Uses and Abuses on Campus of the Freedom of Information Act

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the federal Freedom of Information Act. FOIA, and its statewide versions, have brought a revolution of transparency to American governments, allowing journalists—and anyone else—an open window to its secretive workings. But FOIA is facing a crisis of concealment. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press laments how government agencies routinely ignore, delay and omit legally required responses to FOIA requests. The backlog of unanswered FOIA requests has reached epic proportions under Donald Trump, who demands secrecy and fired many employees responsible for fulfilling FOIA.

Public colleges often use the same tactics to violate the spirit and letter of FOIA laws. For example, Boise State University has refused the request from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to reveal which state legislator fabricated a hoax about conservative students being victimized—a hoax that led to 55 classes with 1,300 students being suspended for more than a week, a ban on classroom discussions in those classes, an expensive investigation and retaliatory budget cuts.

But in academia, FOIA is often abused in a different way. In June, an extremely troubling report appeared in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal attacking a project of the American Association of University Professors—the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and its director, Isaac Kamola—that quickly spread among outraged right-wingers on the internet. (Full disclosure: I applied this year to be a CDAP fellow, but I was rejected.)

An exposé by Manhattan Institute Director of Higher Education John Sailer denounced Kamola for criticizing campus “civics centers” that have been established in many states by Republican legislators aimed at attacking leftists.

But what was troubling to me about the report wasn’t any of Kamola’s allegedly offensive words criticizing right-wing “civics centers.” No, what’s troubling here are the techniques used by Sailer to spy on the AAUP. Sailer admits that he identified a professor at a public college who was a fellow with CDAF and then used FOIA to surveil CDAF’s internal emails and online meetings.

Kamola said absolutely nothing controversial, repressive or in the least bit newsworthy. It is, in fact, a defense of academic freedom when you criticize right-wing centers that are being imposed by politicians on colleges to engage in explicit political discrimination.

Sailer’s post on X about his spying has over 500,000 views, and the news sparked alarmingly false headlines across the right-wing internet. Modern Age editor Dan McCarthy’s widely reprinted syndicated column was titled, “University Professors Against Academic Freedom” and began, “Does academic freedom have a greater enemy than the American Association of University Professors?”

Reason magazine reported, “‘Unmasking, Naming, and Shaming’: This Academic Freedom Group Is Pushing for Campus Censorship.” But wait—isn’t unmasking, naming and shaming a form of free speech and not censorship? Otherwise, wouldn’t Reason magazine—by unmasking, naming and shaming the AAUP—be guilty itself of pushing for campus censorship? Where exactly is the censorship here?

The author, Reason intern Ari Shtein (who has recently been accused of sexual assault in New York City), deserves credit for admitting, “the legitimacy of civics centers—which are often created or backed by right–leaning state legislatures or conservative donors—may deserve questioning. When partisan politicians engage in the direct management of public institutions of higher education, bias and censorship are often the result.” Is Shtein also guilty of “campus censorship” for questioning the legitimacy of civics centers?

Shtein claimed that CDAF wasn’t “conducting an honest audit of the centers’ efficacy.” Certainly it’s not a disinterested audit. But what’s dishonest about wanting to criticize a trend you oppose? Kamola, a professor of political science at Trinity College, is the co-author of the 2021 book Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War, and wrote the AAUP report “Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023.”

In a recent piece for the CDAF Substack, fellow John Warner wrote a very negative but completely honest critique of “civics centers.” Warner noted about the faculty working with these centers, “Many are trying to operate in good faith.” If that’s the dishonest audit from CDAP, then how can anybody with an opinion about the culture wars be regarded as honest?

Most of these attacks on CDAP focus on one sentence spoken in a meeting by Kamola taken from the thousands of emails and recordings obtained: “I would love to strategically map who these fuckers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out.”

Doing opposition research on the people who are funding a political attack on universities seems like a reasonable thing to do, and disliking them for undermining shared governance and academic freedom is a completely understandable reaction.

“Knock them out” is a pretty good description of the motives behind Sailer’s hit piece against the AAUP, and I’m sure there are some conservatives who have privately referred to academics with mean words. Wanting to write hard-hitting analyses criticizing ideas you dislike isn’t a crime. It’s also not a demand for censorship. Kamola—even in these private moments—is explicit that he wants to discredit these right-wing centers, not censor anyone. Kamola wants people to turn to CDAP for information on these civics centers rather than uncritically believing their propaganda, as he says, “They come to us and find out who it is and they don’t listen to them.”

Sailer struggles to find anything noteworthy in his spying despite having access to a vast trove of emails and recordings. He concludes with a story that he apparently considers the most damning evidence: “In one meeting, CDAF Fellow John Warner praised the University of Pennsylvania for disciplining law professor Amy Wax over her controversial remarks. ‘What UPenn did is an example of the process of academic freedom.’”

Sailer concludes, “All of this might sound odd coming from an organization purportedly devoted to defending academic freedom.” Actually, it doesn’t sound odd at all, because Warner is correct. Although I disagree with the punishment of Amy Wax for her derogatory comments about her students, the process of following faculty recommendations (including refusing to fire Wax) is how colleges help protect academic freedom. By contrast, many left-wing professors have been suspended and fired by administrators who ignored due process and the recommendations of faculty committees.

The final line of Sailer’s hit piece is this: “With its deep-pocketed funders, the academic resistance is just getting started.” It’s a bit rich for the deep-pocketed and politically connected Manhattan Institute to complain about all the funding going to “academic resistance.” CDAP was funded for its first two years with a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. That grant, and massive growth in professors joining the AAUP to increase membership to over 55,000, helped push the AAUP’s budget in 2025 to over $13 million—which is less than half of the Manhattan Institute’s budget and a small fraction of the money given to FIRE and other groups by right-wing funders who have had a massive influence on the debate over campuses.

Conservative groups and Republican politicians led by the Manhattan Institute have seized control of universities, firing professors, deporting students, banning books, censoring classes, cutting research funds, prohibiting protests and launching the worst assault on academic freedom in the history of American higher education—and when one group pushes back to criticize their repression, the far right launches a spy operation to find one stray sentence, which they distort to whine about the injustice of being critiqued, and then repeat the complaint among their vast army of sympathetic media outlets.

The attack on CDAP is part of a campaign by right-wingers to use the government to spy on professors and private organizations. Soon, AI-powered FOIA requests will help conservative activists like Sailer surveil anything that any current or former public college student or professor has ever written in any email critical of Donald Trump or the government, as well as any embarrassing personal revelations.

It’s a worrisome trend of right-wing hacks using the power of the government to surveil private organizations by spying on people who happen to work for public colleges. Climate scientists have long been a target of FOIA abuse, but in this brave new world of AI, anyone can be surveilled.

The solution to this problem is not to ban or limit FOIA requests; in fact, we need to improve and expand FOIA laws to prevent abusive secrecy. Instead, we need to shame and condemn those like Sailer who abuse the FOIA system to spy on professors and other public employees. And we need to refuse to participate in the outrage machine designed to feed anger whenever someone is caught saying something impolite.

We also need to encourage campus reforms. All colleges, public and private, should adopt policies to strictly limit how their control over email systems can be used to spy on students, staff and faculty. All colleges should encourage and facilitate the use of personal email addresses by students and staff so that official emails are forwarded to them. Every professor and student should use a private email account to prevent this kind of ideological spying.

Professors will still be obligated to turn over emails on personal accounts related to their official work. And administrators at public colleges must still have their public work made transparent. But the accidental power of colleges over campus email systems should not be abused to spy on the private activities and thoughts of academics.