March 18, 2025
Dear President Daniels and Provost Jayawardhana,
We write to you as dedicated members of the scholarly community at Johns Hopkins. At an unprecedented pace and on a scope unseen in U.S. history, federal executive actions undertaken since January 2025 are undermining the principle of academic freedom and institutional self-governance that forms the bedrock of research and teaching in our nation’s universities.
As the nation’s first research university, Johns Hopkins has played a central role in shaping the academic values that have made our country’s institutions of higher education among the world’s greatest. The principle of academic freedom integral to the democratic exchange of ideas and to scientific progress was laid out in 1915 by JHU Professor of Philosophy Arthur O. Lovejoy along with other charter members of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). One century later, our Board of Trustees reaffirmed the University’s commitment “to the steadfast protection of the right to academic freedom.” Its words offer unambiguous guidance in this time of crisis: “Without a full and vigorous protection of this principle,” the statement reads, “the university’s capacity to discharge its hallowed mission would be compromised.”
In the words of our 2015 statement, academic freedom affords “the broadest possible scope for unencumbered expression, investigation, analysis, and discourse.” It “protects the right to speak and create, to question and dissent, to participate in debate on and off campus, and to invite others to do the same, all without fear of restraint or penalty.”
We write now to affirm our collective responsibility to defend the right to intramural and extramural utterance, including the expression of political disagreements: a right aligned with U.S. First Amendment protections, which are now actively under attack. Targeting members or groups of our community for retribution, criminalization, or deportation based on ideological criteria that equate disagreement with discrimination, contravenes this core principle. To allow outside political powers to target and retaliate against JHU academic units engaged in the work of discovery and instruction, we believe, is likewise to betray our institution’s foundational values.
In the face of the present and future pressures by government authority, we believe that Johns Hopkins must maintain its historic commitment to central values of academic freedom and institutional self-governance. U.S. universities must not go further than any constitutionally legitimate order demands. Absent academic freedom, the societal benefits of higher education are degraded, our ability to educate and train students for the challenges of tomorrow is disrupted, and discourse based on hypothesis, evidence, and sound reasoning becomes impossible.
We ask that you support the Board of Trustees and faculty whom you represent, and our university leaders who follow your guidance, to each act with these principles in mind. Now is the time to make public your commitment to academic freedom, in concert with colleges and universities nationwide.
Respectfully,
The Executive Committee of the JHU AAUP Advocacy Chapter
Juliana Paré, President
Photini Sinnis, Vice-President
François Furstenberg, Secretary
Derek Schilling, Past President
cc: Laurent Heller, Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration
Stephen Gange, Executive Vice Provost and Professor
Lainie Rutkow, Executive Vice Provost and Professor