February 5, 2026
Last month, Plato became the latest casualty of the escalating attack on academic freedom in the United States. An administrator forced a faculty member at Texas A&M to cut selections from the “Symposium” because of a new Texas law limiting discussions of race and gender on college campuses.
In a moment of intensifying attacks on higher education — including the termination of tenured and non-tenured instructors, state legislators positioning themselves as arbiters of faculty syllabi and university administrators cooperating with vague federal allegations at the expense of student rights and wellbeing — we all want to believe that Yale’s historical commitments are sufficient to protect ourselves, our colleagues and our students from the chilling effects of such assaults.
They are not.
The opening lines of the celebrated Woodward Report, a 1974 assessment of the conditions of free speech at Yale, issue a soaring defense of “the need for unfettered freedom to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” This broad language, and the way the report is reverently evoked at Yale might lead you to think that our academic freedom as faculty is institutionally guaranteed. But the university has argued otherwise.
Just two years ago, the academic freedom organization FIRE excoriated Yale for “shredding faculty rights” and turning its back on academic freedom. In response to a lawsuit brought by Bandy Lee MED ’94 DIV ’95, a voluntary clinical psychiatry professor let go in 2020 after tweeting about President Donald Trump’s “mental instability,” Yale’s Office of General Counsel made the remarkable choice to argue, in a brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that the mentions of academic freedom in the Faculty Handbook, incorporated along with references to the Woodward Report, are not “sufficiently specific” to constitute a contractual promise. In short, the University asked the court to treat the principles of academic freedom that it regularly celebrates as legally nonbinding. Chillingly, the court agreed. Yale’s legal position was protected, while its professed commitments were sacrificed.
Remarkably, under a new union contract which includes specific definitions of academic freedom, graduate students have more substantive protections than do researchers and faculty.
After researching several peer schools’ policies on academic freedom and faculty governance — including Brown, Penn, Dartmouth, Cornell and Stanford — the newly established Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors, joined by members of the FAS-SEAS Senate, drafted proposed revisions to the Faculty Handbook that aim to accomplish three modest but important things.
First, they define academic freedom in definitive, operational terms, and make clear that all Yale faculty, regardless of rank or tenure status, enjoy freedom in research and publication, freedom in teaching, freedom to participate and comment on matters of university governance and freedom to speak in public as citizens and public intellectuals.
Second, the changes propose that the handbook will not be further revised without first consulting a committee of Yale faculty chosen by the FAS-SEAS Senate along with faculty from the professional schools, who are not otherwise represented by the senate. Otherwise, the academic freedom portions of the handbook, and other terms of faculty employment, can be revised by Yale’s provost without notice or discussion with any representative body of faculty.
Third, the revisions make clear what we believe is already the case but should be stated clearly: that faculty are employed by the university, not by departments, and that no department will be dismantled without consultation with faculty.
We hope Yale will act quickly to adopt this modest proposal to put its professed commitments to academic freedom in writing. President Maurie McInnis herself has emphasized the importance of action over mere statements. And faculty have spoken: for two years, faculty members across schools and divisions have made it clear in open letters with hundreds of signatories that Yale needs to be proactive in this moment of crisis, to protect the values we hold dear in deed, not just word.
In October 2025 the FAS-SEAS Senate voted affirmatively on the proposal and issued a recommendation that the University administration revise the Faculty Handbook accordingly. It is our understanding that the administration is considering the proposal, but we have received no firm timeline for an official response.
This leaves the Yale community at an inflection point. Our peers like Columbia; Harvard; Northwestern University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago have already demonstrated how quickly philosophical principles can be strained when financial security is at stake. In such moments, aspirational language, no matter how eloquent, cannot shield faculty, students, administrators or staff.
We need real, enforceable protections of academic freedom. And we need them now.
TARREN ANDREWS is assistant professor in the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and faculty in the medieval studies program. She can be reached here.
DAVID WATTS is Alison Richard Professor of Anthropology. He can be reached here .