A recent survey from Yale University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) concluded that a “substantial portion” of their members believe that their ability to teach has deteriorated “significantly” because of “a deeply politicized higher education environment since January 2025.”
Almost half of the faculty surveyed self-censored themselves in various ways, according to the survey.
The AAUP surveyed 177 members of Yale’s faculty in this survey in March and April this year. AAUP, which is an independent organization and does not have access to every faculty member’s email, distributed the survey by sending out emails on various lists that include around 1,000 faculty members, according to Prof. Daniel Martinez HoSang. HoSang is the Director of Graduate Studies in the American Studies Department, where he also teaches. There are over 5,800 faculty members at Yale.
“We’re not making a claim about proportions,” HoSang said. “What we’re highlighting is that there’s a broad number of faculty who have significant, significant concerns about their ability to teach, research, do public-facing work without punishment or restraint.”
One-fifth of the respondents say they had been asked by an administrator to change the language related to their courses, research, or on their website, according to the survey.
Additionally, almost half of all the respondents said they were significantly concerned that the university might discipline them for “public engagement,” and 70% of the non-citizen respondents were concerned about being deported because of reasons related to their academic work.
There is also significant self-censorship occurring in the school. Around one-third of respondents said they avoided discussing “potentially controversial” topics in lectures, and one in five respondents said they disregarded scholarships based on controversial topics.
“The Trump administration has announced as its official policy its intention to target what it perceives as ideological bias, but that also includes work around gender that’s targeted grants related to public health, international health work with academic collaborators in other countries. So that’s been the official change of the US government, but I don’t think the pressure has just come from the Trump administration alone,” HoSang said. “We’ve seen universities and many, many other states eliminate programs, censure faculty, in some cases, fire faculty, and so I think that’s absolutely part of the climate that faculty are seeing.”
The full report states that debates over academic freedom have escalated in the last “three years.” Although this does not explicitly reference the most recent war between Israel and Hamas, this coincides with the wave of pro-Palestinian activism and encampments that started after October 7.
Yale is currently being investigated by the Department of Education for alleged discrimination against Jewish students that occurred at these protests. Two students claim that Yale looked the other way when pro-Palestinian protestors violated content-neutral rules and regulations that Jewish students and pro-Israel activists needed to abide by, and allowed Jewish students to be discriminated against at certain academic events and in public spaces by pro-Palestinian activists and protestors.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division issued a formal finding stating that the Yale School of Medicine violated the Title VI rights of white and Asian applicants in its admissions process.
Title VI protects students on the basis of shared ethnicity and ancestry.
After Pres. Donald Trump took office for his second term, and the Department of Education and the Justice Department began a campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming in education. There have also been funding cuts for, among other things, research into HIV/AIDS.
The AAUP survey only collected information about the “academic freedom” of faculty members, not any allegations of discriminatory practices at the university against students and applicants.
“Academic freedom is a collective right, held by a faculty and upheld by higher education institutions. The faculty must define the appropriate boundaries of academic knowledge, because we are the experts in what counts as disciplinary knowledge,” the report states. “Together they provide a foundation for equity across faculty ranks and help to ensure that all faculty can teach and research to the best of their ability regardless of political pressures.
A recent report from the Buckley Institute, which surveyed 1,666 faculty members, found that 82% of the surveyed faculty members were either registered Democrats or primarily supported Democratic candidates. Only 2% were Republicans. Additionally, more than half of the departments that granted undergraduate degrees—27 out of the 43—had no Republican faculty members.
HoSang says these metrics do not translate to biases in class. He said in his 20 years of teaching, he has never once discriminated against a student based on their viewpoint, and has never known a professor to do the same.
“There’s plenty of professions that have different kinds of partisan bias or partisan kind of imbalance, and if we’re talking about that, then why are we not also talking about, let’s say, the race and class composition in the faculty, or the kind of areas that are taught or represented,” HoSang said. “Just as an example, if you look at the Yale course catalog, there’s almost no classes about labor, labor unions, very few classes about poverty, about working people’s lives, very few classes about rural life, rural areas. Those are just not areas that are represented. Meanwhile, if you look at classes that are oriented towards investment, towards capital, towards the, you know, the financial sector, they number in the hundreds.”
Yale received a 2025 D- college free speech ranking from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an improvement from the F they received in 2024.
The AAUP is calling on Yale to “take concrete actions” to protect academic freedom for all of its faculty members, including non-tenured faculty, which is one of the groups that the AAUP found was the most afraid of facing retribution for their speech.
“If people feel like, well, this is just about a kind of ideological rebalancing of the University, that’s not the case,” HoSang said. “It’s a loss for everyone if faculty from any background feel like they can’t have open and frank discussions with students, and it’s also a chance for people who say they’ve long stood to defend free speech and free inquiry.”
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