Published and Perished
Across the country professors are losing jobs – because of their beliefs
Anna Oakes reports on the troubling phenomenon of academics being pushed out of work, time and again for finding themselves on the wrong side of the Trump Administration’s views and policies
- MS
On September 10, 2025, barely a week after he’d been awarded tenure as a history professor at Texas State University, Thomas Alter received notice that he had been fired. An excerpt of his speech at an online conference, the “Revolutionary Socialism Conference,” organized by several socialist groups, had gone viral on social media and the published video, the university administration claimed, appeared to show him “inciting violence.”
The firing came as a shock to Alter. “I was ready to devote my academic career to Texas State,” he said. “The shock of being fired totally blew apart my world. My wife had been laid off from her job teaching special needs kids the previous school year and so it was just, ‘oh my goodness.’”
Alter, arguing he was fired without due process, filed a lawsuit with the support of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and was temporarily reinstated by a Texas county court judge. In the suit, he claimed that early discovery and Freedom of Information Act documents revealed that Texas Governor Greg Abbott had called two high-level administrators at Texas State University to demand Alter’s immediate firing.
In the short video clip that went viral, Alter, speaking on a recorded Zoom call, seems to emphasize the importance of organization in social movements as a tool to overthrow the “most bloodthirsty, profit-driven” US government. The person who edited and posted the video, a self-professed “anti-communist cult leader,” gasps in apparent shock. But in the full recording, Alter also criticizes the tactics and methods of “insurrectionist anarchists,” calling their tactics “laudable” but asking, “what purpose do they serve?”
A few days after Alter’s provisional reinstatement, following what the university described as a “thorough review,” he was definitively fired.
“The language was so sanitized,” he said. In the letter, Texas State President Kelly Damphousse claimed that Alter’s remarks at the conference did, in his view, “read as a call to build a ‘Revolutionary Socialist Party’ with the purpose of overthrowing the United States Government” and said his comments “call into question your neutrality as an educator.”
Because Alter’s lawsuit is ongoing – a hearing is scheduled for June 17 – his lawyer has advised him not to state his expected, or hoped-for, outcomes. “I can say that I really enjoyed teaching at Texas State,” he said. “Coming from mainly a working-class background, it’s the type of students I wanted to teach. First-generation college students, working class backgrounds, majority minority campus. It really was where I wanted to be.”
In the aftermath of the firing, Alter has received death threats. One commenter in an article about his firing described his house; other comments have been violent. Despite open support from many in the community, he and his wife have installed a security system.
The accusations by Damphousse that Alter was indoctrinating his students, in the letter to Alter informing Alter of his second firing, was particularly upsetting. “That gets me boiled up more than anything,” he said. “Who’s doing the indoctrination? I mean, this is really just self-projection on their own part because they think because that’s what they’re doing, that’s what we’d want to do. And it’s not.”
Alter said his case has even brought support from academics on the Left who have traditionally engaged in heated intellectual disagreements. “It’s kind of an ‘all hands on deck’ type moment with all these assaults coming at us right now,” he said.
In the 18 months since President Trump took office, there has been a marked increase in incidents of professors getting fired or pushed out for speech related to topics that contradict Trump administration stances – from teaching the social underpinnings of gender and sexual identity, to critiques of Charlie Kirk, to writing in favor of Palestine.
There are many factors that make it difficult to thoroughly track retaliations. For one, universities often don’t explicitly tell their faculty why they are dismissing them – meaning that it is difficult to prove retaliation has taken place. For another, dismissals can take different forms: whether as explicit firing, or as a more implicit failure to renew a contract, which professors often interpret as retaliatory.
In the absence of a single database or way to measure academic repression across states and institutes, many academic and advocacy organizations have established their own trackers. The Middle East Studies Association, for example, maintains a series of trackers that identifies attacks on academic freedom, including one that tracks employment retaliation “in connection to Palestine advocacy after October 7, 2023.”
Other organizations take a broader approach to retaliation, including censorship as well as firings. Duke University’s Campus Speech Database tracks “campus speech issues emerging in the American landscape.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has maintained the Scholars Under Fire Database since 2000, tracking efforts to “punish scholars at U.S. colleges and universities for expressive activity that is…protected by the First Amendment or that violates academic freedom.”
“One thing we’ve seen since the second Trump administration has come back is far, far, far more attempts by elected officials or unelected appointees” to influence internal university decisions, said Sean Stevens, Chief Research Advisor for FIRE.
The AAUP, an academic union and advocacy organization with a mission to “advance academic freedom and shared governance,” has its own internal tracker. Since Kirk’s assassination in September 2025, the AAUP has identified what it claims are at least 60 incidents of academic retaliation related to criticism of Kirk across the country. Most cases have involved suspensions or terminations of faculty, according to Kelly Benjamin, national press liaison for AAUP. Many cases involve social media posts and have even affected faculty traditionally protected by tenure. In one case, a retired University of Florida law professor’s emeritus status was rescinded following his Facebook post calling Kirk an “evil person spouting all kinds of hateful messages.”
Attempts to censor academic speech and teaching are nothing new, said Isaac Kamola, an associate professor of political science at Trinity College who researches right-wing attacks on higher education and is the director of the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
For decades, Kamola said, “there’s been this very, very concerted, well-funded, well-organized effort to delegitimize the university” as an environment of left-wing indoctrination. In a 2021 book, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War, Kamola tracks the growing influence of the Koch brothers on college campuses. In recent years, especially amidst Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and the #MeToo movement before that, Koch-funded student groups, academic centers, and media outlets used accusations of “free speech” repression to push back against protester demands for institutional reform.
During the first Trump administration, this backlash reached federal levels: a Trump executive order in fall 2021 purported to combat a “destructive ideology” framed around race and gender reform.
Pushback at that time, Kamola said, was limited to Red states and centered around critical race theory and DEI. A prime example is Florida’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act, which prohibited apparent endorsement of so-called “woke indoctrination,” as Governor Ron DeSantis called it, defining teaching of “woke” concepts as discriminatory.
Until the October 7 attack, successful efforts to control university curriculums and teachings were largely limited to Red states, Kamola said. Republican donors and think tanks struggled to politically influence universities, including elite and Ivy League schools, in states controlled by Democrats.
But the subsequent protests against the Israeli war on Gaza that rocked college campuses across the country provided an opening. As groups like the Anti-Defamation League made accusations of rampant antisemitism, backed by statistics that critics have argued are inflated and inaccurate, conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute “then pick up that language of antisemitism and deploy it for their own purposes in order to advance this broader culture war attack on higher education,” Kamola said. By using this language of antisemitism, conservative donors and politicians have been able to expand their influence to private institutions and institutions in Blue states. “This is a political gift for Republicans,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist, in a 2024 NPR report on how Republicans have used antisemitism as a political strategy.
A civil rights-era law – Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits programs that receive federal funding from “discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin” – has also become an increasingly popular tool of academic censorship under the second Trump administration. The AAUP has documented a jump in Title VI investigations in the past year.
The impact of academic censorship has also affected institutions seen as strongholds of progressivism and diversity. Last summer, Corinna Mullin, an adjunct professor of Political Science and Economics at CUNY for eight years, received news that her contract was not being renewed. “It’s essentially a firing because I had courses already lined up for the fall and I didn’t get to teach those courses,” she said. “So if I had been a full-time faculty member, that would have been a firing.”
Mullin was let go along with three other professors. They received no explanation from CUNY. “They called it a non-reappointment,” Mullin said. “But it’s just a sanitized version of saying you’re fired.”
But Mullin and her supporters had an idea why she had been let go: “We all have been involved in teaching as well as organizing around Palestine solidarity,” she said. Mullin, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, had also undergone two Title VI investigations into her teaching based on claims of antisemitism – both of which had been found unsubstantiated.
Following an extensive campaign by the CUNY PSC union, during which they argued that CUNY had fired the four professors “in what appears to be retaliation for their lawful political expression outside of the classroom,” Mullin and two more of the four fired professors were reinstated. In a statement at the time of her firing, a spokesman for Brooklyn College, as reported by the New York Times, said the school had not reappointed the four faculty members because of their conduct, not their political beliefs. She returned to teaching at CUNY this spring.
“Still, when I think about it, I get emotional. Because, it’s not just loss of income and my livelihood, family, but this is what I’m passionate about, you know,” she said.
Retaliation has not only come from positions of institutional authority, though. In October, Mark Bray, a historian and professor at Rutgers, fled with his wife and two young children to Spain. Bray, who wrote the book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook in 2017, had received renewed attention under Trump’s second administration. But in the aftermath of the Kirk killing, and the designation of Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” threats against Bray took on renewed energy.
“It really started to get intense,” he said. “It seemed pretty evident to me that Trump and his allies decided after Charlie Kirk’s killing to go after Antifa as a kind of bogeyman. And I am the person that wrote the book with the title.”
Kirk’s legacy on the right as a proponent of open dialogue, Bray added, is a stark contrast to their tactics.
After bemoaning “cancel culture,” MeToo, and “safe spaces,” conservative leaders are using the same tactics they criticized to repress freedom of speech, he said. “But now they’re championing book bans and getting rid of academic departments, firing people who are critical of Charlie Kirk, and so forth and so on.”
“And what that says to me is that it was always a lie, it was always a game.”
Bray and his wife had received death threats for months. But when one included their home address, they decided to leave the country. “It became clear that if one person could find our address, other people could. So we decided that day that we would leave.”
Bray has continued to teach his classes at Rutgers remotely, from Spain. In the summer, hoping that the threats will have died down, he plans to move back to the US with his family.
While Rutgers allowed him to work remotely, Bray said that universities should appoint administrators to respond to faculty safety concerns, given the current political climate. “It’s become a workplace safety issue. And it is not being treated, generally speaking, as such by universities,” he said.
“It seems in most cases, they either want to avoid the controversy, avoid the attacks from the right, or use them to achieve the purposes that they wanted to achieve for a while – which is to cut a number of programs, get rid of progressive and left-leaning faculty,” he added. “In so many ways, this is a crucial period for the future of American higher education.”
- Anna Oakes