Austin Sarat ScheerPost It looks like President Trump’s tirade about alleged vulnerabilities in the nation’s electoral system and the problem of non-citizen voting is a prelude to the chaos that…
Austin Sarat Writing in the wake of the 2016 presidential election and anticipating what American life would be like under Donald Trump, M. Gessen offered some rules for surviving autocracy.…
Austin Sarat On July 6, the New York Times published an editorial entitled “A Great University Undermines Its Mission.” I turned to it eagerly, expecting to see a stirring defense…
Austin Sarat Melat Kiros, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander and Claire Valdez, are hardly household names. But if President Trump and his MAGA allies have their way they will soon…
Austin D. Sarat Move over, Brad Raffensperger . He was the Georgia Secretary of State who, in January 2021, received a call from President Trump demanding that Raffensperger find more…
Austin D. Sarat ScheerPost The Supreme Court’s MAGA majority has done almost all it can to turn the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom into one of the Constitution’s most…
Austin Sarat ScheerPost My college, Amherst College, held its Commencement on Saturday, May 23. Like similar events across the country, our ceremony marks a new beginning for the graduates. But…
Austin Sarat ScheerPost As the school year winds down on college campuses across the country, it seems clear that 2025-26 was not a great time for free speech in the…
In recent years, diversity has become both a touchstone for judging colleges and universities and a lightning rod for critics. Colleges seek to attract students by advertising the demographic diversity…
Austin Sarat ScheerPost In late January, Professor Ian Bogost published a very flattering account of four premier liberal arts colleges: Amherst (where I teach), Davidson, Smith, and Vassar. As he…
By Austin Sarat for ScheerPost It is hardly news that America’s colleges and universities are in serious trouble. Declining public confidence, politically motivated attacks, and the withdrawal of government funding…
By Austin Sarat and Leah Schmalzbauer A survey of employers released on Jan. 13 brought bad news for college students entering the workforce in 2026. Among its worrisome results, “Small…
The prospect of not having what we have long taken for granted has rallied the troops, offered academics and judges an occasion to articulate academic freedom’s value in new ways,…
Restricting academic freedom is often thought of in terms of universities telling professors what they can and cannot do or teach. But that isn’t the only scenario.
By Austin Sarat / The Conversation In January 2023 two Democratic representatives, Judith Garcia and Carlos Gonzalez, proposed a bill that would offer prisoners in Massachusetts a new way to…
