Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom: Fellow Projects

The second cohort of CDAF fellows began their two-year term this month as they gathered for the first time in person for a strategic convening. Read their bios here and learn more about their proposed projects below.

Kaleb L. Briscoe:

Kaleb plans to advance her project "Navigating the Threats to Democracy," which examines the intersections of political polarization, legislative activity, public trust, and higher education governance. Through the CDAF fellowship, she will develop op-eds and peer-reviewed articles that analyze threats to academic freedom, document emerging policy trends, and identify strategies for institutional defense through policy advocacy, coalition building, and governance reform. By translating empirical research into accessible and publicly engaged analysis, she aims to equip faculty, staff, policymakers, and broader communities with the tools to better understand evolving legislative landscapes and their implications for higher education, democratic engagement, and public trust in educational institutions.

Brendan Cantwell:

Brendan will work with CDAF to contribute to building a knowledge and policy infrastructure that advances a positive agenda for protecting and expanding academic freedom. This would include advancing the necessity of structural reform in higher education, identifying concrete steps to achieve necessary reforms, and drafting plans such as model legislation to disseminate through CDAF's networks. Defining the contours of a positive agenda will require collaboration, deliberation, and consensus and will be centered around three key areas of concern. The first is governance reform. Second, institutional autonomy must be ensured in state law, preferably constitutionally. Finally, protections for academic workers (including but not limited to tenure) are being hollowed out, from restrictions on unionization to dismissal of faculty without due process. Academic work cannot be free under conditions of precarity. Laws that protect and expand tenure and other labor protections are necessary to secure academic freedom.

Renée DiResta:

Renée's project investigates how government power is being used to intimidate scholars, chill disfavored research, and pressure universities into abandoning their obligations to academic freedom. Focusing on subpoenas, politicized oversight hearings, vexatious litigation, funding threats, smear campaigns, and other coercive tactics, she will expose how political narratives are converted into official action against researchers and institutions. The project brings together research on propaganda and institutional vulnerability with firsthand experience of government-driven targeting, with the goal of helping academics, universities, advocates, journalists, and legal organizations recognize these attacks and respond forcefully and effectively. The central premise is that academic freedom cannot be defended through quiet damage control alone; it requires public engagement and institutional courage, and, where appropriate, legal action against abuses of state power.

Afshan Jafar:

Despite their significance, antidiscrimination policies have not typically been considered in faculty governance and discussions of academic freedom. Until recently, such policies were seen as mired in legalese and outside of faculty expertise. But given the recent weaponization of such policies, especially Title VI, there is greater interest in understanding their implications and in ensuring that policies and procedures for assessing claims, conducting investigations, and determining sanctions sufficiently protect faculty rights and academic freedom. But as more and more institutions farm out these policies and their adjudication to "consultants," it has become increasingly important to analyze how their involvement undermines faculty expertise. Afshan's proposed project will look at the role of outside consultants and "risk-managers" in developing antidiscrimination policies and the threat such entities and their "pre-packaged" policies pose to academic freedom and governance.

Josh Mayer:

Josh proposes to develop a line of work on the nexus of academic freedom and immigration, including both the forced migration of scholars to the United States amid international crackdowns on academic freedom and the mobilization of the US government's anti-immigrant apparatus against international scholars' academic freedom. Continuing and expanding CDAF organizational partnerships, Josh aims to develop 1) a CDAF action report on academic freedom and immigration, including the potential role of collective bargaining in protecting noncitizens' academic freedom; 2) a journal article rooted in interviews with scholars who have immigrated to the United States due to violations of academic freedom in their home countries; and 3) a feature story and Q&A on academic freedom and immigration for the Academic Freedom on the Line Substack. He will also continue the work of current CDAF fellows on academic freedom and the Palestine exception, including the potential to collaborate with national student organizations to develop a database of university policies that have been enforced or newly formulated in response to campus speech supporting Palestinian human rights.

Heather McCambly:

Heather's work with CDAF will focus on documenting and analyzing schools and centers established to advance right-wing attacks on academic freedom. Drawing on her prior research on philanthropic investment and higher education policy, she hopes to examine the donor networks, institutional commitments, and tactical strategies of these centers in order to map the terrain and interrogate their internal contradictions and violations of academic freedom. Heather will share findings via op-eds, contribute to the Academic Freedom on the Line Substack, and develop long-term collaborations to develop a deeper line of research on these centers, their development, and their trajectories.

Katie Rainwater:

As a fellow based in Florida, Katie plans to produce public and academic writing on the attacks on academic freedom and institutional autonomy at Florida public universities. As Florida is being used as a testing ground for higher education capture by the national conservative movement, the implications of these attacks have great import. Her focus on Florida will include analyzing the production of a state-dictated general education curriculum as well as documenting the activities of state legislature-created ideological centers on public university campuses. Second, she plans to research attacks on the independent accreditation system to help inform the AAUP's campaign against the new state-run accreditor, the Commission for Public Higher Education, and the right-wing capture of the accreditation system.

Raquel M. Rall:

As a fellow, Raquel's work will focus on the role of university governing boards in protecting or undermining institutional autonomy-an underexplored dimension of the broader academic freedom crisis. On the Academic Freedom on the Line Substack, she plans to lead a beat titled "The Boardroom as a Battlefield," producing features that include interviews with student regents and faculty trustees and in-depth stories examining how boards can serve as institutional shields for academic independence. At the end of the fellowship, she hopes to provide an action report that develops a governance health matrix for campus leaders to assess board independence and codify board accountability for academic freedom. Together, these projects aim to shift public and scholarly attention toward the boardroom as a critical and often overlooked front in the fight for higher education's independence.

Victor Ray:

Victor plans to write for Academic Freedom on the Line, focusing on race in higher education. Scholarship on race has become one of the most hot-button issues in the country. Driven by a disinformation campaign, conservative legislatures have used race scholarship as a wedge issue to attack academic freedom more generally. Additionally, as vice president of the American Sociological Association, he also hopes to help to continue forging relationships between professional and advocacy organizations devoted to academic freedom.

Angela Valenzuela:

Angela plans to center her fellowship work on the development and advancement of the National Defense of Higher Education Act (NDHEA), a proposed federal framework intended for introduction in the 121st Congress. The NDHEA is designed to safeguard institutional autonomy, restore shared governance protections, and establish federal standards that prevent political interference in curriculum, research, faculty governance, and academic labor. In the current climate of intensified attacks on higher education, the proposal offers a timely opportunity to move from documenting harm to advancing a concrete federal policy response. She plans to contribute to the Academic Freedom on the Line Substack with a recurring series and develop an action report that documents governance restructuring and demonstrates how the NDHEA directly addresses these patterns.

Bradford Vivian:

Bradford will prioritize two forms of work during his time as a CDAF fellow. First, the CDAF research agenda comports seamlessly with his vision of advocacy for academic freedom. Empirically proving the alarming scale of attacks on academic freedom, rendering the measurable costs of those attacks visible for the public, and promoting effective persuasion about the broad value of modern university systems are imperative forms of research-based advocacy. Second, the prospect of facilitating and organizing partner meetings dovetails with his overriding vision and past leadership positions. Constructive dialogue and deliberation among university organizations and academic societies who are vulnerable to unprecedented attacks on academic freedom are essential to creating networks of mutual advocacy and support.

Ralph Wilson:

To address the growing attacks on academic freedom, Ralph will develop datasets tracking privately funded and publicly funded ideological centers as well as funding streams, network ties, and advocacy actions targeting higher education. Relevant data would include payments, institutions, actions, legislation, donor contracts, and other work featured in CDAF publications. Ralph proposes building a shared dataset for use by AAUP chapters, faculty, scholars, activists, and journalists, in consultation with CDAF fellows and partners.