Amir H. Payberah - 2025-04-25

Can a public university truly defend academic freedom, equality, and justice, if it is structurally embedded in a state apparatus that enforces global hierarchies, borders, and power imbalances?

This question feels especially urgent today, as US-driven restrictions, through funding cuts and keyword bans, reshape the global academic landscape and expose the limits of institutional autonomy. Universities walk a tightrope between principle and compliance. They publicly commit to values like openness, diversity, and academic freedom, positioning themselves as defenders of truth and inclusion. However, in politically urgent moments, like the war in Gaza, those same institutions often fall back on their role as state agencies. For example, when students and staff call for solidarity with Palestinians, the leaderships respond by citing the need to "follow the government's line". At the same time, scholars from certain countries face growing restrictions, limiting collaboration, hiring, and mobility, not for academic reasons but political ones.

Isn't it a structural contradiction? How can we claim to support inclusion while silencing dissent? How can we uphold academic freedom while enforcing geopolitical exclusions? Public universities are embedded in frameworks prioritizing national interests, and as a result, they often become complicit in systems that privilege some voices and silence others. So we must ask: can we truly stand for justice from within structures that limit our freedom to act and speak? Perhaps the first step is honesty. If universities cannot act independently, they should admit it. But more importantly, we, as students, teachers, and researchers, must ask what we are doing to push back against those limits. The values we claim only matter if we are willing to defend them when it's inconvenient, especially when doing so challenges the systems we rely on. Ultimately, the freedom we seek cannot be partial or selective; as Fannie Lou Hamer reminded us, "Nobody's free until everybody's free".