July 31st, 2026
By Howard M. Wasserman
The Constitutional Law Workshop explores the Trump Administration’s attacks on major institutions through three discussion groups, organized and moderated by Tom Metzloff (Duke) and Howard Wasserman (FIU).
The second discussion group, at 9 a.m. Thursday, explored assaults on universities, campus speech, and academic freedom. The discussion was divided into three topics; within each topic, featured speakers offered prepared remarks, followed by an open discussion among the 25 participants of those remarks and other issues.
Universities
Topic One explored academic freedom. Isabel Medina (Loyola) critiqued new ABA Standard 208. Although designed to protect and ensure academic freedom, it defines the concept too narrowly; this leaves some important expression at private universities without due process protections, including some expression that should qualify as academic freedom. Joseph Blocher (Duke) explored the interaction between free speech and academic freedom. Although listener interests lie at the core of both, the concepts diverge. Government can
regulate speech in the classroom in ways it could not regulate the same speech in broader discourse, but some regulation of speech necessarily undermines academic freedom. Howard Wasserman (FIU) discussed the recent Eleventh Circuit decision in Pernell v. Florida Bd. of Regents (invalidating state restrictions on certain classroom speech) and what it says about the state of faculty speech and efforts to limit faculty speech at public institutions. The discussion considered the way universities use budget decisions (rather than direct control over expression) to achieve its aims; the concept of a “discipline” (rather than a department) as the core of academic freedom; and the need to understand how academic freedom applies to the modern university comprised of a different faculty types and status, not only tenure-track scholars.
Topic Two explored the relationship between academic institutions and academic freedom. Paolo Farah (Tulsa) discussed the weakening of universities as institutions capable of creating knowledge; universities face outside influences such as conditional funding, compliance requirements, accreditation pressure, and centralized decisionmaking. Paul Gowder (Northwestern) discussed the process through which Northwestern was targeted by and settled with the Trump Administration, highlighting how it illustrates the broader (and pre-Trump) problem of oligarchic takeovers of civil institutions and efforts to suppress dissent. The discussion highlighted the key question: Is there any piece that qualifies as healthy criticism of universities or is this entirely a harmful assault on the institution. Money and finances work in both directions—they create problems and opportunities to control universities, but solid finances allow universities (or unites within universities) to resist efforts at control. And
Topic Three explored efforts to restrict and punish campus speech (by students and faculty). Vanessa Miller (FIU) examined Trump Administration demands that Columbia University establish a campus police force to control protests and campus speech, arguing that the demand affects academic freedom as an indirect attempt to control how universities govern themselves. This discussion considered the effects on campus speech; funding threats and other government demands incentivize universities to silence student speech, much of it protected. Universities, the administration, and other critics of student speech conflate issues and thus cloud the discussion of campus speech—using concerns for antisemitism to attack diversity initiatives, treating unprotected speech and offensive-but-protected speech as one, and using incidents at one school to target similar speech at all schools.
Two features makes universities unique among the three targeted institutions. First, the attack is not limited to the Trump Administration; state officials have engaged in the attack. Second, universities not only fail to push back; they often adopt and accept critics’ framing and narrative, proceeding as if the attacks are warranted and the fault of the universities themselves.