I’m always a little surprised by how rarely debates about academic freedom pay attention to the actual work of academia. Sure, there are anecdotes featuring syllabi wars or lectures gone wrong (or wrongly prevented from going on at all). But those vignettes —used to illustrate and persuade—are always hurried along so that the author can get to their normative argument defending academic freedom or announcing, once again, its demise. The vignettes aren’t really there to make us focus on the “what” and “how” of academic labor.
Archana Sridhar’s recent article isn’t exactly about granular academic labor practices, either. I doubt she’d consider it a “labor” piece at all. But in very refreshing way, she focuses on academic work structures and patterns in ways that generate insights about what makes academic freedom possible.
Sridhar’s central argument is that universities are, should be thought of as, and should think of themselves as analogous to platforms like Google, Facebook, and X. Faculty, meanwhile, are analogous not to the employees of those platforms—they’re not Googlers—but to user-moderators. Or, as she states in the conclusion: “universities should be considered analogous to internet platforms: more passive or neutral hosts of content created and owned by individuals and groups who moderate their own content collectively.”
Sridhar admits that “[t]he analogy is not perfect.” And indeed, there is likely no end to the number of plausible counterarguments and counter-hypotheticals we might drum up. Sridhar highlights the fact that user-moderators are often “poorly paid employees in countries around the world, whose incentives are not to prioritize facts or truth, but rather to efficiently remove content that violates certain corporate policies and to promote other content that will attract views.” We might even start a few steps earlier: Platform companies are companies—and not of the B corp variety—defined above all by the profit motive. Or we might go a few steps further down the analytic line: Those user-moderators are not lengthily and expensively trained specialists in and around the content they are charged with moderating. There are a lot of “Yes, but…” possibilities when it comes to Sridhar’s analogy.1
But Sridhar’s analogy holds up better than expected. As higher ed scholars have been documenting with increasing urgency, most of the faculty doing the bulk of “content-moderation” work in American academia—the peer reviews and book reviews and committee work and such—are “poorly paid employees,” or even poorly paid independent contractors. And thanks to this precariousness, their “incentives are not [only] to prioritize facts or truth.”
Besides, the real value of Sridhar’s article is not its central analogy, but how it nudges us towards thinking about labor patterns and managerial patterns, oversight mechanisms, and other mundane, institutional, organizational dynamics. Such dynamics deserve at least as much attention as explaining why the university matters for democracy. For instance, Sridhar discusses the 2019 incident involving George Washington University (GWU) professor David Karpf and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, whom Karpf offended via a tweet comparing Stephens to bedbugs. Stephens replied to Karpf by email, cc’ing the GWU provost.
Sridhar alludes to this episode not to make the usual point that Karpf had a right to critique Stephens or why it matters that Stephens thought GWU could and should rein in Karpf. Rather, Sridhar highlights that GWU did not exercise—and was rightly glad to not exercise—managerial oversight over Karpf’s activities. Academics are in the business of pushing boundaries, thinking critically, and generating new knowledge—and teaching others to do likewise. None of these activities are easily translated or packaged for a non-specialist audience, let alone for an audience with ruffled feathers and a national readership. It was better for GWU to be able to stay out of it.
That point, though, is grounded in the “how” of academic labor more than the “why” of academic freedom. As I’ve similarly argued,2 we in the academy take it to be self-evident that, despite our W2s, we are more like free agents sharing a building than like employees sharing an employer. That arrangement is both under particular (but not unprecedented) stress right now and its extraordinariness needs an explanation. Sridhar encourages us to think through such issues.
- Deepa Das Acevedo, The War on Tenure 13 (2025).
- Deepa Das Acevedo, Extramural Absolutism, 6 J. Free Speech L. 321 (2025).
