The issue of academic freedom has become a crucial topic, especially at campuses like Western Washington University.
Academic freedom is the standard that allows professors and faculty in institutions of higher education to study, teach and publish in their fields without fear of restriction and interference. Falling under the rights of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, professors experience protection from institutional censorship in areas that pertain to their subjects of research.
In the 1930s, former Western President Charles Fisher was accused of being a communist and an atheist, and was forced from office despite these allegations proving false. He attracted the attention of opponents due to the way he facilitated discussion, inviting liberal speakers to campus and going against local political powers like a prominent Ku Klux Klan member. Almost a century later, Western grapples with this climate of higher education and academic freedom.
In recent years, there have been a variety of records requested of Western that challenge this issue of academic freedom.
The Heritage Foundation, known for being the think-tank behind the conservative policy blueprint Project 2025, requested documents from colleges, including Western, under the Oversight Project. They required universities to turn over instructional documents and materials such as syllabi relating to keywords such as “DEI” and other diversity-related terminology.
As a public university, Western is beholden to records requests. However, there has been a lot of debate over whether or not professors’ syllabi could be given in a records request, as that remains the intellectual property of the professors.
While professors and educators aren’t exactly secretive about their syllabi, many still wish to maintain control over their own creations. Some colleges have caved to Oversight Project efforts. UNC-Chapel hill decided to create a policy that requires faculty to publicly post their syllabi, leading to questions about the safety of both the careers and lives of faculty members.
Some who have been targeted by these campaigns claim that the sweeping records requests by the Oversight Project are attempts at intimidation of faculty, as they have targeted specific professors and faculty for their work and teachings. These requests primarily targeted professors in fields of inclusive education like women, gender and sexuality studies.
“Academic freedom is built on the idea that we deserve to be able to have inquiry,” said United Faculty of Western Washington president and Western professor Theresa Warburton. “It bothers me when some of these attempts to repress academic speech are framed as wanting there to be open inquiry.”
The question of how this applies to students was posed in 2024. Following a visit to the university, Western’s accreditation agency, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU), told the school that it did not meet its standards regarding students and academic freedoms. Western was told to issue a statement of the university’s stance on student academic freedom.
While many agreed with the statement and the wording, according to Jack Herring, associate vice president of academic affairs, concerns were brought up by faculty regarding the potential for interference in their own academic freedom.
“A number of faculty noted how the requirement for universities to protect student academic freedom had been imposed by several states that had particularly conservative state legislatures,” Herring said. “They were very skeptical about the political agenda that might be behind what our accrediting agency was asking us to do.”
Worries that the assertion of student academic freedoms would infringe on professors and faculty being able to respond to students arose among some faculty members, mirrored by the publicized dismissal of an Oklahoma graduate instructor after she gave a grade of 0 to a student who referenced the Bible in her essay.
“It’s not really relevant for students because it's about professional responsibilities around teaching and research and service,” said former Faculty Senate president Brandon Dupont. “Students have First Amendment rights, free speech and free expression, but that's different from academic freedom, which is about how a faculty member conducts classes and research.”
Academic freedom and its protections have garnered some attention and worries. Researcher Susan Ramlo stated in her paper “Examining Views about Academic Freedom at Institutions of Higher Education in the US” that there is a consensus that academic freedom represents a social good, as well as a general agreement that institutions should be reluctant to intervene in a faculty member’s teaching and research.
Next to educational institutions, academic freedom protects from interference by other entities, like government interference. With a federal government that is increasingly hostile to education as an institution and educators through the cutting of funds and support for students and studies, the ability for faculty at colleges to continue to study topics that members of government have professed opposition to remains a crucial aspect of free speech.
“That’s what academic freedom does, it gives us a set of parameters that are beyond whoever is in the president position in our country and what they believe,” said Warburton. “Academic freedom is about serving a field, a discipline, not a person.”
Elliot Nicoletti is a second-year journalism and history student at WWU. He covers campus news at The Front. Outside of school, he plays and listens to music or modifies his clothes. You can reach him at elliotnicoletti.thefront@gmail.com.
