Honored to Join the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom as a 2026–2028 Fellow

Honored to Join the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom as a 2026–2028 Fellow

Friends:

I am delighted to share that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom has selected me as a fellow in its 2026–2028 cohort.

I am deeply honored by this opportunity, particularly at a moment when academic freedom, shared governance, tenure, institutional autonomy, and the freedom to teach and learn are under extraordinary pressure across the country—and certainly here in Texas.

The Center brings together scholars and advocates working not only to document attacks on higher education, but also to develop practical strategies for defending the university as a place of independent inquiry. The new cohort began its two-year term this summer with a strategic convening, and the fellows' projects address such urgent issues as political interference, governing-board power, immigration and academic freedom, accreditation, ideological centers, faculty governance, and attacks on scholarship concerning race. (AAUP)

This work feels especially urgent to me because the struggle before us is increasingly about more than any single law, prohibited concept, eliminated program, or censored course. It is about who gets to govern knowledge.

We are witnessing efforts to shift authority over curriculum, programs, faculty governance, accreditation, research, and even the purposes of higher education away from academic communities and toward legislatures, governing boards, political executives, and other external actors. The erosion of shared governance is central to this transformation because shared governance is one of the institutional safeguards that allows universities to remain genuine sites of inquiry rather than instruments of political power.

The AAUP has defended this principle for more than a century: higher education serves the common good precisely because the search for truth must retain a meaningful degree of independence from political, economic, and ideological coercion. The Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom was established to confront the escalating political and ideological attacks on precisely that independence. (AAUP)

I therefore see this fellowship not simply as an honor but as an opportunity—and a responsibility—to help imagine what comes next.

Defending higher education cannot consist only of opposing bad legislation after it is introduced or litigating infringements after they occur. We also need an affirmative architecture for academic freedom: stronger protections for shared governance, due process, institutional autonomy, teaching and research, and the right of universities to pursue knowledge without political interference.

I am tremendously grateful to the AAUP and the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom for the opportunity to undertake this work alongside such an extraordinary group of fellows.

There could scarcely be a more important time to do it.

-Angela Valenzuela

Read about the 2026–2028 CDAF fellows and their projects