Far too often in the academy, teaching is treated like a necessary bother. It’s something squeezed in between writing manuscripts, managing a lab, or doing pretty much anything else on the laundry list of professorial duties. It's telling that our teaching methods have hardly changed in well over a century, with pedagogical innovation largely stalled and the doctoral students who go on to teach being given almost no training in the craft.

But now it seems that U.S. faculty are waking up to the power of the classroom — of the tremendous privilege college and university educators have enjoyed culturally and legally. This, however, is happening for a negative reason rather than a positive one. Threats are knocking on our classroom doors, as outside political actors are increasingly seeking to redistribute power to the government in an attempt to stop what they call “divisive” concepts from entering university classrooms. 

In 2022 in Florida, Republicans passed the Stop WOKE Act, legislation a federal court later declared “positively dystopian” given that upholding the statute would mean “professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves.” The court concluded the Act unconstitutionally “officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints.” 

After the Court halted the Stop Woke Act, Florida and other states began enacting bills that would ban ideas only from general education courses. Courts have not yet weighed in on whether that also constitutes an impermissible idea ban.

Farther north, Ohio recently passed legislation that “Affirm[s] and declare[s] that faculty and staff shall allow and encourage students to reach their own conclusions about all controversial beliefs or policies and shall not seek to indoctrinate any social, political, or religious point of view.” As Heterodox Academy’s policy team noted in their analysis of the legislation, “[T]he vagueness of the term ‘indoctrination’ raises enforcement concerns. What is indoctrination? Are faculty supposed to refrain from honest expressions of their views? For example, if an economics professor passionately proclaims communism has failed, is he indoctrinating his students?” In effect, “This bill creates fear around teaching contentious ideas.”

And, at the federal level, the Trump administration has been using various levers — including Title VI, executive orders, and massive funding cuts — to try to keep ideas it considers wrong out of college classrooms, including at private universities. This is despite federal law prohibiting the federal government from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution.” All this is creating a sense of (self-)censorship and closed inquiry in and around classrooms. 

Legally speaking, do professors have the academic freedom to teach without government interference? It’s not so simple. Although there are decades of case law prohibiting government interference, recent court developments have put the question back in play. 

As preeminent First Amendment scholar Nadine Strossen explained in the March 2025 issue of inquisitive, the Supreme Court stated in 1967 that academic freedom in the classroom is “a special concern of the First Amendment,” but the question of academic freedom as a right is not a fully settled concept. 

The Supreme Court has been clear that the First Amendment “does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.” But despite the strong case law in support of academic freedom, there are those who are insistent on imposing government controls over what can be taught in college classrooms. 

Some have argued that because faculty at public institutions are government employees, the government may restrict what they teach. In Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), the Supreme Court held that when a public employee (including potentially a professor) speaks within the scope of their job responsibilities, that expression receives no First Amendment protection. Their speech is in effect “the government’s own speech.” Acknowledging that applying this rule to public colleges and universities could threaten academic freedom, however, the Garcetti Court indicated that it may have to decide in a future case whether an academic freedom exception to the general rule was necessary.

In the process of defending the Stop WOKE Act, Florida’s attorney argued that the Garcetti rule applied, claiming that “in the classroom the professor’s speech is the government’s speech,” and so a state can “insist that professors not…espouse…viewpoints that are contrary to the state’s.” 

Indiana’s Attorney General has used the same argument to defend 2024 legislation seeking to impose the state’s preferred ideas in the classroom: “The curriculum used in state universities and instruction offered by state employees” is “state speech,” the attorney general’s office argued in a legal filing, and professors “have no right to control how the State speaks.”

The results for freedom of inquiry in the college classroom should a Garcetti line of reasoning be upheld would be devastating. In his 2024 book, You Can’t Teach That: The Battle Over University Classrooms, Yale law professor Keith Whittington argues persuasively that “academic speech should be understood to be an exception to the Garcetti framework,” because we should “understand that the particular kind of speech that professors are employed to engage in as part of their job responsibilities is speech that is of ‘special concern for the First Amendment’.”

Whittington explains, “By engaging in speech as a professor, these particular government employees are engaging in speech that is sheltered by the First Amendment” because professors are “differently situated…from a First Amendment perspective” than other government employees. 

Despite the strong case law in support of academic freedom, there are those who are insistent on imposing government controls over what can be taught in college classrooms.

Politicians’ attempts to censor professors’ classroom speech are especially problematic, Whittington argues, because “the attempt to suppress them is not motivated by…ordinary workplace concerns that universities operate efficiently but rather by broad political motivations.” In his view, “The desire to censor such ideas on campus is the same as the desire to censor such ideas in the public sphere more broadly.”

When professors step into the classroom, Whittington notes, they are speaking as experts in their fields in the service of educating students — a special kind of service. Thus, their speech is constitutionally protected even if — indeed, especially when — it disagrees with the views of politicians, the public, students, or other scholars.

Whittington and others have made good arguments that classrooms and the speech within them count as important exceptions, culturally and legally. But it’s important to note that that special status is in part predicated on us, as educators, taking our duties seriously. Our exceptional status within the public sphere is granted on the assumption that we are speaking with the pure intention of educating students on the topics of our classes with the expertise that our years of study and scholarship have endowed. 

This means that we must speak with care to avoid abusing our exceptional powers as educators. We cannot (and should not) use our classrooms to pervasively speak on matters irrelevant to the course. We cannot (and should not) use our classrooms to teach our subject matter incompetently. We must (and should) take our responsibilities as educators profoundly seriously. As the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has recognized, “there are no rights without corresponding duties.” 

Misuse of the power of the classroom — including by professors using their positions for activism instead of scholarship — has opened higher education to existential threats. We should fight vigorously against government bans on ideas in our classrooms while also recognizing the urgent need to take our responsibility as educators far more seriously. It’s beyond time to professionalize our roles as educators with the same rigor we have as scholars. We must actually do our jobs as educators to restore public trust.

If we do not wield our power in the classroom with careful intention, it might soon be wielded instead by whatever party is in power.