Everyone knows, or else should know, that there is an intimate relationship between the state of academic freedom and the health of a democracy. Judith Butler offered an eloquent version of this argument in an essay titled “The Criminalization of Knowledge,” the subtitle of which makes the stakes clear: “why the struggle for academic freedom is the struggle for democracy.” To some people this assertion might sound counterintuitive, since it is far more common—and far more commonsensical—to understand freedom of speech (or freedom of the press, or freedom of religion, or freedom of assembly) as central to that struggle. Academic freedom, by contrast, seems to non-academics like a comparative niche concern, of interest only to professors like me whose livelihoods depend on it. But perhaps if I substitute the term “open society” for “democracy,” the point will be clear: the intellectual independence of knowledge workers is the sine qua non of the open society—in fact, it’s a definitive measure of its openness. For people involved in the production of knowledge, no legacy of the Enlightenment is more important than the principle that the pursuit of knowledge should be an enterprise that does not answer to the strictures of church or state—or, in our post-Enlightenment era, the dictates of the CEO of Omnicorp.
But the pursuit of knowledge is only one aspect of academic freedom. It’s addressed in the first paragraph of the American Association of University Professors’ 1940 Statement, according to which “teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results.” The second paragraph covers freedom in the classroom, and the third paragraph addresses “extramural” speech—that is, the kind of speech I’m engaging in right now, outside the walls of the institution that employs me. But there is a hidden fourth dimension of academic freedom, and it has to do with the principle of “shared governance;”;it is not mentioned in the 1940 statement, and in fact the AAUP only got around to issuing a statement on the subject in 1994, nearly eighty years after the founding of the organization: “On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom.” Elsewhere, I have written that if you understand why academic freedom is indispensable to the life of the university, you probably own more than one NPR tote bag. But if you understand why shared governance is important to academic freedom, you’re almost certainly a professor—indeed, a member of a relatively small subset of the professoriate.
Shared governance, if you don’t know, is the principle that the faculty should be full partners in the operations of the university: not simply the stewards of the curriculum—which remains, at all reputable institutions, the “primary responsibility” of faculty—but collaborators and consultants on university policies in general, including but not limited to (to give you three examples of policies I have worked on at Penn State) regulations governing things like outside business practices, participation in political campaigns, and consensual relationships among faculty, students, and staff. Why should we regulate consensual relationships, you ask, as distinct from prohibiting sexual or gender harassment and assault? So that people in those relationships don’t have any evaluative or supervisory capacity over each other, that’s why. The idea is that faculty aren’t simply employees of their institutions; they are credentialed experts in any number of fields, some of which are relevant to university administration. Shared governance could just as well be described as workplace democracy—which is obviously how we should have been describing it all along.
And that’s the first counterintuitive idea I’m going to ask you to entertain: to think of “democracy” not simply as “one person one vote,” but in a more expansive and elastic sense. Workplace democracy does not require that all workplace decisions be made by plebiscite; it is a catchall term for a variety of procedures and practices that allow workers to have a say in the operations of their workplace. In academe, it entails drawing on the expertise of the faculty in order to make the most of the institution’s collective brainpower.
Now, I realize that in speaking of shared governance I am like unto a conservation biologist talking about the Vaquita porpoise or the Sumatran rhino—creatures that have all but vanished from the earth. The situation at many universities is worse than absurd. At my own institution, we have business professors who are experts in risk management and health and human development professors who are experts in employee “wellness” programs. Are they consulted by the administrative offices of risk management and human relations? No. Admin gonna’ admin. As Larry Gerber has shown in his aptly-titled book, The Rise and Fall of Faculty Governance, shared governance was rare in American higher education before World War II, grew in force as did American higher education in the postwar boom years, and has been severely eroded in the past few decades. In some respects, the erosion has been internal: witness the 2015 book by William Bowen and Eugene Tobin, Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education, which argues emphatically that the locus should be located squarely in the Central Administration Building precisely because models of faculty governance are outdated and inefficient. And I can’t deny that at many universities, the Faculty Senate is about as effective as your high school’s Model United Nations. But in the past few years, Republican legislators and absurdly entitled billionaires have noticed that there are in fact a few remaining Vaquita porpoises and Sumatran rhinos, and they have taken action to augment the internal erosion of shared governance—by which I mean, hit the porpoises and rhinos with sledgehammers until the last of them dies.
I am not exaggerating. Between the time I pitched this essay to this publication and now, Inside Higher Ed’s Ryan Quinn published an article titled “New State Laws Land Blows Against Shared Governance, Tenure.” Some of those laws disembowel faculty senates (many of which were already toothless, so now they will have neither teeth nor intestines); some bar faculty input into whether a faculty member can be stripped of tenure and fired; and one particularly ingenious law in Indiana orders closures of programs if their graduates do not earn more than high school graduates. PEN America, which has been tracking the Trump administration’s multipronged assault on higher education alongside the AAUP, recently released a definitive report,Expanding the Web of Control: America’s Censored Campuses 2025, which opens on the appropriate announcement of a five-alarm fire: “There is no use in sugarcoating things. For higher education in America, 2025 was a year of catastrophe.” The PEN America report is chiefly concerned with attacks on speech, with a full section devoted to the mind-bending hypocrisy which has enshrined Charlie Kirk as a martyr to free speech and launched a scorched-earth campaign to fire any professor who dares to question Kirk’s candidacy for beatification and canonization.
But among all the recent attacks on university governance, nothing, for sheer chutzpah, can beat the Trump Administration’s 2025 “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” chiefly authored by billionaire Penn alumnus Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management. The Compact has rightly been rejected by every American university with which it was threatened, with the sole exception of the New College of Florida.[1] But it is important nonetheless as a vivid reminder of what plutocrats and autocrats hate about higher education—namely, its intellectual autonomy from plutocrats and autocrats. The Compact is full of high-end wingnuttery, like the demand that “Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes” (this demand apparently proceeds from the conviction that billionaires are more qualified to determine such matters than biologists), but the real tell comes in Section 2, “Marketplace of Ideas & Civil Discourse:”
Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas. Given the importance of academic freedom to the marketplace of ideas, signatories shall adopt a policy protecting academic freedom in classrooms, teaching, research, and scholarship.
Yes, you read that right. Academic freedom is so important to the marketplace of ideas that universities must transform or abolish institutional units on the basis of the vaguest possible right-wing complaints about the allegedly beleaguered status of “conservative ideas” in those units. The vagueness extends, of course, to the content of those conservative ideas themselves: are we talking about ideas about deregulation and tax cuts, or are we talking about white supremacy?
The Trump / Rowan Compact made me realize, at this late date in my career, that beyond shared governance, there is yet another, still more obscure fifth dimension of academic freedom, undetectable in four-dimensional spacetime but critical to the operation of the first dimension, and that is freedom of research in the system of peer review. I have taken it for granted for as long as I have known what a university is; I have always assumed that decisions about research and teaching should be made by my colleagues, not by alumni or trustees or elected officials. I have always thought that William Buckley’s demand, at the end of God and Man at Yale, that the alumni rather than the faculty should determine the intellectual direction of the university was not even worth debating. But here we are, living in the miasma of that long-festering right-wing fever dream.
I know it’s deeply counterintuitive to think of peer review in terms of democracy, even more so than thinking of shared governance as workplace democracy; hence the title of this essay. Peer review—whether of publications or academic programs—is conducted by experts, not by popular vote, and some of those experts can be bad actors. Everyone in academe, myself included, has an experience with a dismissive, uncomprehending Reader # 2, and though peer review is usually double-blind, it is always possible—in academe as in the nation’s judiciary—for bad actors to put a heavy thumb on the scales.
But bear with me a moment. In his 2012 book, Democracy, Expertise, and Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State, Robert Post describes scholarly knowledge and its mechanisms of peer review as “democratic expertise.” He distinguishes this from “democratic legitimation,” which has to do with free speech. The idea is that the two things are distinct—as Jennifer Ruth and I argued in our 2022 book, It’s Not Free Speech—but complementary: democratic legitimation allows anyone to criticize the government without fear of retribution, and democratic expertise distinguishes between actual, reliable knowledge and random people doing their own research on the internet (and eventually becoming a YouTube influencer or the Secretary for Health and Human Services). For Post, the important thing about “democratic expertise” is the expertise involved, which is critical to informed decision-making in advanced postindustrial society; for me, what seems most important these days is the democratic means by which that expertise is adjudicated.
Because it could be otherwise—and it has been. As Christopher Jencks and David Riesman argued almost sixty years ago in The Academic Revolution, it was only in the twentieth century that the faculty in American universities became “professionalized”—that is, vetted by a credentialing and certifying process administered by other faculty. For Jencks and Riesman, professionalism is “colleague-oriented rather than client-oriented.” Jonathan Culler, picking up this argument twenty years later in Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions, argued that “this progress of professionalism shifts power from the vertical hierarchy of the institution that employs a critic to a horizontal system of evaluation”—namely, by one’s peers. (Culler speaks of “a critic,” i.e., a literary critic, but of course the principle applies to any professor in any discipline.) In practice, this has meant that deans, provosts, and presidents sign off on appointments and tenure decisions, but leave the substance of the evaluations to the faculty best positioned to make informed judgments. Without professionalized systems of peer review, the intellectual autonomy of universities depends on the courage of administrators’ willingness to defy edicts from state and federal government—which is to say, gauging by most administrators’ response to the Trump 2.0 assault—it becomes as strong as wet Kleenex.
Academic freedom is the oxygen of the open society; that truism happens to be true. But it depends on a delicate machinery which is largely known only to people inside academe, who so far have not done enough—and I certainly include myself—to explain why that machinery is important, why anyone who cares about the free exchange of knowledge should care about things like shared governance and peer review. But shared governance is workplace democracy, and peer review depends on democratic expertise. And both depend on faculty willing to do the work—which is to say, shared governance and peer review are at risk today not only from without but from within.
That’s because there isn’t much reward, in terms of prestige or pay, for doing what is unfortunately called “service” work—serving on committees, evaluating programs, trying to sustain or revive one’s faculty senate. The 1994 AAUP statement on faculty governance closes with a warning about that:
Faculty members must be willing to participate in the decision making processes over which a sound governance system gives them authority. As the Association’s Statement on Professional Ethics says, faculty members must ‘accept their share of faculty responsibilities for the governance of their institution.’ If they do not, authority will drift away from them, since someone must exercise it, and if members of the faculty do not, others will.
Yes, well, that happened. And as for peer review—ask any press or journal editor about what’s going on lately, and they will tell you that it’s harder than ever to get readers to do unremunerated or under-renumerated labor in the post-Covid era of “quiet quitting.”
Now is not the time to quit, quietly or no. Academic freedom is nothing other than intellectual autonomy from state, church, and corporate interests; shared governance is workplace democracy; peer review is a horizontally-run system of democratic expertise. These are the things that the Trump regime and its enablers hate about academe and seek to destroy, and these are the things that all responsible citizens of academe must work to justify and defend.
[1] The New College, since its takeover by DeSantis Republicans, is no longer a “college” in any serious sense (as evidenced partly by its accession to the Compact), but rather a kind of Trump University Redux, and I expect it to meet the same fate as its predecessor—though not before it squanders untold amounts of taxpayer dollars on obscenely bloated salaries for the DeSantis cronies installed in its central administration. Former president Pat Okker, who was ousted in the DeSantis putsch, was paid $305,000; current president Richard Corcoran, a DeSantis associate, has a compensation package worth over $1 million.
