—Aslı Ü. Bâli, Yale Law School
[Editor’s Note: In conjunction with the 2026 ICON-S conference in Dublin, Ireland, ICONnect is featuring blog posts written by some of the participants in the 2026 conference’s Plenary sessions. This is the first post in that series.]
Repression by administrative means rarely looks like a violation of academic freedom. That is what makes it so effective.
When we worry about academic freedom, we tend to picture the dramatic case. The professor fired over a viral video clip. The speaker disinvited after a protest. The commencement address canceled at the last minute. These episodes are real, and they deserve attention. But they are not, today, where most of the damage is done. The more consequential threat to scholarly independence, particularly in the United States today, is often far less visible. It arrives quietly, through the ordinary machinery of university administration, and its ordinariness is exactly what makes it dangerous.
Over the past decade, and with growing intensity in recent years, universities have absorbed a steady stream of pressure from outside their walls. Donors threaten to withhold gifts. Alumni circulate complaints. Advocacy organizations file grievances and mount public campaigns. Legislators hold hearings and attach conditions to funding. In the U.S., federal agencies open investigations that carry enormous financial and reputational risk. Faced with all of this, administrations have learned to respond not by openly restricting speech, which would invite litigation and public criticism, but by adjusting the internal processes through which scholarship is produced, evaluated, and circulated.
Consider how this works in practice. A program review, long understood as a periodic exercise in self-assessment, becomes an occasion to restructure a unit whose work has drawn outside attention. Authority over hiring, promotion, curriculum, and partnerships migrates from faculty committees to senior administrators who are more exposed to external pressure and more attentive to institutional risk. A faculty search is paused and then quietly closed. A journal issue is delayed and then withdrawn. A course is discouraged, a center reorganized, a collaboration terminated. Each of these decisions can be explained in narrow and reasonable terms. Each invokes a legitimate interest: prudent risk management, fiscal discipline, donor relations, institutional neutrality, campus order. Considered one at a time, they look like governance. Considered together, they amount to a transformation of the conditions under which inquiry is possible.
What makes administrative repression so effective is its presentation as competent and neutral management. And because each step is defensible on its own terms, the people affected are left contesting individual decisions rather than the pattern those decisions compose. The incrementalism that marks repression in higher education today is by design. A single dramatic ban would be visible, nameable, and contestable. A hundred small adjustments, spread across hiring committees, provosts’ offices, general counsel, deans, and human resources, are nearly impossible to challenge as a coherent policy, because formally there is no policy at all. There is only a sequence of prudent choices, each made by someone with a plausible reason.
The vocabulary of neutrality deserves particular scrutiny here. Rules governing protest, the use of shared space, signage, or conduct are introduced or revised as content-neutral measures meant to preserve order and ensure equal access. Often they are nothing of the kind. Their timing tracks specific controversies, and their enforcement falls unevenly, with the same conduct tolerated in one setting and sanctioned in another. Selective enforcement rarely appears in any written rule. It emerges through patterns, and the pattern is the message. Over time, members of a community learn which subjects carry risk without necessarily having it made explicit, and they adjust accordingly. A rule that is neutral on its face but selective in practice can discipline expression more efficiently than an open prohibition, and with far less accountability.
Comparative and historical experience teaches the same lesson. Universities rarely lose their autonomy in a single decisive act. They lose it through accumulation: repeated investigations, administrative centralization, politicized appointments, disciplinary proceedings, and, above all, anticipatory obedience. The most corrosive move is often the one no outside actor demanded. An institution that has learned to expect pressure begins to discipline itself, removing problems before they attract notice, declining to pursue lines of work that might prove costly, settling questions in advance in the direction of caution. By the time the chilling effect is visible, it has already done its work. The reading not assigned, the search not run, the event not hosted, the article not written, each of these choices leaves no trace, but collectively they are more effective and insidious than overt acts of repression. They are absences, and absences do not generate headlines.
The consequences fall hardest on those least able to absorb them. Tenured faculty may weather a controversy. Untenured and contingent scholars, who hold the bulk of teaching appointments at most institutions in the United States, cannot. When the boundaries of acceptable inquiry are unwritten and enforced unevenly, the rational response for a vulnerable scholar is to retreat to safer ground. The result is a quiet narrowing of the questions a field is willing to ask, or a department is able to teach, carried out one cautious individual decision at a time, with no one ever issuing an order.
It is tempting to treat all of this as either temporary — tied to the vagaries of the political moment or the electoral cycle — or confined to whichever field happens to be under scrutiny this year. That is a mistake. The mechanism of repression at work is general and once it takes hold it is likely to spread. Any scholarship that touches powerful interests, whether corporate, political, religious, or governmental, can become the occasion for the same administrative repertoire. The specific controversy is interchangeable but the repressive machinery is not. Once an institution has built the apparatus to monitor, vet, and discipline disfavored work in one area, that apparatus is available for use in any other. A faculty that allows it to be normalized for a contested field today will find it pointed at a different field tomorrow.
This is why the response cannot be individual, and why faculty have to organize. A distributed system of soft control cannot be defeated by isolated scholars defending themselves one case at a time, because the system is designed precisely to make each case look singular. Collective bodies can do what individuals cannot. They can document the pattern and make it legible, refusing the fragmentation that repression depends on. They can insist on genuine faculty governance over hiring, curriculum, and promotion rather than ceding those functions to administrators acting under pressure. They can demand transparency about what universities share with outside actors and on what terms. They can support colleagues under investigation instead of leaving them to face exposure alone. And through professional associations, unions, and where necessary litigation, they can raise the cost of repression and slow the drift toward anticipatory compliance.
Faculty governance is not a bureaucratic nicety. It is the institutional form of academic freedom. The migration of academic decisions away from faculty and toward administrators is not a side effect of the current pressures but the principal means by which those pressures are translated into outcomes. Defending shared governance is therefore both the end and the instrument. To organize in its defense is to protect the structures capable of resisting the slow transfer of authority that everything else depends on.
Universities, for their part, have their own reasons to protect scholars, and not merely out of obligation to them. The public value of a university rests on its capacity to produce knowledge that those in power would prefer not to hear. An institution that subordinates that capacity to the management of its reputation has given away the very thing that justifies its independence and its public support. The protection is also a matter of institutional self-interest correctly understood. A university that disciplines faculty whenever their work generates an outside complaint teaches every constituency that pressure works, and so guarantees more of it. Each capitulation is an invitation.
What protection requires is not complicated, though it is increasingly rare. Universities should distinguish controversial scholarship from professional misconduct and refuse to treat the first as if it were the second. They should defend faculty while inquiries proceed rather than acting immediately to contain reputational damage, which is governance by outrage, in which the operative question becomes whether speech is controversial rather than whether it was defensible. They should insist that complaints be evaluated through fair internal processes that consider full context, and they should resist the temptation to settle matters by sacrificing individuals to whoever is loudest. None of this means shielding genuine misconduct. Discrimination, harassment, and abuse of position are real, and accountability for them is part of what academic freedom makes possible. The point is that accountability must run through fair process attentive to context, not through the reflexes of reputational management.
There is a temptation, in moments like this, to defend the university exactly as it is. That is not quite the right aim. Many institutions have shown us their limits, and some of the erosion described here has been carried out by university leaders themselves. The thing worth defending is not the institution in its present form but the possibility it is meant to hold open: education as a practice of freedom, a space in which difficult questions can be examined rather than administratively foreclosed. That possibility is not self-sustaining. The protection of academic freedom and the survival of critical inquiry in higher education depends on faculty organizing to protect these values and institutions finding the resolve to absorb pressure rather than pass it through.
Suggested citation: Aslı Ü. Bâli, The Administrative Erosion of Academic Freedom, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Jun. 30, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/the-administrative-erosion-of-academic-freedom/