Now more than ever, choose wisely when defending academic freedom

Nearly every week brings news of another assault on academic freedom by the Trump administration and its red state allies, seeking to control who can teach and what can be taught in colleges and universities.

Resistance is essential, but it is also important to understand where academic freedom begins and ends. Not every limitation encroaches on academic freedom, and it is unhelpful to sound overheated alarms over relatively benign events. 

Consider a recent episode at the University of Minnesota. 

Violinist Stephanie Arado accepted immediately when she was invited to play at a memorial for Alex Pretti, who had been shot dead by U.S. immigration officials only one day earlier. She could not have anticipated that she would be barred from performing by university President Rebecca Cunningham, who objected to a political slogan on Arado’s clothing.

Hundreds of faculty colleagues later took Arado’s side, protesting that she had been denied artistic and academic freedom. It turns out, however, that the university had a better case than many professors have been willing to recognize. 

The community event was organized overnight to honor Pretti, a 2011 Minnesota graduate who had been working as a Veterans Administration nurse. It included a morning moment of silence, followed by a virtual afternoon gathering for reflections “on navigating this profoundly difficult time.” Although the circumstances of Pretti’s death were well known, there was no specific mention of the shooting. 

Arado, an associate professor of music at the university, arrived at the venue ready to play. She was wearing a long black tunic with “The evil must end now” affixed as an applique to the front in small letters, and “ICE OUT” on the back. 

Arado never got a chance to perform. As she explained in a recent interview with the Minnesota Daily, she was approached backstage by an unidentified woman in a dark suit. “We have a problem,” the woman told her. “You need to take that off, or we won’t allow you to play. This is intended to be a solemn occasion.” 

Unwilling to change her clothing, Arado packed up her violin and left. “It was very upsetting to me, of course, because this meant a lot to me,” she told the Minnesota Daily.  

Arado’s dismissal from the program was not widely known until weeks later, when the student newspaper broke the story. Other faculty expressed outrage at what they perceived as a violation of academic freedom.  

According to Professor Michael Gallope, “to ask a faculty artist to edit their work as a condition for its exhibition is a violation of their academic freedom.” 

A statement from over 400 University of Minnesota faculty that I was sent in an email “condemn[ed] the university administration’s violation of the academic freedom and freedom of expression of a faculty artist,” noting that Cunningham acknowledged making the decision to prevent Arado from performing.

The protesters are wrong. The exclusion of Arado did not come close to resembling “the work of fascists,” as their statement alleged.

Most important is the context of the event, which was planned within a day of Pretti’s death. At the time, Trump administration officials were still — falsely and reprehensibly — calling Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin” who wanted to “massacre law enforcement.” In that light, holding a memorial “to honor alum Alex Pretti” was an implicit refutation of the foul lies coming from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House adviser Stephen Miller.

The organizers reasonably decided that a silent rebuke, holding up Pretti as someone to be honored rather than slandered, would be powerful without an overtly political message.  

While academic freedom extends to artistic expression, the sponsors of an event are not required to cede all control over the program. A soloist invited to perform at a Mozart concert could not insist on playing a piece by Philip Glass. Surely no one would support a performer who attempted to wear a MAGA hat in the Pretti memorial. 

That does absolve the university for mistreating Arado. In an email, Arado informed me that she had been given no advance notice about a dress code, or that the event was to be non-political.

Worse, Arado was immediately escorted out of the building by armed campus police officers. Her supporters said in the statement that they were rightly “horrified that our university leadership invited an artist to perform and called the police when her individual expression of mourning did not fit into their unspoken rules.” 

It is understandable that everyone at Minnesota was on edge following the unprovoked killings of Pretti and Renee Good, but rudeness is not the same as censorship. If the original invitation to Arado had included a prohibition on political slogans, she could have accepted or declined, and nobody would have invoked academic freedom.  

No harm would have been done by allowing Arado to perform as she planned, but no bedrock principle was violated by the university’s decision to stick with an unspoken repudiation of the Trump administration’s deceit.  

Facing an unrelenting war on higher education, it is crucial for the defenders of academic freedom to choose their battles wisely. This shouldn’t have been one of them.  

Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

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