How a Firing Turned Into a Fight for Academic Freedom

NEW YORK, N.Y.—By six o’clock on Monday, April 27, the City University of New York Graduate Center’s aptly named Skylight Room was humming with dozens of graduate students, professors and staff eager to hear from Tom Alter, a former Texas State University history professor who was fired in September after speaking at an online socialism conference. Some wore union swag. Several wore Palestinian keffiyehs. Others sported gray T-shirts with the words “Reinstate the CUNY fired four” splashed across the front—a reference to the four adjunct professors at Brooklyn College who were let go in June, allegedly for their pro-Palestinian activism.

What started out as an impromptu effort to support Alter has turned into a coordinated movement to protect academic freedom on college campuses and defend anyone unfairly punished for their political views. The CUNY gathering marked the third-to-last stop on Alter’s 2026 Defend Free Speech Tour, designed to be part speaking events and part community organizing meetings. Each chair held a stack of fliers encouraging attendees to sign petitions, send letters to administrators and get involved with their union—in this case, PSC-CUNY, which was one of the event’s 13 sponsors.

Alter had been on the road for nearly three months, telling the story of how he was abruptly fired by Texas State. The short version: A self-described “fascist” YouTuber infiltrated an online socialism conference where Alter gave a talk, spliced recorded clips together and circulated the footage online, where it got the attention of Republican politicians in Texas. Alter, who was tenured and attended the conference in a personal capacity, learned he was fired via a Facebook post from Texas State president Kelly Damphousse, who accused him of “inciting violence.” Damphousse was referring to the now-viral moment during Alter’s talk, about the organizing tactics of anarchist groups, when he said, “Without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven mad organization in the history of the world—that of the U.S. government?”

As soon as he was let go, Alter went public with his fight for reinstatement, citing academic freedom, and thus the Committee to Defend Tom Alter was born. It’s a nebulous group that includes whoever chooses to be a part of it for however long they want to be involved. Some people have joined to help plan speaking tour stops, while others are part of an advisory board and “chime in occasionally with advice,” Alter said. A core group of five people work on his reinstatement case weekly, if not daily, he said.

Throughout Alter’s tour, he has traveled to college campuses, bookstores, bars and cafes to talk about political attacks on academic freedom and help faculty, staff and graduate students organize within their own communities. Finally taking a breather at home in San Marcos last week, he called it “incredibly successful” in a phone interview with Inside Higher Ed.

“I can honestly say that every single event was fantastic. It really brought together a coalition of students and faculty and community members and … helped build faculty unions and student organizations on the campuses that we went to,” he said.

From New Jersey to California …

The tour was a “patchwork,” Alter said. After a one-off event at Rutgers University in November, invitations to speak flooded in.

“Once people were like, ‘Oh wait, Tom’s traveling and willing to speak at places,’ it just kind of snowballed from there,” he said. “I remember when I was still in California [in February], the whole thing wasn’t together yet. The Connecticut [stop] was still coming into being, and the details of Chicago were still being worked on. And so it just kept extending, extending, extending. We were able to turn this thing, which would have been a few speaking events here and there, into a full-blown three-month national tour.”

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Bill Mullen

Early stops included several campuses and bookstores in California. At a Feb. 12 event at San Francisco State University, Alter was joined by Sang Hea Kil, a tenured full professor who was fired from San Diego State University after participating in pro-Palestinian protests. At a pair of Los Angeles events, John Caravello, a philosophy lecturer at California State University Channel Islands, joined Alter. At the time, Caravello was facing up to 20 years in prison for allegedly assaulting a federal officer by throwing a tear-gas canister back at Border Patrol officers who had deployed it to disperse protestors. He was acquitted last month.

Caravello met Alter through a fellow California Faculty Association union member, he said.

“I had been putting my head down a bit early on for legal and safety reasons, but I was always aware that there were these two almost competing ideas about how to fight back against … political prosecution,” Caravello said. “One of those was to put your head down, be defensive, and the other was to be careful, but to be a little bit more public.”

His union colleague helped coordinate two L.A. events with Alter—a talk about their experiences at the independent bookstore Midnight Books and one on academic freedom at California State University, Los Angeles. Now that his case has come to a close, Caravello said he thinks he did the right thing by fighting publicly.

“Looking back, I do think maybe I could have started earlier and still not put myself in any sort of legal trouble. I was worried early on, especially, that the state would come down harder on me if I started being public,” he said. “But I couldn’t work from a place of fear … I just felt like I needed to express myself [publicly] or I was going to go crazy.”

Caravello is now helping develop a defense committee akin to Alter’s—a cross-union council, he called it, that would help faculty who are similarly punished for political acts or who have their academic freedom threatened. It will be “labor-centric,” he said, and could support all members of the working class, not just those in unions or in higher education.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | John Caravello

“I’m glad I was part of making the link between the academic world—people losing their academic jobs for speaking out through political persecution—to the defense of our immigrant neighbors,” Caravello said. “It’s the hot political issue right now that so many organizers are putting their bodies on the line for.”

 … and Texas in Between

The tour brought Alter back to his home state of Texas several times over the past three months. On April 22, he planned to speak at the University of Texas at Austin, but officials canceled the event hours before it was scheduled to begin due to security concerns, Alter said. He considers the concerns a weak excuse for pulling the plug on his event; he said university officials had “shut down half the campus” a week before for an event featuring Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The Texas State Employees Union, which sponsored the Austin talk, pivoted and brought the event to a women’s sports bar across the street from campus, where the UT Austin American Association of University Professors chapter regularly meets.

“Word seemed to have gotten out enough, because we had a good crowd on the back patio,” Alter said. He called the abrupt cancellation part of a “far-right hostile takeover of university spaces” and pointed to what he thinks is another recent example: UT Austin officials cited insufficient safety planning when it told Austin’s NPR station, KUT, that it must move much of the programming for its KUT festival off campus just days before the event was scheduled to begin.

Alter also visited his former campus in San Marcos to attend a rally in support of Idris Robinson, a fellow Texas State professor who was abruptly fired a year after giving an unaffiliated, off-campus talk about Israeli-Palestinian relations. The rally was held in the Texas State campus “free speech zone” near the Fighting Stallions statue in the quad. Alter said he was sitting at the rally with a sign promoting free speech when a university administrator approached him.

“She said that there’s a university policy … that only faculty, staff and students can protest on campus. Not outside community members or people not directly affiliated with the university, even though this is a public university,” Alter said. After a brief back-and-forth about the policy and constitutional rights, the administrator threatened to call campus police.

Alter didn’t want to be arrested, he said. “We came to an agreement … that I could stay as long as I wasn’t holding a sign.”

Since then, Alter has learned that another Texas State faculty member—physics professor Saeed Moshfegh—was told in April that his contract would not be renewed for the fall. While the department chair did not give him a reason for the nonrenewal, Moshfegh told The University Star that he suspects it’s because of an earlier dispute with administrators over signs he posted on his office door that described it as a “safe space for immigrants.”

“It’s one of those very clear political things,” Alter said. “Because now the three main professors at Texas State who advocated for Palestine and against the genocide have now been fired.”

More Stops to Come

The visit to CUNY Graduate Center was one of the last stops on Alter’s tour. There, he was joined by Noelle Mapes, one of the aforementioned CUNY fired four who has since been reinstated, along with two others. The last one remains “blacklisted” from teaching at any CUNY school, Mapes said—they call her the “fired fourth.” At the event, Mapes shared her own story and advocated for the fired fourth—who has chosen to remain anonymous—to be reinstated.

“The whole time we’ve been fighting, the goal has been … to show the administration that if they come for four of us, they face all of us. And while it might not be all of us, it’s a way bigger number than just four, and it’s way more titles than just adjuncts,” Mapes said. “We always said that—even if we didn’t get our jobs back—if our chapter was stronger, if our collective was stronger, if we came out ready to fight the next fight a little bit better together, then that would be worth it.”

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | H. Hümâ Yardım

Though he’s returned home, Alter is not done fighting. His lawsuit against Texas State is ongoing, and he hopes to be in court by next spring. In the meantime, a new tour leg is in the works, with likely stops in Michigan and Indiana, where Alter grew up. It will be more strategic, he said, since he and his supporters have more time to plan.

The first leg ended Friday with a rain-soaked May Day rally back in Alter’s hometown of San Marcos. About 150 people packed into the local Irish pub Sean Patrick’s, which waived the $100 space reservation fee in solidarity, Alter said. Moshfegh was there, as was Robinson.

“For San Marcos, it was a big-sized crowd. And we had Erin Zwiener, a Democratic state representative, and Amanda Rodriguez, a city council member here, speak,” Alter said. “It was really powerful and people felt really energized. I don’t know when a May Day event like that has happened in San Marcos, if ever.”