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PEN America is a venerable organization of writers that, it says on its website, “stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.” In recent years, though, it has more often stood at the intersection of political infighting and bad publicity.

A federal judge ruled last month that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) termination of more than 1,400 grants in April 2025 had violated the Constitution on several counts. Princeton researchers await the effects of the verdict, which ordered that the NEH must rescind its termination notices.

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said Sunday that Harvard’s legal fees are “mind-boggling,” calling them the “price” of defending the University against a barrage of federal investigations and lawsuits.

At a Harvard Hillel event to celebrate the launch of YARID, a new journal of Jewish thought, Garber said that while he does not “speak publicly about this,” the fees are the “the price of defending yourself against all kinds of investigations, lawsuits, congressional investigations, other investigations from the current administration.”

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that nine universities are under investigation for allegedly abusing the J-1 visa program, which allows noncitizens to temporarily teach, lecture, conduct research or receive graduate medical education, among other options.

The Labor Department is leading the investigation, and at a press conference on visa fraud Thursday, an official said that subpoenas “have been served” to higher ed institutions. The department’s inspector general, Anthony D’Esposito, pledged to “follow the money and uncover the schemes.”

Soon after President Donald Trump retook office, researchers and academics across the country began receiving startling news. They were abruptly informed, often mid-project, that their federal grant funding had been terminated. Form letters bearing the news often offered few details beyond that their work no longer aligned with agency priorities.

A majority of Yale University faculty members say their academic freedom has decreased in recent years, and half fear losing their jobs for teaching about controversial topics, according to a survey released today.

Of the 177 faculty members surveyed by the Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors, 68.4 percent said their academic freedom has “decreased somewhat” or “decreased a great deal” since January 2025. About a third reported that their academic freedom has remained the same, and one respondent said their academic freedom has increased.

A public university can’t silence the board members elected to run it. But that’s exactly what a majority of Michigan State University’s board of trustees has done by requiring its members to promise not to publicly criticize university governance. When trustee Michael Balow refused to give up his First Amendment rights, the board imposed severe punishments that are preventing him from effectively carrying out his duties.

Today, Balow and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a federal lawsuit challenging the unconstitutional restrictions the board’s revised ethics code imposed on Balow.

Some heartening higher ed news, hot off the press: faculty value viewpoint diversity! In our latest report published yesterday, Faculty Attitudes Toward Diversity in Their Disciplines: A National Survey, we asked over 3,500 faculty from 80 different institutions about the extent to which they think teaching and research are improved by exposure to a wide range of viewpoints along eight specific dimensions of diversity.

Dozens of organizations have cropped up promising to foster “civic discourse”, “dialogue across difference” and “viewpoint diversity”. Together, they make up a fast-growing ecosystem that has ballooned, by some estimates, into a $200m a year business some skeptics have billed the “civility industrial complex”.

A new report on the state of humanities scholarship made waves in higher ed circles when it was released Friday, and has since drawn criticism from professors across the humanities.

Commissioned by Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Washington University in St. Louis chancellor Andrew Martin, the “State of Scholarship” report finds fault with disciplines including anthropology, philosophy and history—not for their content but for the quality of their scholarship, which the report’s authors argue is too often driven by political ideology rather than the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Critiques of the report are broad and varied. 

In March 2026, the journal Theory and Society published a sweeping analysis of academic social science research spanning 1960 to 2024. The paper, “The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960-2024,” ran over 600,000 article abstracts through a large language model to map the ideological orientation of an entire field across six decades.

James Manzi, a DPhil (PhD) student in sociology at the University of Oxford, unleashed a wide-ranging discussion across social media with the publication of his paper. In the conversation below, Manzi walks us through the paper’s central findings, responds to questions about methodology, and sketches next steps.

One in 10 faculty members working in states that restrict academic speech are seeking jobs out of state, according to survey data released this week. Six percent reported they are trying to leave the academy altogether.

The new data on relocating researchers underpins anecdotal stories about faculty members fleeing red states in search of greater academic freedom. Researchers with Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit higher education consultancy, surveyed 4,003 researchers at U.S. four-year colleges and universities via email about a slate of topics, but their first look at the data is focused on academic freedom in research. 

The Trump administration urged the First Circuit on Monday to let it revoke Harvard’s funding, arguing the district court lacked the authority to require the government to restore nearly $2.7 billion in research grants last fall.

Justice Department lawyer Michael K. Velchik ’12, arguing before a crowded courtroom, asked a skeptical three-judge First Circuit panel to toss out a September 2025 ruling by U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs requiring the Trump administration to restore Harvard’s funding. Velchik framed the dispute between Harvard and the Trump administration as a contractual issue stemming from the termination letters issued widely to University researchers in May 2025 — a question that he said could only be decided by the Court of Federal Claims.

In the summer of 2023, Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill into law that created “civics institutes” at five of Ohio’s public universities. Over the last two budgets, the state has poured $59 million into their operations.

So far, the evidence suggests that Ohio’s push for civics is more about squelching viewpoints the state opposes than it is about widening the marketplace of ideas. Consider the official statement of Wright State University’s Center for Civics, Culture, and Workforce Development, which offers a dense compilation of conservative shibboleths: “The Civics program educates students for virtuous citizenship by: Examining the American experiment in ordered liberty by reestablishing the transcendent as a legitimate starting point for intellectual inquiry, while embedding freedom in natural law and the formative institutions, traditions, and customs of Western civilization.”

From higher ed journalism to concerned professors, AI is often portrayed as an unprecedented frontier to be tamed, a danger to both the future of the humanities and the independent, critical thinking abilities of its scholars. But a strict AI ban is superfluous, not to mention difficult to enforce: If students are plugging essay prompts into ChatGPT en masse, there are larger issues at stake that a band-aid AI ban won’t fix.

The first time we knew there was something seriously afoul in the Princeton Department of Classics was when, in January 2018, the then-chair circulated to the faculty a draft of a mission statement emphasizing the historical complicity of classics in perpetuating race-, class-, and gender-based inequality and promising a new era of inclusivity.

The draft itself was not especially interesting—such things rarely are—but one of us (Joshua, then a professor in the department) was bothered by the absence of “academic excellence” from its stated goals. When he pointed this out to his colleagues in a mild email, his words were met with incredulity and derision.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon ordered 30 universities to audit their ties with certain overseas institutions of concern, or else risk future federal funding. Few details have emerged about the universities’ responses as of Monday, the deadline to comply. One, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has confirmed publicly that it’s ending a study-abroad program in China.

The list of concerning foreign partners, often called the “1286 List” for the relevant section of the National Defense Authorization Act, is maintained by the Department of Defense. It was most recently updated in July. “These institutions have been confirmed to engage in activities that increase the likelihood of U.S. government-funded research and development efforts being misappropriated,” according to a news release from the Pentagon. 

The Department of Defense has directed a group of 30 research-focused universities to conduct an “immediate and comprehensive” audit of their partnerships with foreign institutions that it says could be a threat to national security.

Each university has until the end of the month to submit its findings and terminate any relationships found to be “problematic,” the department said in a news release last Monday. Any university that does not comply could lose federal research funding.

In fall 2025, Cornell University Provost Kavita Bala convened the Committee on the Future of the American University to consider the current course and future direction of higher education over the next half century. The committee, composed of 18 faculty drawn from across disciplines, was charged with examining the disruptive forces confronting higher education. 

They were asked to envision how Cornell should adapt its core missions of undergraduate education, research and scholarship, public impact and community engagement, and graduate and professional education to meet the disruptions of the current moment by looking decades into the future. The charge was deliberately ambitious. They were not asked to defend the university as it is, but to imagine what it could become.

A year ago, I partnered with the chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis to commission an independent committee of leading scholars — chaired by philosopher Paul Boghossian — to examine the state of the humanities and humanistic social sciences. We asked the committee to assess whether ideological commitments were eroding scholarly standards and distorting the objective pursuit of knowledge.

The reaction to this report has been lively. Some responses challenged its conceptual foundations. Some criticized its evidentiary basis and how it was produced. Others said it should have proposed more reform steps. That is how scholarly debate should work. But others ascribed sinister motives to those involved or asserted that the report had been commissioned to advance a broader political agenda.

The letter, dated February 12, on South Florida State College letterhead and hand delivered by the Director of Human Resources, contained four sentences.

I would be placed on administrative leave with pay till the end of my contract. The contract would not be renewed. I would be relieved of all teaching duties immediately. A concluding sentence offered contact information if I had any questions.

I had many.

The Department of Justice has found that George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Services intentionally discriminated against white and Asian students in admissions by admitting Black and Hispanic students with lower standardized test scores in 2024 and 2025, according to a news release.

In the announcement, the DOJ said GWU’s medical school also used essay questions “that were designed to elicit information about an applicant’s race or ethnicity” and then used that information to decide which candidates to interview.

At a time when the average tenure of a college president has dipped below six years, Ronald J. Daniels is beginning his 18th year at the helm of the Johns Hopkins University. He’s weathered numerous crises, though perhaps none as severe as the second Trump administration.

As part of the leadership of the Association of American Universities, Daniels had several discussions with members of the Trump administration about its recent open letter, “A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards.” I spoke to Daniels over Zoom about his decision to advise on that open letter, how conservative scholars have been “systematically excluded” from the academy, and whether his emphasis on political diversity has come at the expense of racial diversity.

I studied in the academic department at Cambridge that later employed Jason Arday. My degree was in ‘Politics, Psychology and Sociology’, and one of my papers was on the Sociology of Education. Arday became a professor of Sociology of Education a few years after I left.

I want to give a few examples of the scale of progressive ideological capture even then, pre-Peak Woke, in 2012 (when I graduated). As well as to try to illustrate the sheer intellectual bankruptcy of so much of what gets passed off as chin-rubbingly profound academic scholarship at some of the most elite educational institutions in the world.

Florida’s war against woke indoctrination has hit a speedbump. On July 7, a panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s injunction against the Stop WOKE Act, the state’s attempt to ban public university employees from inculcating trendy beliefs about racial superiority and privilege. 

My research team at Heterodox Academy has been tracking faculty job ad content for the last two years with an eye towards understanding how required Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) criteria have changed. Our recently published research report showed that the share of jobs requesting DEI statements — whether standalone, within cover letters, or within research or teaching statements — declined sharply, falling from approximately 25% in 2024 to 11% in 2025.

An arbitrator ruled that Sang Hea Kil, a tenured San José State University professor who was fired in 2025 after participating in pro-Palestinian student protests, should be reinstated, the California Faculty Association announced Monday. 

The arbitrator deemed Kil’s termination to be an “excessive” punishment and said it should be reduced to a one-month unpaid suspension, according to the news release. Kil was the first tenured full professor to be fired for pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Last fall, the University of California announced that it would sunset a key diversity-hiring initiative tied to its President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). Less than two weeks later, the UC system reversed course, cowed by a backlash led by the very “scholar-activists” whom the program had spent four decades and more than $162 million cultivating. The episode offers a sobering lesson for reformers: when a university sustains an agenda long enough, that agenda becomes self-sustaining.

The PPFP functions as a social-justice career accelerator—and a kind of side-door to the faculty lounge. Through the program, UC hires postdoctoral fellows with a heavy emphasis on DEI, and the postdocs then get special favor for tenure-track faculty jobs.

It’s now widely (though not universally) conceded that improving viewpoint diversity on campus would improve university teaching and research. Faculty on American campuses are overwhelmingly cut from the same ideological cloth, and this homogeneity has harmful effects on all aspects of the professoriate, including teaching, research, and service.

But suppose you had the opportunity to fix this. You could wave a magic wand and improve viewpoint diversity in any part of campus. Where should you work your magic? Where does viewpoint diversity matter the most? 

Colleges and universities face a moment of crisis, with their missions, funding, and operations under threat. At the same time, US public opinion surveys show that support for higher education is at historic lows. The Trust Agenda outlines a response to these challenges that can build public trust, make campuses more trustworthy, and enable colleges and universities to defend their missions successfully.

The report’s recommendations include a combination of internal reforms, external communications, and collaborative defense strategies. The unifying theme of The Trust Agenda is a need for increased and meaningful connection in higher education—between campuses and their communities; among faculty, staff, students, and administrators; across institutions; and with society as a whole.

There is widespread agreement that higher education is politicized, but there is disagreement over who is to blame. The left argues President Trump and various red states enacting policies are injecting conservative dogma into teaching and research. The right argues that the left politicized academia over the past several decades, and that the new policies are merely trying to reverse the current politicization. There is some truth to both stories.

Fortunately, there is a solution to depoliticize universities – establish heterodox centers, or colleges within the existing university, that would add missing perspectives and compete with the traditional departments.

You’ve heard the critique.

The humanities and social sciences have been corrupted by political aims, and their disciplines have tossed out rigorous research standards in favor of advancing social-justice causes favored by the political left. This has made for an impoverished scholarly landscape, filled with laughable claims and obscure jargon.

Over the past several months, a group of high-profile scholars convened privately to study whether this criticism holds water across several fields within the humanities and social sciences. “The first thing to say,” they concluded in a report published Friday, “is that we reject the complaint in this bald form.”

A massive financial crunch has hit many schools because of sagging tuition revenue growth—reflecting falling enrollment or more aggressive discounting of tuition fees—and reduced public financial support in the form of federal and/or state aid and stagnant private philanthropy, all occurring in an environment of heightened inflationary pressures increasing the dollars needed to operate.

Higher education works hard to avoid destruction while also avoiding needed moves designed to promote efficiency coming from increased outputs or lower costs, because its “owners” lack incentives to do so. 

From the outset, DEI at MIT was controversial even before it became a target of outside political scrutiny. Initial objections came not only from skeptics who opposed DEI as ideology or bureaucracy, but also from DEI supporters who believed it wasn’t enough. Some student activists and steering-committee members argued that the draft plan had been weakened by senior administrators. They criticized what they saw as closed-door changes, fear of upsetting faculty and donors, lack of transparency, and a plan that risked becoming “mostly performative” unless leadership accepted stronger, centralized standards.

The criticism from both directions showed that DEI at MIT was controversial before it became a target of outside political scrutiny. MIT’s DEI project was caught between competing criticisms: too ideological and bureaucratic for some, too weak and decentralized for others.

On April 11, 2025, the president of Yale, Maurie McInnis, convened a Committee on Trust in Higher Education. On April 10, 2026, the ten tenured faculty members on the committee submitted their report—unanimously. Detailed and running to fifty-six pages, it is a model of clarity.

There is much to admire in the report, and I will not stint on praise. But in addition to the appropriately strong words about many things that plague America’s colleges and universities, there is also a lack of strong words about other highly relevant things that Americans care and fight about. For example, the committee skirts around the dreaded trio of diversity, equity, and inclusion and does not mention the current U.S. president by name. I will have more to say on this subject, as well as on the need for the committee’s strong words to be followed by strong actions.

A federal judge on Friday blocked in 17 states the Trump administration’s demand that public colleges and universities submit detailed race- and gender-related admissions data stretching back seven years.

The ruling, by U.S. District Court judge Dennis Saylor IV of Boston, was in response to a March 6 lawsuit by the attorneys general from the group of Democratic-led states. Their lawsuit argued that forcing colleges and universities to complete the new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement survey was unlawful, “arbitrary and capricious” and exceeded the authority of the agency that approved it, the Office of Management and Budget.

The Trump administration’s investigations and demands for admissions data have extended beyond undergraduate colleges and universities, The New York Times reports. Now, the Department of Justice is requesting years’ worth of information about applicants at major medical schools.

The three institutions currently under investigation—Stanford University, Ohio State University and the University of California, San Diego—have been asked to turn over the reports by April 24. If they don’t, according to the Times, the DOJ says federal funding for their professional programs could be on the line.

Some colleges and universities now have until April 6 to collect and report admissions data that the Education Department says it plans to use to identify unlawful race-based admissions practices, a federal judge decided Tuesday.

It’s the latest development in a lawsuit 17 Democratic state attorneys general filed against the department earlier this month over the Trump administration’s original demand that colleges and universities with selective admissions policies complete the new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement survey by March 18.

On a November Monday in 2016, two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, the conservative campus organization Turning Point USA published a list of nearly 200 academics who, according to the site’s stated mission, “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

Today, the infamous website has vanished; professorwatchlist.org instead redirects to Turning Point’s home page. Professor Watchlist may be no more, but academic freedom experts don’t consider it a victory.

Almost a decade after the "Hypatia Affair" nearly ended her career, the philosopher reflects on public shaming and being a cautionary tale.

Alan Garber’s lawyer told him he shouldn’t speak at the Economic Club on Thursday, in the midst of his institution’s protracted legal battle with the Trump administration over federal research funding.

For a report released this week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveyed 1,959 law faculty at 192 ABA-approved law schools. The findings reveal a profession caught in a contradiction: law professors overwhelmingly endorse free expression in principle, yet many describe an academic culture that discourages them from practicing it.

PHILADELPHIA, June 9, 2026 — A new survey of law school faculty paints a bleak picture of free speech and inquiry in the legal academy, with respondents reporting self-censorship, political litmus tests, and attacks on speech from the left and right alike.

Over the course of a month and a half, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression surveyed thousands of faculty members at 192 of the 197 ABA-accredited law schools, seeking their perspectives on the state of free speech and discourse within their programs.

What would it take to open up a research field that has narrowed without anyone quite noticing? That sociology of knowledge question animated Jesse Smith’s presentation to the HxSociology virtual community. An assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University — one of the new civic-thought centers reshaping the institutional landscape of higher ed — Smith builds his case from four premises: that values irreducibly shape research, that they can distort inquiry when they harden into a closed paradigm, that sociology today operates under just such a progressive paradigm, and that closed paradigms only crack open when a competing paradigm, grounded in opposing values, offers genuine alternatives rather than mere critique.