Solidarity is our weapon: what the US courts are teaching us about defending academic freedom
On the morning of 8 July, sitting in my study in Palmerston North while on leave, I read the Eleventh Circuit's ruling striking down Florida's Stop WOKE Act. The judgment landed in my inbox alongside the usual traffic of a life under attack: media queries about Hindutva, updates from a union colleague on strategies of resistance to attacks on the scholarship of whiteness, the residue of a coordinated harassment campaign traced to a Free Speech Union Council member.
I read Judge Britt Grant's words twice. A state that forces an official government line into a college classroom, the court held, imposes exactly the "pall of orthodoxy" that a free society cannot tolerate. A district court had earlier called the law "positively dystopian."
I have spent three decades building the culture-centered approach, listening to subaltern communities from Santali villages in Jharkhand to migrant worker dormitories in Singapore to marae across Aotearoa.
What I read in that judgment I have heard in every one of those sites: when structures try to erase voice, the work of radical democracy is the work of building infrastructures where voice can be exercised, defended, and made durable.
The courts, it turns out, can be one such infrastructure. But only when solidarity carries us into them.
The authoritarian playbook
The far-right assault on universities follows a script that is now legible across national contexts.
Legislate against critical race theory, whiteness studies, gender studies. Manufacture moral panics about "indoctrination." Weaponise complaints processes against scholars who study racism, settler colonialism, and empire. Target Palestine solidarity with special ferocity.
The script is authored by a network of think tanks, astroturfed "free speech" organisations, and political entrepreneurs whose actual project is the destruction of the university as a site of critical inquiry.
This is structural violence dressed up as freedom.
In the culture-centered approach, we read these attacks through the interplay of structure, culture, and agency.
The structures here are legislative and managerial. The Stop WOKE Act barred Florida's educators from endorsing ideas about race, sex, and privilege that the state disfavoured, targeting eight concepts including whether privilege or oppression is shaped by race.
The AAUP's special committee report on Florida documented a system of political interference so thorough that it described an existential threat to public higher education in the state.
And the culture: a manufactured common sense in which the scholar who names whiteness is the aggressor, and the state that censors her is the defender of liberty.
What the courts have delivered
Agency, in the CCA, is never individual heroism. It is collective, organised, infrastructural. And this is precisely what the string of US legal victories teaches.
On 7 July, the Eleventh Circuit decisively rejected the Stop WOKE Act's higher education provisions, affirming that professors at public universities are not mouthpieces of the state.
The challenge was brought by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression alongside a parallel case from the ACLU, the ACLU of Florida, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, with amicus support from the AAUP, the National Education Association, and the United Faculty of Florida.
Read that list again. A professor of Latin American history, a student, a student organisation, teacher unions, civil rights organisations, faculty associations.
The ACLU called the law what it was, classroom censorship, and the coalition that defeated it was a coalition of solidarities.
No individual professor, however brilliant, defeats a state legislature alone.
The same lesson emerges from the Palestine cases, where the repression has been most vicious. Dr Sang Hea Kil, a tenured professor of justice studies at San José State University, was fired for her pro-Palestinian advocacy, the first tenured professor at a public US university dismissed in connection with the Gaza solidarity movement.
Her own faculty hearing committee found her actions did not warrant termination. The university president overrode them.
What won Kil her job back, with full back pay, was the California Faculty Association, a union of 29,000 education workers that carried her case through nearly two years of appeal to an arbitrator who found the termination excessive and disproportionate.
Kil is now suing the university for retaliation. She has named the pattern plainly: a team-up between the authoritarian right and higher education administrators to attack educational workers and the tenure protections that shield critical scholarship.
And then there is the wave of settlements following the firings of educators who commented on the white supremacist Charlie Kirk's assassination.
A former University of Tennessee anthropology professor, fired over a private Facebook post after a Republican congressman tagged her employer, won a $1.9 million settlement. Austin Peay State University reinstated a professor and paid him $500,000. An Indiana university worker, backed by the ACLU, secured $225,000.
Across these cases, educators are securing significant payouts because public institutions that punish protected speech are discovering it is expensive to do the far right's bidding. The AAUP's litigation programme has been central to this legal infrastructure, filing suits and amicus briefs that treat academic freedom as a collective good, held in common by the profession, and defended in common.
The complicity of the managerial class
Here is the uncomfortable truth these cases expose.
In almost every one of them, the university did not resist the authoritarian demand. It anticipated it. Administrators fired faculty before any court required it, overrode faculty hearing committees, placed scholars on leave within days of a congressman's tweet.
As one recent analysis put it, if states and colleges won't protect academic freedom, the defence has fallen to courts, unions, and professional associations.
This is where a culture-centered reading matters. The managerial administrative class that now governs our universities is a class formed in the neoliberal era. Its members learned to read universities as brands, scholars as reputational risks, and complaints as customer service tickets.
They learned that the path upward runs through singing the songs of power, mastering the right mood, performing responsiveness to whoever shouts loudest.
I have watched this class operate in Singapore, in the United States, in United Kingdom and Australia, in India, and here in Aotearoa.
When the far right comes for a scholar of whiteness or a defender of Palestinian life, this class does not ask what the law requires or what academic freedom demands. It asks what the risk register says.
Individual accommodation to power is no protection. The scholars who apologised, who deleted posts, who met every managerial demand, were fired anyway.
Appeasement did not save them. Unions, courts, and collective organising did.
Solidarity as voice infrastructure
The lesson for Aotearoa is direct.
Our Education and Training Act enshrines academic freedom and casts the university as critic and conscience of society. Those words are only as strong as the collective power organised behind them.
The same networks that manufactured the Stop WOKE Act have their local franchises here, running the same playbook of complaints, harassment campaigns, and moral panic against scholars who study racism, colonisation, and caste.
The question is whether we build, now, the voice infrastructures that made the US victories possible: strong union density among permanent and precarious staff alike, student-faculty alliances, legal defence funds, professional associations willing to litigate, and a shared refusal to let any colleague stand alone.
Solidarity is what the culture-centered approach has always found at the margins.
The Santali village defending its forest, the migrant workers in Singapore organising for food and wages, whānau Māori building communication sovereignty over their own data and their own stories. None of them survived by charming power.
They survived by standing together and by forcing structures open.
Faculty, precarious academic workers, professional staff, and students are one class of educational workers facing one coordinated assault.
The courts can be our instrument.
The unions are our muscle.
But solidarity is our weapon.
They want us isolated.
We refuse.