SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
EDITORIAL POLICY
Volume 17: Academic Freedom as a Practice of Democracy
Edited by Karim Mattar, University of Colorado at Boulder
At a panel during the Coalition for Action in Higher Education’s April 2025 national protest, urban and cultural studies scholar Davarian Baldwin made a rousing call for courage in the face of political and material repression in US colleges and universities: “We are the power that we have been waiting for.” Responding to this call, the 2026 volume of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom seeks to showcase work of students, educators, and activists—and of unions, scholarly associations, and other governance bodies—in fighting back against repression. We invite original scholarly articles grounded in a renewed notion of academic freedom as not only an abstract value or principle to be defended but also a living practice—as historian Joan Scott, among others, has put it—of research, teaching, and public engagement that articulates a democratic higher education and a democratic society.
As a practice, academic freedom is embodied in the free, critical inquiry of students and scholars in their areas of expertise; in syllabi, curricula, and classrooms whose content is determined by experts rather than by administrators, boards of trustees, external special interest groups, or government agencies; and in the extramural speech and action of students and scholars, which are protected by the First Amendment and by AAUP principles. As recent court rulings have demonstrated, the practice of academic freedom unambiguously includes inquiry into, teaching about, and extramural speech and action pertaining to Palestine and other controversial topics. However, as experts on academic freedom have meticulously demonstrated, such practice is increasingly being delimited and circumscribed. National and international political discourses and federal investigations have pressured administrators—often all too willing to comply—to police protected speech and action on campuses, while the rise of neoliberal structures of governance at the expense of shared governance has created conditions of institutionalized disposability and precarity that further threaten the freedoms of academic workers. Under such conditions, the practice of academic freedom—resilient, defiant, and unwaveringly committed to the search for knowledge and the common good—itself becomes an instantiation of democracy over and against authoritarianism.
To defend and fight for academic freedom is to defend and fight for democracy. With the explicit objective of contributing to this struggle, the new volume seeks submissions on initiatives that have been pursued, strategies that have been deployed, coalitions that have been built, and work that remains to be done in the fight for academic freedom.
We will consider any eligible submission relevant to the journal’s core focus on academic freedom. Topics of special interest for the volume include but are not limited to
political education
public outreach
sanctuary campuses
mutual defense compacts and other forms of coalition-building
debt reveals
boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns
campus unionization
protests and other forms of mass mobilization
lawsuits
political lobbying
The fight for academic freedom continues. But the efforts that have already been undertaken by educators and organizers suggest the formation of a new community both within and beyond the academy that is dedicated to the core freedoms on which any acceptable notion of the American university must be built—the freedom to think and to dream, to teach and to learn, to speak and to act, and to dissent in the face of authoritarianism and genocide. The proposed volume aims to help cultivate this community and these freedoms.
Download a one-page version of the call for papers.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Electronic submissions of 2,000–5,000 words (including any notes and references) should be sent to [email protected] (preferably as a Microsoft Word file) by Monday, March 9, 2026, and must include an abstract of about 150 words and a short biographical note of one to two sentences about the author(s). Because of word-count limitations for the volume, shorter submissions might have a better chance of acceptance, and the editors may make acceptance of any article contingent on substantial edits or cuts.
At the time of submission, please complete the form at this link. We will consider only manuscripts for which submission forms have been completed.
Please read our editorial policy prior to submitting. We welcome submissions by faculty members, staff, graduate students, and independent scholars. Authors using pseudonyms must notify the journal at the time of submission, disclose their real names, and explain their reasons for wishing to keep their identities confidential. If you have any questions for the faculty editor about the call for papers or ideas for an article, you may contact Karim Mattar, but be sure to send submissions to [email protected] and complete the mandatory submission form.
While this is an academic journal with submissions subject to peer review, we welcome innovative and journalistic prose styles. The journal uses the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style and follows Chicago’s author-date system of citation. Authors should anticipate that, if an article is accepted for publication, it will need to be put into Chicago style. Read more about the Journal of Academic Freedom here.