Keystone Concepts in Teaching: A Higher Education Podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning

S3 E23: Exploring Free Speech and Academic Freedom in Teaching

• Stearns Center • Season 3 • Episode 23

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Zach Greenberg, from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), joins your host, Dr. Rachel Yoho, as the first guest from outside of the university to have an exploratory and academic talk about the timely topics of free speech and academic freedom. Please note that this episode was planned in June 2025 and recorded in August 2025. This is an academic exploration of a topic, not a set of directives, as are all podcast episodes. 

Resources: The FIRE Org: https://www.thefire.org FIRE’s Free Speech page:  https://www.thefire.org/defending-your-rights/free-speech FIRE’s Academic Freedom page:  https://www.thefire.org/defending-your-rights/academic-freedom FIRE’s Research & Learn page:  https://www.thefire.org/research-learn  

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Rachel:

Hello and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast. I'm your host Rachel Yoho, and I'm very excited to be joined by Zach Greenberg from the FIRE institution, so the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, for this episode. This episode I anticipate is probably one of our first in many different speakers on the topic of free speech and academic freedom, as it's such an important and pressing issue with so many different takes and different aspects on it. Thank you so much, Zach, for joining us. Would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience here?

Zach:

Sure, Rachel. Thank you so much for having me. I am Zach Greenberg. I am a First Amendment attorney at FIRE. We are a nonpartisan nonprofit that defends free speech nationwide with a particular focus on college campuses. At FIRE, my department, our Campus Rights Advocacy Team, defends professors, students, and student groups facing free speech issues at public and private universities across America. I grew up on Long Island, and I went to SUNY Bingington for undergrad and Syracuse Law, and I've been in Philadelphia ever since. I graduated in 2016 and it's been a pretty amazing nine years at FIRE, so I'm really excited to be here and talk with you today.

Rachel:

Yeah. That's great. Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for being our very first non-Mason speaker on the podcast or guest, if you will. So thank you so much. So as we get started today, I'd like us to do a little bit of maybe just foundational conversation. You know, we're often hearing about terms, especially, in the news right now, about like academic freedom or free speech, and also in the context, not just of universities, but also of teaching and learning. So, can you start off our conversation today with your thoughts on what these terms might mean to our listeners considering that would be mostly people on campuses full-time or adjunct faculty?

Zach:

Yeah, sure. I can start with academic freedoms, talking about faculty members here. Our definition of academic freedom is the general recognition that professors should be free to teach research and debate without censorship or institutional or outside interference. So this is really the core of a professor's job, responsibilities, teaching, lecturing, researching, discussing the issues within their expertise, commenting as experts in their community. And we feel this should remain free, not only for the rights of the professor individually, but also for the institution and for society at large. Having the freedom to delve into these sometimes controversial and obviously very important societal topics is really essential for the free functioning of a university and in our democracy. And so we see academic freedom as both an individual right of the professor, and also a institutional larger value for our society.

Rachel:

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And so to a faculty member who's mostly focused on, you know, a random Tuesday, getting their students to do the reading, what, how does this, in your view, maybe show up? You know, we can have these kind of theoretical concepts of yes, they're research, yes, they're teaching, but especially in the teaching, how do you see that as maybe a day-to-day practice? Or do you see it as a day-to-day type of thing?

Zach:

Yeah, I mean, academic freedom protects everybody equally. It's kind of like free speech. We'll have the same right to express ourselves on a college campus and in society at large. And in terms of how it affects regular faculty members, yeah, I mean, we believe that one of the goals of a liberal arts education is to get students to challenge their deepest ideas and their deepest biases, you know, expand their worldview, have a discussion about the most important topics facing our society. And that can involve some potentially uncomfortable pedagogy and some lecturing. As long as it's relevant to the subject matter. It's important that professors are free to introduce materials in their class that may make students uncomfortable and make them question their world views. And that's how they grow and educate themselves as human beings and as citizens of our democracy. So I feel like academic freedom might not affect professors who are teaching like physics or maybe hard sciences as much as it affects professors teaching philosophy or politics or law, or we know one of these hot button topics. But really all professors have the same right to lecture and to teach and debate without having their jobs threatened for expressing and discussing these academic and, you know, controversial materials.

Rachel:

Yeah, that's a great. And so when we're talking about this, having the activities, having the conversation be an academic debate is, or an academic exercise or whatever the activity might be, is very important. But I think here also we're talking about sort of that difference between learning and training. You know, we do some of both or some of each in different activities. You know, we might be trained on a certain software, but we're also learning about larger concepts and I think here we get into some of the nuance with some of that as well. And so with that, you know, we've covered a little bit on academic freedom. Is there anything you wanna expand on for free speech specifically for this type of audience?

Zach:

Yeah. Academic freedom, it, you know, really affects professors. It protects institutions as well from government interference, but, you know, we consider free speech as a larger societal value as well. You know, it's just trying to, the first amendment, that's kind of the legal background for free speech. The general recognition that people should be free to express themselves in any manner they see fit up and until their speech falls into one of the categories of unprotected speech, like truth threats, or harassment. And we can discuss that a little bit later. But yeah, I mean, at a university, especially one that's bound by the First Amendment that promises free speech, you know, we feel that the unfettered exchange of ideas is the most important thing the university can possibly promote. It's within the mission statement of the university. It is the value of higher education. And it's part of being in a free society that when students graduate and they go into, you know, greater society, they're gonna have the full array of First Amendment rights at their disposal. Learning how to use those in college is a really important factor.

Rachel:

Yeah, absolutely. And so right now, especially, you know, these topics are very, very timely, very discussed in broader society in the news on a nearly daily basis. So what do you see, from your view, your perspective as the points of concern for teaching that faculty might want to, or perhaps should be, considering right now?

Zach:

That's a really interesting question. Yeah. The points of a concern for teaching. It's a very difficult time to be a faculty member right now, I would say in 2025 for a variety of reasons. The first is that higher education is at a bit of a crossroads about whether they want to inculcate a set of societal values among students, such as, you know, recent concerns we see, or I guess I should say advocacy regarding DI initiatives and, you know, other societal viewpoints. The call between that, the classical liberal arts education of just kind of being a philosopher, expanding their worldview, questioning their assumptions, kind of just having this more abstract teaching notion. And then what you mentioned, which is building skills, right? Teaching students, for example, how to read a case, you know, how to fix a light bulb, how to do plumbing, how to just have these life skills you're gonna have, right? Things you should know before you graduate college. So it's tough to join a curriculum around all that, especially when it comes to, you know, the university's interests as well in its own curriculum and its own academic pursuits. So we encourage universities and professors to come to a shared understanding when it comes to what the actual goals are for teaching and lecturing. But we do hope that professors have enough freedom to really set their own criteria and their own syllabi when it comes to these classes.

Rachel:

Yeah, absolutely. And so with this, it kind of goes back to broadly higher ed's identity crisis a bit, but also really thinking about what do we want in a particular course, what do we want our students to learn? And sometimes that conversation can seem a bit transactional. Um when we're thinking about, you know, what do you do to earn a grade? What do you do to earn a degree? Something like that. And so, hopefully in this, staying a little bit away from the transactional view on learning or whatnot. But in general, I think we talked a little bit earlier on, you know, faculty are mostly trying to get students to do the readings, participate in the assignments, participate in class, maybe use or not use, you know, generative AI when they should or shouldn't be doing that. So especially for our faculty members who don't necessarily teach what we might put in quotes of contentious topic, should they still be engaged with this type of conversation or how might this affect them? I know you mentioned earlier like maybe less relevant in physics, but should they still be kind of keeping their, you know, finger on the pulse of the conversation, if you will?

Zach:

Yeah, absolutely. I strongly believe that even in the hard sciences, even in the topics where we don't really have the kind of academic freedom interest here of the free exchange of ideas, maybe just teaching math or physics for example. It's still important to teach students about basic civics and about free speech, about why it's important. Because regardless of what students do after they graduate, they're gonna be voters. They're gonna be part of our side, they're gonna be citizens, they're gonna have to have some basic understanding of how our democracy works. And we are seeing a lot of students that are graduating nowadays without the understanding. I was reading a report recently that only I think 60% of students or Americans can name the three branches of government. And you know, that really comes back to high school, comes back to grade school, comes back to college, where you know, they're not really getting the kind of education they need to make these decisions. And yeah, I just think it's really important that before a student graduates to have some sense of what it means to live in a country that has the First Amendment, free speech, that we live in a democracy the systems of government we have, and I do hope that comes earlier than college, but if not, college is a great time to start.

Rachel:

Yeah, so when we're thinking about this, we're looking at some of the similar to perhaps some of the ways we hope different areas are even doing things like teaching and helping students develop skills in teamwork or interactions with topics or how they communicate with others. So this really seems like it's quite along the same lines. And so do you see any current guideposts or recommendations, like for example, what to do or not to do right now? How to do the good work we want our students to get and, you know, meet the learning goals at the end of the semester. But we also don't wanna be, you know, in larger conversations that we don't need to be in perhaps.

Zach:

Yeah. Yeah. One thing that I recommend is to teach a culture of free speech. You don't have to be a First Amendment expert to understand the value in seeking out opposing views, not demonizing those with divergent opinions. Having the humility to understand that you might not always be right, and that there's always a chance to change your mind. There's no shame in that. And the best way to teach these values is to model it. I love to see classes that have debates, that have discussions where students play devil's advocacy, where students really get into the issues they're passionate about and discuss them with free speech values in mind. And I think that's best modeled by the professor in the syllabus with the assignments, with their grading. Because these values can apply in really any situation, and they're lifelong skills students are gonna have, whether they're in the workplace on a team, and of course in their philosophy and politics classes, in law school, definitely. But yeah, just having that kinda lifelong curiosity, that thirst for knowledge. I think it really starts with understanding free speech values and why they're important.

Rachel:

Absolutely, and it kind of makes it that academic exercise as well.

Zach:

Definitely.

Rachel:

I mean, I've done that in some of my classes, you know, when I'm teaching, is having that structured debate. I mean, for me it's the importance of the structure. We're not having a class conversation turn into a debate, but we're structuring a debate. We're having opening statements. We're having responses. And you know, for me, with the way I taught some of these activities is, you know, assigning the sides. So that way you're not really necessarily advocating for your actual, personally held beliefs, but we're making an academic activity. We're making an academic debate, and like you said, having that, you know, necessity of bringing in points and counterpoints or whatnot as well.

Zach:

Definitely, I love the, uh, Oxford style debate style for classes, where,'cause then you have the audience participating as well, right? To see how many minds you change through your advocacy, even though you may not care about the topic at all, just having a student persuade one another that they're right and the adversaries are wrong, can be a lot of fun. And I think it's a good skill to have, even in your own personal relationships, right? Being able to persuade your significant other, that you're right and that they're wrong or maybe vice versa, it's a useful skill. It might not get you, you know, many brownie points there, but still being able to hold your ground and make an argument, it's important.

Rachel:

Yeah. And being able to hear the other points and be able to make those, you know, with, whether it's research backed or political or general opinion based, and being able to clarify the differences. I think they're especially bringing those into classes because I think there are a lot of classes, a lot of topics and disciplines. You know, even ones that aren't necessarily in a philosophy or a law or one of those areas that might be more common fits for debates. I mean, I was teaching these types of debates in environmental health and so anytime we don't have that always one easy one right answer. There can be a lot of opportunity there for that to be a learning experience.

Zach:

And ifstudents don't learn that from college, where are they gonna learn it from? I mean, they're gonna look at the news, they see people using ad hominem attacks, emotional reasoning. They see people catastrophizing, using other pathological thinking. And like, if they see that as the best way to argue or best way to debate your opponents, you can see how that can spiral into, you know, not a very productive democracy going forward. So I think if you're gonna learn somewhere, you might as well learn it in college. You might as well model it and show'em how it's done.

Rachel:

Yeah, absolutely. And how we approach conflict resolution, how we approach different types of, you know, building bridges, building dialogue with that as well. And so with this, obviously one of our topics, one of our interest areas for this conversation today is really thinking about faculty, you know, what are their needs? Certainly our listeners, what are they interested in? And so what are some of your recommendations for faculty to protect themselves in a way that not only supports them as an individual, as a contributor to the institution, but also helps their students continue their learning?

Zach:

Yeah, I think the number one thing faculty members can do to protect themselves is to know their rights, to be forewarned, just forearmed. Just having an understanding of what academic freedom means, what university policies protect, is the number one thing they can do to identify rights violations when they occur and to address'em, not only for themselves, but also for their colleagues. So, yeah, I mean a lot of professors have an intuitive understanding that when administrators tell'em to change their lecture content when they censor their speech, say they can't have events. We see a lot of faculty members are protective of their syllabus, that when the administrators say You have to take this off your syllabus, they kind of have red flags go up in the back of their head saying, Hey, this seems wrong. I'm not sure why it's wrong, but I'm gonna maybe contact FIRE or, you know, reach out to an attorney and see if they can help us out. So yeah, just knowing that the professors teaching their research, how they talk, the way the debate is protected, will go a long way to protecting faculty rights. And of course, when those things are affected, when faculty are suspended or punished for what they say or how they teach, the best thing you can do is contact FIRE. You know, we're here for you. We're happy to discuss ways we can protect faculty members and how we can best help them.

Rachel:

Absolutely, and I think you know here especially, we're talking about a very strong difference between the, Hey, these things in our syllabus don't align with the programmatic goals, or something like that, versus, Hey, we don't wanna talk about these topics anymore for maybe a reason that isn't shared, you know, something like that. So yeah, these are great points, and especially as we're thinking about what does it mean for everyone in the space to feel included, to be part of the learning experience. I think that's a great point of faculty to be learning about some of these topics that maybe aren't at the front of their minds if they're not in that particular space. So as we start to wrap up any. Other things you'd like to share? Any resources that you might like to highlight from FIRE? Things that our faculty or listeners might find interesting.

Zach:

Yeah, there's two quick points, on FIRE's website, theFIRE.org, we do have some explainers and some examples of academic freedom, what it means, what it looks like. You can read stories of other professors who've been punished for exercising their academic freedom and what defending them looks like, and just to see if you have similar situations like that, you know, contact us. And yeah, just to plug our services one last time, FIRE does have our faculty legal defense fund, FLDF, where we will connect faculty members facing free speech violations with attorneys free of charge at public universities. And the goal is, as a first responder program, to get somebody in there who can help the faculty member right away understand their rights, defend themselves, and hopefully get their jobs back. We found that many faculty members who are targeted for their expression, often wind up suspended or terminated, just because of the controversial nature of what they're saying, especially when they're involved in Israel-Palestine or other, you know, hot button issues. And so, you know, we reach faculty members to get in touch with us if t hey feel they're facing censorship and it's a totally confidential, totally free process. The faculty member's the one that controls the whole part of it. And, you know, we're here to help'em in any way that we can. And you know, our goal is to get them teaching, get their jobs back, get them back in the classroom and doing what they do best because, you know, they're the experts of what they do. But we are the free speech, academic freedom people. We wanna help any way that we can.

Rachel:

Yeah. That's great. Well, thank you. So today I think we're really looking at our keystone concepts of exploring resources. You know, I think here obviously we're always in that space or often perhaps in that space of the faculty member is the expert. And obviously we should be experts in our own disciplines or in our own courses, but there are just like we were talking about earlier, there are times where the best thing we might say is, I don't know. And so when we say, I don't know, maybe these are also looking at things of, you know, what are some of the different conversations going on about higher education? What is academic freedom? What does free speech look like in our teaching? Where do I find resources? Whether those are fIRE resources, or sorry, Zach, maybe other resources as well, um, certainly out there, other things to read also. But yeah, I think that's really looking at our keystone concept today of, you know, how do we explore and expand our own knowledge on some of these things that might not always be at the front of our day-to-day.

Zach:

Absolutely. Yeah. It's about getting the help they need to defend their rights. And yeah, we want to ensure that they're able to do what they do best.

Rachel:

Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. I appreciate the work that you do and your giving your time to this podcast to talk with our faculty, our instructors or instructors broadly who might be listening. So thank you so much for your time.

Zach:

Thank you for having me. Best of luck with the rest of the semester.

Rachel:

Yeah. Thank you. Alright, and please catch our next episodes. We're posting every two weeks on Keystone Concepts in Teaching during the fall and spring semesters, and you can find us on most of your favorite podcast listening platforms. So thank you and I look forward to catching you in another episode.