Yale faculty defend academic freedom—sort of

The limits of our popular conception of academic freedom and political repression are on sharp display in a letter from the Yale faculty

According to the Yale Daily News, nearly 900 faculty at Yale have signed a letter calling on the president and provost to protect academic freedom at Yale. It's a strong letter, organized by the faculty senate and a local chapter of the AAUP, but I couldn't help noticing a glaring omission in it.

The letter identifies four threats to academic freedom at Yale (and calls upon the university to take two affirmative steps for academic freedom), but all four of the threats come solely, in the letter's formulation, from the government.

This seems like an odd position, to me, because since Trump's second ascension to power, the most severe violation of academic freedom at Yale has come from the University itself, acting entirely on its own behalf and initiative.

Just a month ago, the heads of Yale Law School suspended Helyeh Doutaghi, deputy director of the Law and Political Economy Project, based solely on a website powered by an AI investigator. Yale also prohibited her from coming onto campus.

The University then insisted on Doutaghi's appearing in person to answer questions. Her lawyer said she would respond to all of Yale's questions in writing but that Doutaghi was understandably fearful of appearing in person for an interview lest ICE or some other federal agency catch wind of it and show up to snatch her off the street. A not unwarranted concern given everything that is going on. Yale fired her.

The faculty letter calls upon the university to "defend the rights to free speech on campus recognized in the Woodward Report, including by assisting community members at risk of government infringement on this right, whether through immigration action or other means."

Doutaghi was not at risk of government infringement on her rights, or at least only at risk of government infringement on her rights. Throughout this entire process, she has been at risk, and has now fallen victim to, Yale's infringement on her rights.

I don't know if this is deemed too politically sensitive a case for all of the Yale faculty to take up—though see this excellent statement on the matter from faculty and staff associated with the Yale Law and Political Economy Project—or if somehow Yale's firing of an employee seems less important, to Yale faculty, than Trump's threats to research money, "shared governance" (whatever that could possibly mean at Yale), and other forms of university autonomy.

Either way, the record of American political repression—and McCarthyism and McCarthyism in the academy, in particular—suggests that the private sector's voluntary firing of employees for the exercise of free speech is at least as potent, and in the long run far more pervasive, a form of repression and intimidation, as direct government threats to the autonomy of institutions.

Side note: It's telling about the state of American political discourse and media coverage that the most objective news coverage I could find of Doutaghi's suspension and then firing was in the Times of Israel rather than in any domestic news source.