You Do Not Mess With Academic Freedom
On a March evening in 2025, Mahmoud Khalil was walking home from dinner with his wife in New York when plainclothes agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement took him into custody. Khalil, a Palestinian activist and a recent graduate student at Columbia University, held a green card. He had helped lead campus protests against Israel's military assault on Gaza, and for this the Trump administration sought to deport him, invoking the foreign policy provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. He spent more than one hundred days in detention. He is free now, though still fighting removal, and he has gone on the offensive in the courts, filing suit under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 against Trump officials and against private organisations, the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission, and Betar among them, alleging a coordinated campaign to punish him for his advocacy.
Sit with the details of that evening. A man returns from dinner with his wife and disappears into the machinery of the state because of what he said at a protest. That machinery is the subject of this essay, and so is the work of taking it apart.
The Khalil case is the sharpest expression of a much wider assault. Republican-led states and the second Trump administration have turned funding, immigration enforcement, and legislation into instruments for policing what scholars may study and teach. Laws and executive orders targeting critical race theory, whiteness studies, and diversity initiatives now dictate the boundaries of permissible inquiry. And universities, the institutions built to defend that inquiry, have too often folded, disciplining faculty, rewriting curricula, and trading away their autonomy for the promise of continued federal dollars and a quieter news cycle.
What travels under the name of governance here is repression. Academic freedom, the right of scholars to pursue inquiry, to teach, and to speak without political interference, sits at the foundation of constitutional democracy. In the United States it is protected by the First Amendment; the same commitment runs through the European Convention on Human Rights and through decades of jurisprudence holding that free inquiry is how societies find truth and govern themselves. When a government punishes disfavoured viewpoints, or coerces universities into ideological conformity, it attacks the very conditions under which a democracy thinks.
I write this from Aotearoa New Zealand, where I have been documenting how coordinated campaigns work to silence critical scholarship, and where I have felt the weight of such campaigns on my own writing. The playbook travels.
Complaint machineries, funding threats, the manufactured outrage of well-resourced lobbies: what is perfected in Texas and Washington arrives, in local dress, on every shore where scholars ask uncomfortable questions about power. Which is why the response now taking shape in the United States matters far beyond it.
That response must be offensive in character, planned and resourced like a campaign.
Waiting for precedents to erode further is a strategy for losing slowly. Litigation, pursued aggressively, dismantles unconstitutional policies, recovers stolen funding, drags the coordination between state officials and private actors into the light of discovery, and attaches real costs to the business of repression through injunctions, damages, and public exposure. The message it sends is simple.
You do not mess with academic freedom, and those who do, whether elected officials engineering viewpoint discrimination, university administrators enabling it, or private groups colluding with state power, will answer for it.
The legal infrastructure for this fight already exists.
The American Association of University Professors and its Foundation have backed litigation challenging the deportation of pro-Palestinian scholars and the funding cuts tied to ideological demands. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia has won significant victories against viewpoint-based targeting. The ACLU, Lambda Legal, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund have sued over state censorship in Texas, where policy now forces faculty to seek approval before teaching on race, gender, or sexuality, as though scholarship were contraband requiring a permit. Each of these suits builds precedent that ripples outward, affirming that public universities cannot be run as instruments of partisan control, and that federal money cannot be swung as a club to silence dissent.
And the offensive is working. Courts have issued injunctions restoring funding to Harvard and to the University of California system, finding that professed concerns about antisemitism and crusades against the "woke" university masked plain unconstitutional retaliation. Khalil's suits, and the cases gathered around them, are exposing how selective enforcement chills speech across entire campuses. Every ruling raises the price of the next act of repression: administrators hesitate before capitulating, officials calculate the legal bill, and the public watches the mechanisms of coercion pulled apart in open court.
This work runs on money and on solidarity. The AAUP Foundation's legal defence effort, the Knight Institute, and the allied litigators waging these multi-front battles operate with limited resources against opponents financed on an entirely different scale. Every contribution pays for the amicus briefs, the discovery that exposes coordination, and the appeals that will carry these questions to the Supreme Court. Alongside the money, the culture matters just as much: the petitions, the public advocacy, the amplification of every win that tells scholars under attack they are held by something larger than themselves.
Academic freedom safeguards democracy itself, guaranteeing that evidence can still speak against dogma, and history is blunt about what follows when politicians police the classroom, whether the subject is race, history, science, or foreign policy. Truth gives way, and authoritarian habits settle in. Khalil's ordeal began with words spoken at a protest, and it could begin tomorrow with the words of any scholar who challenges power, which is exactly why the answer has to be delivered now, in court after court, until the machinery of repression is taken apart bolt by bolt and everyone who built it understands that it was never worth building at all.