inquiry of
students and scholars in their areas of expertise; in syllabi,
curricula, and classrooms whose content is determined by experts rather
than by administrators, boards of trustees, external special interest
groups, or government agencies; and in the extramural speech and action
of students and scholars, which are protected by the First Amendment and
by AAUP principles. As recent court rulings have demonstrated, the
practice of academic freedom unambiguously includes inquiry into,
teaching about, and extramural speech and action pertaining to Palestine
and other controversial topics. However, as experts on academic freedom
have meticulously demonstrated, such practice is increasingly being
delimited and circumscribed. National and international political
discourses and federal investigations have pressured
administrators—often all too willing to comply—to police protected
speech and action on campuses, while the rise of neoliberal structures
of governance at the expense of shared governance has created conditions
of institutionalized disposability and precarity that further threaten
the freedoms of academic workers. Under such conditions, the practice of
academic freedom—resilient, defiant, and unwaveringly committed to the
search for knowledge and the common good—itself becomes an instantiation
of democracy over and against authoritarianism.
To
defend and fight for academic freedom is to defend and fight for
democracy. With the explicit objective of contributing to this struggle,
the new volume seeks submissions on initiatives that have been pursued,
strategies that have been deployed, coalitions that have been built,
and work that remains to be done in the fight for academic freedom.
We
will consider any eligible submission relevant to the journal’s core
focus on academic freedom. Topics of special interest for the volume
include but are not limited to
-
political education
-
public outreach
-
sanctuary campuses
-
mutual defense compacts and other forms of coalition-building
-
debt reveals
-
boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns
-
campus unionization
-
protests and other forms of mass mobilization
-
lawsuits
-
political lobbying
The
fight for academic freedom continues. But the efforts that have already
been undertaken by educators and organizers suggest the formation of a
new community both within and beyond the academy that is dedicated to
the core freedoms on which any acceptable notion of the American
university must be built—the freedom to think and to dream, to teach and
to learn, to speak and to act, and to dissent in the face of
authoritarianism and genocide. The proposed volume, which will be edited by Karim Mattar of the University of Colorado at Boulder, aims to help
cultivate this community and these freedoms.
Submissions of 2,000–5,000 words (including any notes and references) are due by March 9, 2026. The complete call for papers, our editorial policy, submission guidelines and instructions, and
links to past volumes of the journal are available at https://www.aaup.org/CFP.
