Free speech on campus is in trouble, but not for the reasons we’ve all been hearing for over a decade. In fact, those most panicked about campus free speech have been among its most committed enemies. I’ve been working in American universities through the entire history of the most recent campus free speech panic. In my undergrad years, mainstream media was losing its head over cafeteria items. My senior year, poor reception of the eugenicist Charles Murray at Middlebury College set off years of aggrieved denunciations and media hand-wringing. Debates about “cancel culture” became arguments about “wokeness” and “DEI” while I was in grad school. A few years later, now working as a visiting faculty member, I noticed many of the nation’s most outspoken “free speech” advocates were curiously silent about or even critical of student protesters speaking out against genocide. And five months ago I was preemptively fired by the federal government, quite possibly for political reasons, before I could start a new university job.

I don’t usually write about myself in this newsletter, but unfortunately this is a history I’ve lived a little bit of. In the 21st-century United States, some political views can make you wealthy, some can make you poor, and some will send you to prison. I’m going to talk about that, and I’m going to hope some of you share this, not just because I am personally struggling but because all of academia is, and because that has long-term consequences for everyone in the country.

This is a reader-supported newsletter! If we lived in a world of thriving magazine and book publishing, and well-funded public institutions, I wouldn’t need to ask for a cent. Unfortunately we don’t, and I appreciate your support (particularly since the federal government of the United States recently forced the institution I was going to start working at this fall to revoke their offer to hire me). In addition to the two articles a month free subscribers get by email, premium subscribers receive one bonus post a month. On that note, here’s another reminder that you can purchase my book Control Science from Verso right now. I also have a new personal website, henrys.now, where you can find more of my work.

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This year there are more than a dozen academic jobs in the humanities intended more or less for right-wingers only. That’s more than H-net, the major job board for the humanities, has listings for African American history, any European history across any period, Latin American and Caribbean history and area studies– I could go on. Academic jobs are like lottery tickets at this point. Most PhD holders won’t get a permanent academic job, most classes aren’t taught by tenure track faculty, and doing great research and brilliant teaching isn’t enough. You have to get lucky. But it sure helps if you’re right wing. 

The jobs in question make quite clear that this is the requirement. Perhaps the worst offender here is Bentley University’s Bartlett chair job, a cushy position whose lucky winner will teach one course a semester. It calls for a scholar who will “foster rigorous, inclusive, and intellectually open classroom environments in which students can engage constructively with competing ideas”-- but then tells you exactly which ideas you will be expected to support. The job posting suggests the recipient might cultivate relationships with think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, or Cato Institute. All of these are right-wing outlets backed by the rich. AEI is a pro-business think tank and the employer of the aforementioned eugenicist, Heritage has among other things has supported vicious war criminal Jonas Savimbi in Angola, and Cato is the Koch brothers’ project. Apparently Bentley is also hiring a chair of Free Speech. But their new free speech positions make very clear what kind of speech they will promote. You’re not just supposed to teach about business– you better teach that it’s good.

Not content with distorting hiring, the right hopes to shape graduate students from the beginning of their careers. Johns Hopkins and AEI are jointly behind a “Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative.” GSIDI is explicitly committed to producing more right-wing faculty by “identifying and assisting . . . especially those [students] interested in” “conservative, moderate, or heterodox liberal approaches.” If you’re to the left of Bill Clinton you’re out, but if you think some races are superior to others, congrats, you might be on the path to a coveted faculty job! 

And look, I get it. If I had unlimited money I’d try to promote my views in American society too. My most significant problem here is not that views I disagree with have financial support, nor even that allowing money into university hiring like this inevitably prejudices research toward whatever the wealthy want, though it does. But the larger problem is that the views supposed free speech proponents are promoting include hostility to the intellectual pluralism they supposedly are advancing. AEI (and I’m going to use them as the example to be generous, because Heritage is worse) has called for defunding universities that “hit certain admissions trip wires that clearly indicate discriminatory intent”-- in plain English, defunding universities that have too many Black students. This reverse affirmative action would be a new version of the despicable quota system that once kept Jewish Americans out of Harvard and Yale. Even an article they republished six months ago supposedly calling for fighting “leftist indoctrination” without “censorship” still insists it is reasonable to fight the “diversity ideology” that has supposedly controlled colleges and universities for decades.

Right-wing/heterodox/reactionary centrist “free speech” advocates have repeatedly acted to restrict the speech and intellectual activity of others. Minding the Campus, a blog by the right-wing National Association of Scholars whose content AEI has shared on their website, just ran an article calling on the Department of Defense to rifle through universities and surveil “foreign students.” In 2024 AEI republished an op-ed from The Hill calling for universities to punish student protesters. A current AEI fellow, Carole Hooven, recently gave a talk at the National Institutes of Health insisting on a binary view of sex and criticizing Harvard students’ disapproval of her lectures for deliberately and pointedly misgendering a research subject. Our public health system is failing to fight measles now, but can still find time to air years-old grievances against students. And the entire right-wing “free speech” ecosystem has been dedicated to dismantling affirmative action of any kind.

This grievance industrial complex believes that fewer Black students should be in college, that Chinese students should be surveilled and fined and deported, that trans people shouldn’t even be able to use public bathrooms, and that anyone who calls Israel’s actions genocide or apartheid should be punished. None of this is even a good or thorough overview of what these actors are up to– this is just a random collection of links I found in an afternoon.

Third, this entire system has thrown its money, support, and attention behind far-right politicians who have restricted free speech everywhere they can. The right-wing think tank complex has consistently provided support for the politics that produced Donald Trump’s presidency. Some of these outlets now make occasional noises about civil liberties and especially about taxes– credit where credit is due, the Koch ecosystem and libertarian cinematic universe have done a good amount of this– but if you set a fire I don’t think you deserve much credit for trying to put it out only once it reaches your house. And the “free speech” advocacy system, which is targeted entirely at elites and policymakers– you cannot convince me there are many people reading an AEI blog on Sarah Lawrence’s admissions policy– has continued to desperately punch left.

In an ideal academy, some views will not be represented, because one function of academia is to ascertain truth and some views are false. We cannot make research progress if we cannot arrive at conclusions. We can and should quibble about the process through which we do so. But “free speech” advocates are instead participating in and profiting from a witch hunt that chases others out of academe both for identity and ideology. Because of their attacks on affirmative action and political support for the Trump administration, right now, there are fewer Black graduate students, fewer trans professors, fewer leftist writers. And they have the gall to call this free speech.

Control Science, my recent book with Verso, is about free enterprise, it covers the Cato Institute, carefully narrates the long trajectory of right-liberal and libertarian thought. There are things we only know about the history of right-wing economic thought because of my work— but since I criticize it instead of endorsing it, my job prospects are infinitely worse. I’d be delighted to have a principled libertarian colleague to butt heads with. I believe in pluralism and good faith disagreement. But the right doesn’t.  

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My own personal case is one example of what this means in practice for academics. Five months ago I was informed in dry bureaucratic language that by order of the US Maritime Administration’s personnel security I was out of a job. I had been lucky enough to earn, after academia’s now-typical several years bouncing between temporary jobs, a faculty position at the United States Merchant Marine Academy. I won’t call it a dream job, because it wasn’t. But it was a job, doing something I love, and equally importantly doing the thing I am actually qualified for— spending a decade working on the history of shipbuilding and political economy trades off with preparing for any other career. 

This is an unusual story about a very, very typical thing. Almost every PhD who wants an academic job has a litany of dismal stories: being a finalist for a job in “X or Y” as an X specialist only to find they wanted Y, running through the whole process only to find there was an inside candidate the whole time, an entire year where there wasn’t even a job in your subfield and you couldn’t apply to anything anyway. All of these are at least as unpleasant as what happened to me, and if anything deserve more attention, because they’re structural and because they might actually be fixed. 

But I do think what happened to me was unfair, and mildly noteworthy. Also if I can’t sell my labor to a university– though I am trying!– at an appropriate rate I have to do something, and that includes shilling a newsletter/blog, and attention is a way to do that. 

The interview process started last fall, at a pace that was (initially) fast for academic hiring: I went from application and through interviews and teaching demo in a few weeks once the process got rolling. Everyone at the institution was gracious and thoughtful throughout the process– I’m sorry I didn’t get to have them as colleagues like we both wanted. By early 2026 I got formal notice that I’d been selected. Great. A light at the end of the tunnel.

Already I had qualms, and already I knew I’d probably take the job anyway. The schedule seemed brutal. It was far away and inconveniently placed, so taking the job would mean reconfiguring my entire life. As far as I could tell online the institution was literally falling apart, infrastructurally speaking. And I felt uncomfortable with the military relationship– MMA trains people in ship operation and is under the Department of Transportation, but they do serve the military, usually in the Navy reserves, for some time afterward.

I imagined the kind of lectures I’d give. I knew I’d find ways to make sure students know– as Merchant Marine Academy alum and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly reminded military personnel during this same period-- that they do not have to and should not follow illegal orders, like the ones the government is currently giving to murder Central American fishermen. Maybe I’d get fired, hopefully in a way that would at least generate some publicity to cushion the blow. I told myself that if I felt I was doing more harm than good I’d leave. I wished it were a better job in a better place, but I was happy to have one.

Once I got notice I was going to get the job I still had to go through the background check process. This wasn’t a job with a security clearance, but there was a requirement you earn “public trust” and prove your “suitability” in character terms for the job. I’m told they use a “whole person” adjudication process, which means I can’t tell you what in the 100 page form I submitted was the problem.

But I have my suspicions. In October 2019 I was arrested as part of an Extinction Rebellion (XR) protest. We blocked traffic. There was fake blood. You do what you can. It was hardly radical: the police thanked us as they released us. I lost touch with the organization soon after the protest, partly because there’s an anti-human strain in many environmental orgs that I don’t agree with and saw firsthand in some conversations with them, partly because COVID happened and we moved away. It was good work still, and I’m not sorry I did it. The charges were dismissed and the case sealed. At the time I had to report this, it was about six and a half years in the past. The background check process asks only for the last seven years. A few more months and it wouldn’t have even shown up. In an ordinary administration I don’t think it would have been an issue.

But this is not an ordinary administration. XR members, I heard, got some FBI visits in early 2026 as part of the broader “antifa” intimidation push of the current administration. XR breaks the law to get attention and mildly disrupt, say, traffic, nothing more– terrorism this is not. I don’t think anyone’s actually been charged with anything. I can’t imagine they would be convicted if they were.

The abrupt and shocking email telling me my job offer was revoked came shortly after I sent in paperwork regarding that 2019 arrest. I’d been growing progressively more stressed each day I didn’t get the final all clear, and had fought off the dread with optimism and rationalizations about slow institutions. When the bad news came, I wept, I scrambled to arrange part-time work again, I moved on. I published my first book and finished manuscript revisions to my second, Enemies of Order: Labor and Power at the Atlantic Dockside, which is a trans-Atlantic exploration of a transformative period in our history that I wrote on a shoestring budget while jumping from temporary job to temporary job.

I can’t say whether this was a politically-motivated firing. The security people I emailed with were professional, and I’m sure are doing their best. Maybe in another administration this wouldn’t have happened or maybe the arrest would have been a problem regardless of who was in charge; maybe there was a Don’t Hire The They/Them directive somewhere explicitly, maybe not. Perhaps my anodyne explanation of the arrest would have been insufficient even in normal times. I do know that the suitability system that got me is the same one the CIA is reportedly using to fire queer employees right now. And I’m the kind of person the administration would want to purge: nonbinary and queer, an outspoken socialist, a critic of this government. This would be a proper story if I could prove this was the case, but I can’t, and even if it isn’t, it happened within and as part of a higher ed environment structurally hostile to liberal and left thought, to pathbreaking research in all fields, and to the basic needs of researchers.

There’s a lot wrong in the world right now, and this is a small injustice, all things considered. There’s probably a case in here for civil service reform– suitability seems vague and unclear and thus prone to abuse– but I don’t know the topic well and am too tired after all this to devote my energy there. Professional military education can sort itself out I suppose, and it will have to do it without the help of at least this particular historian of maritime labor. Higher education as a whole is in danger now. Like the more typical rejections early-career academics receive when they are lucky enough to hear back from a job search that didn’t work out for them, none of this would have mattered much even to me if higher ed were like any other job– if secure jobs were regular opportunities and not rare hopes.

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But secure jobs are scarce, thanks to the funding environment in higher education. Many would-be faculty are not being hounded by the government (and many are, including for their research on, for example, climate science). But all of us face an austerity environment that turns individual institutions’ subtle preferences into career-ending bars to employment. And if I had gotten that job it would have been a lifeboat for me only– the system would still have been in shambles for someone else, and still will be if I get out of my own current situation. 

At many blue state research universities, hiring is anemic or frozen. Those faculty who are securely employed watch their salaries eaten away by inflation, their research budgets evaporate, and their discipline crumble before their eyes. Here at UConn, where I work part time right now, the administration has taken away garbage cans from our offices. The state has directed funds for quantum computing, business, and poaching senior faculty from other institutions, but refuses most new hiring. Under so-called “fiscal guardrails,” Governor Ned Lamont refuses to let the budget expand even when tax revenue does. (Lamont, by the way, also refuses to enforce state laws that prohibit ICE agents from going masked or entering courthouses without warrants; they did both recently, and have been kidnapping parents from school bus stops lately).

My fellow Connecticut residents probably, by and large, have no idea that UConn is in this state– we still produce research, we still teach their kids brilliantly, the basketball team is doing great. They’re getting a new building. I make a few thousand dollars a course, and had I not been in the right place at the right time I wouldn’t have that either. If it weren’t for my wife’s salary and health insurance I would be unable to stay in academia. As is, I am only just holding on. And others have it far worse.

In this fiscal wasteland, the bravery and commitment of individual faculty, departments, administrations, and even whole institutions is not enough to protect free speech from the supposedly liberty-loving right. If we cannot publish our work and teach our students, and right-wing donors get to choose who can, they win. For decades, academia has demanded that talented young people sacrifice years of their lives for only a small chance to teach somewhere far away from their families and perhaps even their partners, and we’ve done it. As that chance grows smaller, salaries are eaten away, and research funding eliminated, that already leaking pipeline is beginning to fail outright. 

This is not just a problem for academics but a problem for everyone. The truth-seeking of free and secure faculty, however imperfect, has helped give us new cancer treatments, trillion-dollar industries, and an ever-deepening understanding of our nation’s place in the world. Blue states’ underfunded and struggling universities provide countless jobs– as they crumble, so do university towns and capital cities. Underinvesting in research now– which state systems are especially egregious about– means restricting what we are able to know and do for generations. It makes us poorer, sicker, sadder, and more vulnerable. 

50 years ago, big business libertarians set out to remake the legal system, and now today there are laws that no longer work for you as they once did, and you are demonstrably more likely to lose a lawsuit or go to prison, because of them. What will they do now to math, to history, to chemistry? An NIH dedicated to denying the existence of trans people will make less progress on cancer research. Professional military education focused on compliance and ideology rather than history will produce an officer corps more likely to hurt Americans and less able to protect us. Business schools that cannot even spare a moment to think critically about “free enterprise” will raise a generation of executives more likely to scam and poison you. 

We don’t have to let them. That professor whose elective you loved in college? The professors who taught the high school teachers who changed your life? America’s beleaguered faculty and graduate students are standing between you and this poorer future. And right now we’re losing. With a renewed public commitment to funding public education (and we need this at the K-12 level just as much), that can change. In the long term this will have to be a federal effort, because states cannot invest in the future the way the federal government can unless our whole monetary system changes. But this starts with states and towns. Call your state legislator, run for office, do whatever you can.

It might seem ridiculous that I’m still in this line of work at all. Sometimes it feels that way to me too. My choices are limited— but more than that I want this to be the right choice. I want to keep mentoring students. I want to keep expanding what we know about our history. There are thousands of people just like me. One of us might be the person who could discover a medical treatment you’ll need, or who could help your child find their dream job, or who will write your favorite book. I hope they get the chance to.