A letter to Vice Provost Lewis, Professor Leo and members of the FCC, September 4, 2025.
The following is an email sent to Vice Provost Lewis, Professor Leo and members of the FCC.
September 4, 2025
Dear Vice Provost Lewis, Professor Leo and members of the FCC
CC: members of Academic Freedom & Tenure Committee, The Minnesota Daily, The Minnesota Star Tribune
We write to express our deep concern about the recently announced September 18th event entitled A Campus for All, co-sponsored by the FCC and Vice Provost Lewis’s office.
The event is to feature three sessions, each led by PEN America, on “campus free speech, academic freedom and the current challenges to higher education.” Given recent, painful, and well-publicized violations of academic freedom on our campus, this event is poised to do real damage to the already fraught relationship between the administration and the faculty, as well as our wider campus community, at the University of Minnesota.
This event could have served as a key opportunity for robust participation and a range of viewpoints from both campus stakeholders and external experts. And yet, contrary to the counsel of the Faculty Consultative Committee in meetings dating back as far as last December, no one from our campus is included as a presenter, and only one organization with little connection to our campus and a tarnished reputation on the issues at hand is involved. This top-down approach is ill advised and will be, as the FCC foresaw, ineffective and divisive. We note that, in its Nov 22, 2024 meeting, the Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure declined to participate in discussions about this event, given that the administration has not addressed its own specific violations of academic freedom.
We urge Vice Provost Lewis to delay and reconceive the event so that it can fulfill its stated goals of expanding space for faculty discussion for this crucial topic at this critical moment. Further, we reiterate our previous calls for the administration to take real action to address and remedy violations of academic freedom on our campus, so that any such fora sponsored by the administration can be viewed as being organized in good faith.
The UMN community continues to reckon with infringements on academic freedom that include Interim President Jeffrey Ettinger’s egregious and unprecedented interference in faculty hiring and the banning of collective speech by the Board of Regents, which resulted in the Saturday night removal of unit statements on issues including Ukraine, Palestine, and Leonard Peltier, as well as the continued chilling of academic speech on campus. The Provost’s Office has been directly involved in these various infringements. It would be wise therefore for the administration to ensure space for the campus community to engage in the organization of any event designed to discuss academic freedom.
Faculty experts on our campus are plentiful and varied, but it seems they were not consulted. It is puzzling, for example, that such an event would be planned without the advice of Professor Jane Kirtley, a globally recognized authority on freedom of speech who served for 14 years as Executive Director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Professor Charlotte Garden and others who regularly teach courses on First Amendment law, or UMN’s Human Rights and Creative Writing programs. Not only does that lack of consultation deprive the event of important knowledge, it also reinforces the misconception that faculty expertise is not relevant to real world issues, even those on campus.
In addition to overlooking campus experts, Vice Provost Lewis seems to have ignored serious concerns raised by shared governance officers over the lack of diversity in perspectives in an event developed and delivered only by PEN America. At the December 19, 2024 FCC meeting, FCC chair Jennifer Goodnough argued that ”a well-constructed panel with a mix of experts, including organizations like FIRE and AAUP, could balance perspectives without creating unnecessary controversy.” Others suggested additional participants and “stressed the need for constructive, balanced dialogue to avoid sensationalism or conflict.” “Overall,” FCC minutes conclude, “participants agreed on the potential value of the symposium but expressed concerns about its framing, historical context, and ability to engage the broader faculty community effectively.” Yet the FCC’s participation was reduced to deciding at its May 22, 2025 meeting whether or not to co-sponsor the event more or less as it was originally conceived—a final version determined entirely by the Vice Provost’s office and listing only PEN staff as speakers. Why was PEN chosen? Why were campus stakeholders sidelined, and the input of key faculty members either not solicited or ignored? We find it disturbing and inexplicable that none of the FCC’s initial concerns seem to have influenced the final shape of the forum. As scholars, we both present and seek expertise as widely as possible. Our campus community cannot be merely the audience for a single organization, let alone PEN America.
Our objections to PEN in this context are two-fold: first, its primary focus is not academic freedom, but freedom of expression. These are distinct concepts. Academic freedom is, however, the bailiwick of other organizations, including some mentioned in Goodnough’s remarks. Second, while PEN has a strong past record as a defender of free speech, it has been at the center of serious controversy in recent years over its response to the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s targeting of Palestinian writers and journalists. Given this situation, it is entirely inappropriate for PEN to lead an event on our campus, where academic freedom regarding Palestine and Israel is at the heart of the concern about the administration’s interference in hiring and the banning of collective speech. While other aspects of the process of organizing this event are evident from available institutional minutes, it is not at all clear why Vice Provost Lewis’s office whittled the list of sponsors down to one, and one doubly unsuited to sole leadership of the forum.
In the wake of the Faculty Senate’s no confidence votes in the administration following the unhiring of Raz Segal, this event reads not as an innocent mistake but as an intentional flouting of principles of common sense and decency. Planning such an event without consultation cannot rebuild trust; planning such an event without directly addressing the violations that prompted it cannot move our university forward.
We urge you to reconsider, and to respond to our call for both administrative accountability and campus inclusiveness on issues of academic freedom at the University of Minnesota. We welcome an opportunity to meet and discuss not only how this forum might be reorganized with participation from faculty experts, but also what substantive steps the administration must take for such a forum to be understood as legitimate.
Sincerely,
The Executive Committee of the AAUP-UMTC:
William P. Jones, President
Heather E. Holcombe, Vice President
Gopalan Nadathur, Secretary
Laura Kane McElfresh, Treasurer
Ruth Shaw, Member-at-large
Sushma Reddy, Member-at-large
V.V. Ganeshananthan, Member-at-large
September 4, 2025
Dear Vice Provost Lewis, Professor Leo and members of the FCC
CC: members of Academic Freedom & Tenure Committee, The Minnesota Daily, The Minnesota Star Tribune
We write to express our deep concern about the recently announced September 18th event entitled A Campus for All, co-sponsored by the FCC and Vice Provost Lewis’s office.
The event is to feature three sessions, each led by PEN America, on “campus free speech, academic freedom and the current challenges to higher education.” Given recent, painful, and well-publicized violations of academic freedom on our campus, this event is poised to do real damage to the already fraught relationship between the administration and the faculty, as well as our wider campus community, at the University of Minnesota.
This event could have served as a key opportunity for robust participation and a range of viewpoints from both campus stakeholders and external experts. And yet, contrary to the counsel of the Faculty Consultative Committee in meetings dating back as far as last December, no one from our campus is included as a presenter, and only one organization with little connection to our campus and a tarnished reputation on the issues at hand is involved. This top-down approach is ill advised and will be, as the FCC foresaw, ineffective and divisive. We note that, in its Nov 22, 2024 meeting, the Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure declined to participate in discussions about this event, given that the administration has not addressed its own specific violations of academic freedom.
We urge Vice Provost Lewis to delay and reconceive the event so that it can fulfill its stated goals of expanding space for faculty discussion for this crucial topic at this critical moment. Further, we reiterate our previous calls for the administration to take real action to address and remedy violations of academic freedom on our campus, so that any such fora sponsored by the administration can be viewed as being organized in good faith.
The UMN community continues to reckon with infringements on academic freedom that include Interim President Jeffrey Ettinger’s egregious and unprecedented interference in faculty hiring and the banning of collective speech by the Board of Regents, which resulted in the Saturday night removal of unit statements on issues including Ukraine, Palestine, and Leonard Peltier, as well as the continued chilling of academic speech on campus. The Provost’s Office has been directly involved in these various infringements. It would be wise therefore for the administration to ensure space for the campus community to engage in the organization of any event designed to discuss academic freedom.
Faculty experts on our campus are plentiful and varied, but it seems they were not consulted. It is puzzling, for example, that such an event would be planned without the advice of Professor Jane Kirtley, a globally recognized authority on freedom of speech who served for 14 years as Executive Director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Professor Charlotte Garden and others who regularly teach courses on First Amendment law, or UMN’s Human Rights and Creative Writing programs. Not only does that lack of consultation deprive the event of important knowledge, it also reinforces the misconception that faculty expertise is not relevant to real world issues, even those on campus.
In addition to overlooking campus experts, Vice Provost Lewis seems to have ignored serious concerns raised by shared governance officers over the lack of diversity in perspectives in an event developed and delivered only by PEN America. At the December 19, 2024 FCC meeting, FCC chair Jennifer Goodnough argued that ”a well-constructed panel with a mix of experts, including organizations like FIRE and AAUP, could balance perspectives without creating unnecessary controversy.” Others suggested additional participants and “stressed the need for constructive, balanced dialogue to avoid sensationalism or conflict.” “Overall,” FCC minutes conclude, “participants agreed on the potential value of the symposium but expressed concerns about its framing, historical context, and ability to engage the broader faculty community effectively.” Yet the FCC’s participation was reduced to deciding at its May 22, 2025 meeting whether or not to co-sponsor the event more or less as it was originally conceived—a final version determined entirely by the Vice Provost’s office and listing only PEN staff as speakers. Why was PEN chosen? Why were campus stakeholders sidelined, and the input of key faculty members either not solicited or ignored? We find it disturbing and inexplicable that none of the FCC’s initial concerns seem to have influenced the final shape of the forum. As scholars, we both present and seek expertise as widely as possible. Our campus community cannot be merely the audience for a single organization, let alone PEN America.
Our objections to PEN in this context are two-fold: first, its primary focus is not academic freedom, but freedom of expression. These are distinct concepts. Academic freedom is, however, the bailiwick of other organizations, including some mentioned in Goodnough’s remarks. Second, while PEN has a strong past record as a defender of free speech, it has been at the center of serious controversy in recent years over its response to the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s targeting of Palestinian writers and journalists. Given this situation, it is entirely inappropriate for PEN to lead an event on our campus, where academic freedom regarding Palestine and Israel is at the heart of the concern about the administration’s interference in hiring and the banning of collective speech. While other aspects of the process of organizing this event are evident from available institutional minutes, it is not at all clear why Vice Provost Lewis’s office whittled the list of sponsors down to one, and one doubly unsuited to sole leadership of the forum.
In the wake of the Faculty Senate’s no confidence votes in the administration following the unhiring of Raz Segal, this event reads not as an innocent mistake but as an intentional flouting of principles of common sense and decency. Planning such an event without consultation cannot rebuild trust; planning such an event without directly addressing the violations that prompted it cannot move our university forward.
We urge you to reconsider, and to respond to our call for both administrative accountability and campus inclusiveness on issues of academic freedom at the University of Minnesota. We welcome an opportunity to meet and discuss not only how this forum might be reorganized with participation from faculty experts, but also what substantive steps the administration must take for such a forum to be understood as legitimate.
Sincerely,
The Executive Committee of the AAUP-UMTC:
William P. Jones, President
Heather E. Holcombe, Vice President
Gopalan Nadathur, Secretary
Laura Kane McElfresh, Treasurer
Ruth Shaw, Member-at-large
Sushma Reddy, Member-at-large
V.V. Ganeshananthan, Member-at-large