The Point: Attacks on Academic Freedom Enter a New Phase
10/16/2025
This week’s Point is written by Nick Juravich, Associate Professor of History and Labor Studies and author of the recently published Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education. As always, The Point represents the views of the author and is not the official position of the FSU.
Keeping pace with attacks on academic freedom in the news is a difficult and disheartening exercise. Every day seems to bring new pronouncements from Washington, new reports of layoffs and program cuts at universities around the nation, and new demands from trustees and elected officials for compliance with ever more draconian oversight. These attacks have intensified against the long-term backdrop of casualization within the academic labor force, which has replaced the protections of tenure with the precarity of contract work for most of our colleagues, as well as expanding repression over the past two years in response to student protests against the US-backed war in Gaza.
None of this will come as news to FSU members. I offer this context because a pair of these attacks struck very close to me over the past two weeks. While such proximity is always jarring, I believe these events reflect a calculated escalation of campus repression and the targeting of scholars, and this is why I am bringing them to this forum.
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On Monday last week, Rutgers University scholars Mark Bray and Yesenia Barragan announced that they had fled their home in New Jersey with their two young children after a series of violent, threatening messages. Bray, a scholar of anti-fascism and author of Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook and The Anarchist Inquisition: Assassins, Activists, and Martyrs in Spain and France, has served as a commentator on mainstream news channels during periods of attention to anti-fascism and did so again after President Trump designated “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization” in September (“antifa” is a shorthand for antifascism as a philosophy, not an organization). The Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA (the organization founded by Charlie Kirk) responded by creating a petition demanding Bray’s firing, which was quickly picked up by Fox News and right-wing social media accounts. This, in turn, generated a coordinated doxxing campaign that escalated quickly into death threats and messages revealing Bray’s home address.
Bray and Barragan’s colleagues and union quickly organized to help them move their classes online and plan a move to Spain for their family’s safety (Barragan is an award-winning scholar who teaches on slavery and emancipation in the Americas and the Pacific world). The story took another turn, however, when they were prevented from leaving the country on Wednesday afternoon under suspicious circumstances (they checked in for their flight and cleared security, only to have their reservations “disappear” at the gate, to their and their airline’s mutual shock). While the federal government has offered no official explanation for the delay, AAUP President Todd Wolfson reported on Thursday that the family was allowed to leave on a flight the following day “after being questioned by DHS [the Department of Homeland Security].” Wolfson described the entire episode as “a gross assault on academic freedom and freedom of speech” to the New York Times a day earlier.
I followed these events closely because I have known Bray and Barragan as colleagues and collaborators for fifteen years. Yesenia started in the Ph.D. program in History at Columbia a year before I did, and throughout our time in New York City we took part in the same workshops, contributed to the same public history projects, and shared notes, ideas, and experiences as educators and organizers (our children are also roughly the same age). I know them to be brilliant and committed educators (a sentiment shared by Rutgers students following Bray’s doxxing), and over the weekend, I celebrated their escape to safety, even as I remained horrified by the ways that the federal government appears to have impeded their rights to travel as US citizens.
And then, this past Monday, another colleague and collaborator, tenured Professor Thomas Alter of Texas State University, was fired (again).
Alter and I are both members of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) and both published our first books with the University of Illinois Press. We appeared together on a panel organized by the press at LAWCHA’s biennial conference in 2021, where Alter shared his groundbreaking work on the roots of Texas radicalism. I have long taught Alter’s excellent article on the Chicago Teachers Union’s 2012 strike to undergraduates and graduate students at UMass Boston (it is on my syllabus this semester).
Alter is both a scholar of socialism and a socialist himself. In the latter capacity – as a private citizen making no claim to speak for his employer – he attended an online conference on revolutionary socialism, where he was recorded surreptitiously (and against conference rules) by a hostile, far-right social media personality. This individual produced strategically-clipped video that, shared out of context, quickly went viral, prompting Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse to announce Alter’s immediate termination. Alter sued, arguing that the university had violated its own policies as well as the laws of state and nation, and a local judge agreed, but this brought only a temporary reprieve. On Monday, after a process that Alter and his union describe as “a coerced and fundamentally flawed due process hearing,” Damphousse affirmed Alter’s termination.
What unites these events, beyond the happenstance of my own connections to the individuals involved? First, the source of these attacks: bad-faith, online actors, many anonymous, whose efforts to silence critics through campaigns of doxxing and intimidation, and to manufacture backlash in media and state legislatures, are well documented. More specific, however, are the logics advanced by those calling for the firing of professors with whom they disagree. Both the Rutgers Turning Point chapter and President Damphousse of Texas State argued that the speech of Bray and Alter, respectively, amounted to incitement to violence. Turning Point argued that Bray’s long record of historically-informed commentary was analogous to “the kind of rhetoric that resulted in Charlie Kirk being assassinated last month,” while Texas State has been engaged in a campaign of retribution in the wake of Kirk’s death (a student was forced to withdraw their enrollment or be expelled and a faculty recruiter was fired for their personal comments on the matter).
The argument that expressing radical ideas is tantamount to inciting violence has a long and sordid history as a justification for repression during “red scares” throughout US history. The degree to which government actors have affirmed this logic in these two cases is, perhaps, the most disturbing part of the situation. Alter’s firing appears fundamentally unjust, and in contravention of the state university’s own policies (as well as the first amendment), but whether any agent of the state of Texas will affirm his rights to academic freedom and free speech remains to be seen. Rutgers, also a public university, has not accepted the arguments of its Turning Point chapter, but in temporarily restricting Bray’s travel and questioning his family before allowing them to leave, the Department of Homeland Security has legitimated this logic and encouraged further such campaigns. The threat of restricting travel for political speech marks a revival of policies that once stripped the passports of radical citizens, including Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois in the 1950s, and has an analogue in the State Department’s politicized revocation of visas for noncitizens.
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Where does this leave us as unionized faculty at a public university like Rutgers and Texas State? It is significant that both Alter and Bray have unions fighting for and with them, albeit under vastly different circumstances (Rutgers AAUP-AFT is one of the best-organized and strongest unions in higher education and enjoys collective bargaining rights, while the Texas State Employees Union is a minority union in a state without collective bargaining rights for public university employees). These stories also diverge sharply when we consider the responses of the employers involved: Texas State has fired Alter, while Rutgers has, under pressure from their union, taken steps to protect Bray, Barragan, and their family.
We cannot predict whether, or when, this new McCarthyism in higher education will come for one of us, but we can prepare to respond. Within our union and our departments, we can build solidarity and educate ourselves on how best to support one another (the materials created by Faculty First Responders are very useful in this regard). We can draw on the resources of the MTA to help us understand, and fight for, our rights as educators and scholars. Among these resources are a slate of Solidarity School events, including a virtual forum on “Educator Rights Under Political Fire” this coming Monday, October 20. The FSU is also hosting an in-person know-your-rights training with Prof. Andrew Leong, “NO to ‘resilience’ and YES to RESISTANCE,” from 12-1:30pm on Wednesday, October 29.
We can also demand that our university administration prepare itself to respond to such attacks. Will instructors facing harassment or displacement be permitted to move classes online for their safety? Will university leaders affirm the rights of FSU members should they be publicly attacked or face calls for termination? Answering these questions now will not stop attacks from coming, but they will guarantee that we are ready, as a union, to protect our rights and our campus community.
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The committee for this year’s The Point currently includes Jessica Holden, Healey Library; Nick Juravich, History; Jeff Melnick, American Studies; and Steve Striffler, Labor Studies. If you want to join our committee, write an edition of The Point, or if you just have an idea, please write us at fsu@umb.edu.