The Point: Combatting Political Repression and Academic Job Insecurity

11/13/2025

“Combatting Political Repression and Academic Job Insecurity”:

Defend CUNY’s “Fired 4”! Injury to One, Injury to All!

This week’s Point is written by Joseph G. Ramsey, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies.  As always, The Point represents the views of the author and is not the official position of the FSU.

“As adjuncts, we occupy structurally precarious positions in the neoliberal university — a system that treats contingent faculty as disposable, stripping us of real job security and leaving us especially vulnerable to political retaliation…These firings are the canaries in the coal mine: if adjuncts can be purged for their political speech, anyone can be next.”

                        -Corinna Mullin, long-time CUNY faculty member and one of the “Fired Four” at Brooklyn College

Recent contributors to The Point have made painfully clear how scholars across the country are coming under attack, both on-campus and at the hands of government officials, due to their political views, critical pedagogies, scholarly publications, as well as their nationality, identity, or immigration status.

The harm done by such attacks extends beyond those directly targeted, and the students, programs, and communities they serve.  It reaches all who are driven into silence or timidity by witnessing such spectacular attacks, and also to all those who are thereby deprived of valuable intellectual encounters that otherwise would have occurred. 

Indeed, when it comes to academic labor, the timeless union slogan “Injury to ONE, Injury to ALL!” takes on a new meaning.  The vital traditional meaning remains, of course: any employer attack on an individual worker that goes unchallenged opens the way to further attacks on other workers in the future.  But there is also an added intellectual injury that occurs when voices, teachings, scholarship, and informed opinion from colleagues and students get suppressed.  It is not only those being silenced who lose out: It is ALL of us, and the public at large, who are deprived of the knowledge, insight, experience, and perspectives of those who are silenced.  In particular, in this era of escalating violence against non-US citizens at home and abroad, when an international(ist) student or educator is driven into silence about global issues of the day, we are all deprived of vital things we need to know.

Thus, the violation of academic freedom and of First Amendment rights does not only harm the people whose voices are silenced (or whose careers are ruined). It harms all who would have listened and learned by engaging those voices (whether through ‘agreement’ or ‘disagreement,’ or, as is usually the case with learning: some combination of assimilation and struggle).  What’s at stake, then, is not only freedom of expression, but the freedom to listen and to learn, the right to flourish as thinking beings by engaging the simmering edge of ideas without the wet blanket of censorship.  This is also to say: the defense of academic freedom is not only about we professors or librarians.  It is fundamentally about our students, and their right to pursue critical inquiry and debate without fear of coercive external constraint.^[i]

In this moment of grasping authoritarianism and perennial austerity, how many educators, even here at UMB, with our critical culture and union protections, now regularly engage in or are tempted towards self-censorship, in our classrooms, on campus, on social media, in print, or in public?  We are living in a time when pervasive surveillance makes any sentence spoken a potential doxing campaign, and when the widespread corporatization of academia has radically eroded faculty governance. Ours is also a moment when the weaponization of Civil Rights law and Immigration enforcement to slander and suppress anti-war and anti-racist activists has become a federally sponsored enterprise.  (And in case you missed it: The White House recently proclaimed this to be “Anti-Communism Week”!)  You know we’re in some trouble when noted historian of McCarthyism Ellen Schrecker, asked to consider the present as a “New McCarthyism,” rejects the comparison: The situation today is much worse, she insists. (And that was six months ago.)

In this context, how can faculty and librarians NOT feel pressure to duck away from, or at least speak less forcefully about, ‘controversial’ issues that matter, for fear of the retaliation that truth-seeking and bold speaking may bring?  Even fully tenured professors are increasingly aware of how their hard-fought job security has become, well… contingent on the powers-that-be.  As I’ve often heard AAUP President Todd Wolfson put it: These days, when higher ed bosses and politicians look at tenured faculty these days, they see… future contingent faculty. 

And if fully tenured professors are feeling the heat, how much more is this the case for those whose jobs were already uncertain? How many adjuncts across our city or the country are let go or not brought back from one semester to the next, due to no problem with their job performance but to some sort of political difference between themselves and their would-be ‘superiors’?  Even at a unionized public campus like UMB? How about pre-tenure TT faculty coming up for review? Or NTT faculty not yet on continuing appointment? Most acutely: how about the roughly 20% of faculty still confined to the precarious (and terribly underpaid) semester-to-semester status of “Associate Lecturers”, subject to non-renewal without cause?^[ii]

Drawn from surveys prior to the start of second Trump administration, a FIRE study found that 42% of faculty were already likely to self-censor during classroom discussions or lectures, and that 35% had toned down their writing for fear of controversy.  Though these numbers were not broken down by TT/NTT or FT/PT-Adjunct status, we can safely assume presumably the numbers are higher for the latter. 

How much do our students lose each year when close to half of all faculty in the U.S.—and undoubtedly more than half of the most precarious adjunct faculty who teach the preponderance of first-year and introductory courses—keep quiet or avoid the burning questions of the day?  When such defensive academic self-censorship occurs, not only do faculty fail to impart knowledge and critical perspectives to students about issues that matter, but arguably, what’s imparted is even worse.  Imposed silence models for newly arrived undergraduates the perverse “lesson” that college is about keeping one’s head down rather than speaking out boldly about issues that matter, when the facts, logic, and principle demand it.

But if labor Contingency is corrosive of academic freedom…Courage can be contagious.  And solidarity with students as well as fellow educators—here and around the world—has the potential to grow more powerful than our personal or professional fears. 

The story of Corinna Mullin at the City University of New York is an instructive and inspiring case in point.  A long-time adjunct faculty member and internationalist scholar, a “part timer” teaching 3 of 4 courses per semester between 3 different CUNY campuses for the past 8 years, Corinna joined protests last year against the genocidal war in Gaza, as Palestinian universities and lives were laid to waste, with the help of U.S. bombs.  For this public and principled activity, Corinna was targeted for non-renewal by CUNY administration, along with several of her adjunct colleagues: now dubbed the “Fired Four.”  (Other faculty, including tenured colleagues and department chairs, have also been targeted, but with at least a semblance of due process. The adjunct faculty were fired immediately.)

Speaking out boldly and publicly against global criminality, despite their precarious positions, adjunct faculty activists like Corinna Mullin and the ‘Fired Four’ are ‘canaries in the coal mine’ during this period of ‘New McCarthyism.’ But they are also leaders on the cutting edge of a resistance movement to defend the core values of critical and emancipatory education at a moment of existential crisis. The courage of contingent faculty speaking out has the potential to inspire us all.

I welcome all FSU members and friends to join me in hearing Corinna Mullin and other targeted CUNY faculty speak about their cases and struggles, TONIGHT: Thursday, Nov. 13, 6-8pm, at an event co-sponsored by Higher Ed Labor United (HELU), the AAUP and our urban public sister union PSC-CUNY: “Combatting Contingency in a Time of Political Repression.” (See flier attached.)  Register for the zoom here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/rgQgordBTemjvEZI5_01bQ#/registration.  All are welcome to attend: https://psc-cuny.org/calendar/combatting-contingency-in-a-time-of-political-repression/ Hope to see some of you there, as we continue building connections across college campuses, across state lines, and across the job categories that too often divide us against ourselves.

                                                                        **

Higher Ed Labor United (HELU) is a ‘wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast” coalition of higher ed unions and advocacy organizations, in which both MTA and FSU are members.  For more information about HELU, visit: https://higheredlaborunited.org/ or contact Joe Ramsey, HELU Steering Committee member and chair of HELU’s Contingency Task Force at joseph.ramsey@umb.edu.

--------------------------