On May, 29, 2025 Harvard University gathered for graduation day – and the New York Times titled that the graduation blended “protest and pride” when gathering with family and friends for commencement (Russel & Herszenhorn, 2025). Graduates brought globes and held them up in order to emphasize … 
academic freedom
the pursuit of knowledge in a democracy: academic freedom and activism
As I write in the spring of 2025, we are in the midst of a crisis in the United States. The crisis is economic, social, political, and legal. One dimension of this crisis is the attack on higher education by the Trump administration. To date, this attack has included:
cuts to funding for …
the radical right and the university: reclaiming value neutrality in higher education
In its policy booklet on reforming education in France, Marine Le Pen’s party Rassemblement National (RN) (2022) emphasised the necessity of “strengthening the requirement for absolute neutrality of members of the teaching staff in political, ideological and religious matters vis-à-vis the students …
the spectre of woke and the reality of academic freedom
A spectre is haunting the university: the spectre of woke. It haunts those who inhabit the castle, without them being able to precisely locate, or arrest, the source of this unrest. Witness the recent Laurens Buijs controversy at the University of Amsterdam. This instructor in Interdisciplinary …
editorial: wokeness in education*
Seldom have philosophical claims been so thoroughly and so speedily falsified by history as Francis Fukuyama’s claim that at the end of the Cold War humanity had reached ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1989; 1992). Rather than “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” and “the …