Higher Ed Is Under Attack. An Organized Faculty Is Its Best Defense.

As voters across the country anxiously awaited the results of last week’s elections, a new edict on free expression was posted for Harvard University affiliates.

The rule — signed by no one — deemed any group activity “that is explicitly using a space to make a point” to be a demonstration or protest. It added that this sort of “protest” — which it defines to include silent attempts “to draw attention” or “to express a point of view to others” — violates University policy in most campus spaces.

The absurdity of this new rule is glaring, but its source reflects a subtle, more insidious problem: unaccountable administrators. Decision-making without any democratic engagement has long been a problem at Harvard, but with former President Donald Trump’s reelection to the White House, it only becomes more urgent.

Harvard is governed by a corporate board — the Harvard Corporation — chosen not by the student body, staff, or faculty, but by itself: Current members choose candidates to fill vacancies. And the board chooses Harvard’s president, who in turn appoints the provost and deans.

These leaders determine for themselves the rules that bind the rest of us. And even though they speak on behalf of the University, most of us have no voice regarding what they say — no input, and no way to hold them accountable.

The new rule on protest is only the latest symptom of the absence of democratic governance at Harvard. This absence is further illustrated by our lack of a faculty senate — a basic institution that most American universities use to coordinate faculty participation in university decisions — and by the administration’s seeming resistance to union organizing by faculty, staff, and student workers.

But it was most powerfully illustrated one year ago, when decisions regarding Harvard’s president were made not because of a vote of our academic community, nor with the input of an even nominally representative body, but apparently instead because of the influence of billionaire donors, messages sent from ski resorts, and hostile members of the House of Representatives.

With last week’s election, this problem of our University being governed by an unaccountable few has only continued to grow more serious. We are about to find out just how soft of a target we are.

Members of Harvard’s community are being individually attacked by political allies of the new president-elect, who has promised to suppress “enemies from within.” The vice president-elect has declared that “the universities are the enemy” and has pledged to “aggressively attack” them.

Across the country, legislatures are weakening university tenure protections, collective bargaining rights, and the academic freedom to teach and learn.

We should take seriously the threats that have already been made by incoming Trump administration officials concerning our own federal funding and accreditation. And if we take the past year as a stress test of the University administration’s willingness to defend the principle of academic freedom and the work of its faculty, the results are not encouraging.

Put simply, we cannot trust that our unchosen leaders will have our backs. We must protect one another, and ourselves. Fortunately, we already have a model for building such protection in the name of democratic government and academic freedom: the American Association of University Professors.

The AAUP formed more than a century ago amid a similar climate of persecution to organize all university educators — tenured and untenured — to fight for shared governance in their universities without fear of political reprisals. Having merged with the American Federation of Teachers in 2022 to form the largest organization of higher education workers in the country, the AAUP is uniquely positioned to lead the defense of higher education and its core values.

Accordingly, we helped found Harvard’s inaugural chapter of the AAUP this past summer.

Although the immediate impetus was the interlocking crises that rocked American campuses following the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza, those events merely showed us that well-resourced private universities like Harvard are vulnerable to the same external threats faced by their public counterparts.

Addressing those threats will require concerted action at the local level – contesting unduly restrictive speech codes and supporting contingent faculty in their fight for reasonable working conditions — but Harvard faculty must also join the fight for the future of higher education at the national level.

As politicians and university administrators develop new and arbitrary rules to force us to sit quietly, we understand that our ability to say “no” will depend not on our status, but on all of us standing together.

The future of higher education will require us to demonstrate what shared governance looks like — from our legislatures to our libraries

Nikolas E. Bowie is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Vincent A. Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and a professor of African and African American Studies. Kirsten A. Weld is a professor of History. They are members of the executive committee of the American Association of University Professors-Harvard Faculty Chapter.