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Teaching with Vigilance and Care: Academic Freedom and Responsibility in Precarious Times

On the ambivalence of vigilance in higher education: sustaining the authority of universities’ public mission while resisting its distortions

Summary: This blog essay comments on the ambivalence of vigilance in higher education, distinguishing it from surveillance and considering how it is enacted in teaching. Drawing on historical perspectives and concrete classroom practices, it frames vigilance as a pedagogical orientation of care, accountability, and responsiveness.

As the academic year begins in American universities, vigilance has become an acute factor in classrooms, as campuses have once again become a contested battleground regarding the past, present, and future of the national identity of the United States. Across K–12 through higher education, schooling has long been a site of contention: From resistance to integration consequent to the civil rights movement’s effort to make schools accessible to the descendants of enslaved Africans, to opposition against busing that peaked in the 1970s, to recent legislative interventions in states such as Arizona, Tennessee, Idaho, and Iowa. 

An honest engagement with history is not possible without examining how social hierarchies and historical inequities shape collective life. Recent state laws, however, have narrowed the scope of such study in public education and libraries. Promoted as measures to “protect individual freedoms and prevent discrimination in the workplace and in public schools,” laws such as Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act narrow what can be taught about history and inequality, restricting open inquiry and training that examine how such inequities have been produced and sustained. Such measures undermine the civic trust that depends on the free exchange of ideas and a truthful reckoning with the past. They equate critical approaches to U.S. history with moral condemnation of superordinate groups in the present, they frame diversification initiatives as discrimination, and they label attention to systemic inequality as indoctrination. (A recent federal initiative, the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” offered to nine universities, would extend such oversight to higher education by tying funding to federally mandated changes in campus culture, hiring, admissions, and international student enrollment.)  

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It must be acknowledged that critical thinking is not morally neutral; it is grounded in commitments to (and valorization of) evidence, dialogue, and accountability. These are moral commitments of a different order than those that attempt to reduce inquiry to a single pre-ordained “Truth,” but they are moral commitments, nonetheless. Drawing on Karen Barad, we might emphasize that critical thinking is not only critique, but also a constructive practice—one that opens space for new possibilities of thought, relationality, and responsibility. By casting inquiry as moral condemnation, discrimination, or indoctrination, those state interventions in academia discourage precisely the kind of honest discussion that higher education is meant to foster. The climate those states cultivated has led to increased government scrutiny of higher education after student activism responding to international conflicts, including the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel and Israel’s counteroffensive. That has been a factor in the federal government’s attempts to cancel congressionally authorized funding for research on challenges such as cancer treatment and global warming. The resulting climate has required that faculty augment their usual care about teaching materials, classroom discourse, and pedagogical practices with special vigilance about external intrusions, as they carry out the educational missions of their institutions.

Amid such pressures, it is worth recalling the university’s role in relation to the nation-state. As John Aubrey Douglas notes in Neo-nationalism and Universities: Populists, Autocrats, and the Future of Higher Education, universities “have played a critical role in educating future civil servants and political and religious leaders of nations” (4). He points out that as access widened beyond elites, universities also became engines of social mobility, even though sometimes they reinforced ideas of racial and national superiority. Sometimes in postcolonial contexts they became spaces for recovering and advancing traditional knowledge and values. Thus, in manifold ways they built, and sometimes reconstructed, nations. Over time, universities shifted from primarily teaching institutions to centers of research, driving economic growth, political authority, and technological innovation—a trajectory shaped in the United States by the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant College Act and the adoption of the German research university model later in the nineteenth century. That process was dramatically accelerated by federal spending during World War II and the post-war period. Aubrey Douglas adds that they also operate as instruments of “soft power,” drawing students and faculty across borders: Britain’s colonial networks, the Soviet bloc, France’s ties with Africa, and the United States’ ability to attract international talent (including the “exodus of academic talent from Europe” before World War II). 

As reflected in the mission statements of most U.S. colleges and universities, the goal of a liberal arts education is to prepare students for civic life through the pursuit of knowledge and inquiry, cultivating critical thinking that enables them to address the challenges of a complex, interconnected, and socially diverse world. In humanities classrooms with which I am familiar—across both public and private universities in the U.S. (as well as in Europe, notably)—this goal is pursued through curricula that reflect the diversity of the nation’s current social and racial demography, including first-generation and working-class students, as well as historically underrepresented populations such as women and racial minorities. 

In my field, it has long been understood that studying literature and culture from beyond the Western canon alongside canonical works such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Milton expands students’ cultural and intellectual horizons. By encountering different traditions, students strengthen their capacity to think critically and responsibly, while also avoiding the reproduction of exclusions that have historically limited access to housing, education, wellbeing, and quality of life on the basis of politicized social differences. Such learning takes shape through multiple pedagogical practices—active and engaged reading, writing for diverse audiences, learning to engage with other cultures’ histories on their own terms, and collaborative hands-on projects for authentic audiences—through all of which students become more vigilant about how knowledge and the very categories we think with have material implications, shaping the ways the world is ordered and reproduced. While I focus here on the humanities, similar vigilance in other fields takes different forms—some more shaped by market imperatives or national agendas than by commitments to the civic good. Recognizing these contrasts underscores how unevenly the public mission of the university is pursued across disciplines, revealing the consequent ambivalence of vigilance: in some contexts it fosters care and accountability, while in others it aligns with market imperatives or state agendas that may compromise the civic good.

In the context of ongoing attacks on higher education and a national decline in public confidence and trust, the broader aims of a liberal education must be pursued with even more vigilance and care. But what does it mean to teach with vigilance and care in these times? A useful starting point is the distinction between surveillance and vigilance. Surveillance is top-down and state-driven, often deployed to curtail inquiry and constrain dissent. Vigilance, by contrast, I understand as attentiveness and responsibility in teaching, distinct from surveillance. It is horizontal and relational—an attentiveness practiced among peers that can be mobilized in different directions: it may reinforce authority, whether by aligning with state agendas or by upholding shared norms, or it may check abuses of authority that quash thinking.In the classroom, the ambivalence of vigilance is evident in how it can take the form of control—whether exercised through state agendas or even through well-intentioned practices of care—or in how it can open space for accountability and responsiveness.As noted earlier, vigilance is ambivalent: It can foster openness and responsibility, but it can also be used to enforce particular social orderings that reproduce exclusionary forms of social organization. This double potential sets the stage for the categories I’ll turn to next.

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Care

As faculty prepare their syllabi, many are acutely aware of how precarious their working conditions have become, a concern underscored by the American Association of University Professors’ ( AAUP) recent session, titled Exploring Academic Freedom Syllabus Resources (August 20, 2025). Although academic freedom is partly recognized as a right, both tenured and untenured faculty are increasingly exposed to pressures that may compromise its meaningful exercise—particularly considering recent legislation that seeks to alter or eliminate the tenure system in some states. According to data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, cited in the AAUP’s Academe Magazine, as of fall 2023, only about 32 percent of faculty members hold tenured or tenure-track appointments, while approximately 68–70 percent occupy contingent positions—including full-time non-tenure-track roles and part-time adjunct appointments. The erosion of tenure, the rise of contingent labor, and the managerial emphasis on student satisfaction surveys creates conditions under which politicized control over inquiry can take root with little resistance. While contingent faculty are protected by academic freedom in principle, limited job security, compensation, and institutional support often present obstacles to exercising that freedom fully. This context raises an urgent question: How can the mission of the liberal arts be carried out within each college or university? It is a question that merits faculty-wide discussion. 

At the classroom level, care is central to fulfillment of the liberal arts mission. By care I mean accountability and responsiveness in teaching, distinct from sentimentality, enacted through student-centered pedagogies that prepare students for civic life by strengthening critical, communicative, and intercultural capacities—skills essential for navigating complexity in a rapidly changing world—as well as vigilant readiness to use those skills. One example of care that was highlighted in the AAUP session mentioned earlier is an invitation for faculty to set aside time in the first week of class to discuss the concept of academic freedom—what it means and why it is important—with their students. Doing so, as noted in the resources on their site, can “set up classroom expectations that adhere to the principles of academic freedom,” understood as essential if universities are to fulfill their social functions: “to promote inquiry and advance the sum of human knowledge; to provide general instruction to the students; and to develop experts for various branches of the public service.” These aims, in turn, require freedom from the “private interests of those with power and influence.” Discussing the concept of academic freedom with students can also model a practice of care that is urgently needed in the broader cultural sphere. At a time when public discourse is polarized, accusatory, and increasingly harsh, the classroom can serve as a space where we commit to something else: the difficult and attentive work of speaking with one another, of listening without rushing to judgment, and of navigating disagreement with curiosity and respect. These are not peripheral skills—they are vital practices for sustaining intellectual community and democratic life. In this sense, care is not reducible to sentiment or accommodation; it is enacted through a sustained engagement with others in the shared effort to discern what we think, what we value, and how we might live together.

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Other forms of care I have observed among colleagues—and enacted in my own teaching—include practices such as collaborative annotation, which foregrounds not only that writing systems and the discourses that emerge from them are created and sustained by communities of readers and knowledge producers, but also that knowledge itself is always contested, shaped by power, and subject to interpretation. In recognizing this, students also come to see that the work of learning entails accountability and responsiveness—because wherever there is knowledge, there is also a power dynamic that must be negotiated with vigilance and care. I have also seen structured dialogue used successfully, such as debates based on role-play, in which students embody characters from literary works set in Latin American societies shaped by dictatorship. Another practice through which students can broaden their thinking is a learning practice called “Readers’ Theater” (as described by Richard Kern), in which students collaboratively select passages from a fictional work, adapt them into a script, and perform the scene as a group. The process concludes with a metacognitive discussion about their learning experience—focusing on how the act of reworking the text not only has deepened their engagement with the target language and culture, but also has made visible the interpretive choices involved in meaning-making. As with other practices grounded in care and responsiveness, Readers’ Theater invites students to inhabit diverse perspectives while reflecting on the dynamics of interpretation and expression. These practices bring to the fore divergent perspectives and help students imagine how they might navigate such historical complexity—within a learning environment committed to exploration rather than partisanship, in keeping with the AAUP’s understanding of academic freedom as “pursuing knowledge wherever it leads, free from intimidation and retaliation.”

What I have described are practices of care that are also forms of vigilance: they resist punitive and reactionary tendencies of national discourse and help sustain the intellectual community essential to higher education and civic life. Care, then, is inseparable from the commitments it entails—among them, accountability and responsiveness to others as learners and constructors of knowledge. 

It’s essential to note that any meaningful defense of academic freedom must also confront the labor conditions that undermine it. Defending academic freedom requires addressing the material precarity of those who teach. When most of the teaching is carried out by precarious workers whose insecurity limits their ability to engage students in open-ended inquiry, pedagogical care remains structurally constrained since the material conditions of teaching directly shape how freedom and care can be practiced, thereby broadening and intensifying the instructor’s requisite vigilance.

Accountability and Responsiveness

If care entails responsibility to others as learners and constructors of knowledge, then it also calls for self-vigilance—an inward attentiveness to how our own pedagogical choices may either foster or inhibit students’ ability to learn freely. The 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure reminds us that: “institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.” As this statement suggests, faculty are not without accountability. Peer review, though imperfect, has long functioned as a practice of scholarly care and vigilance, for the purpose of accountability to a community of knowledge producers. Shared governance likewise embodies a collective responsibility for institutional direction, however unevenly accessible it is across ranks.

This is a powerful reminder that academic freedom is not the freedom to act without any constraint at all, nor to impose our own political or ideological positions on our students. Rather, it is a form of trust—one that requires us to create the conditions under which inquiry remains open, dynamic, and inclusive.

Such inquiry can be unintentionally curtailed when reading selections, assignment prompts, or discussion structures are designed in ways that presume a shared ideological position. For instance, when a course includes only one political perspective or constructs assignments around assumptions of student agreement, it may limit the scope of critical thinking and discourage students from exploring alternate positions or contributing divergent experiences. Vigilance in this context requires cultivating openness to disagreement, designing assignments that invite positioning rather than compliance, and making space for complexity, uncertainty, ethical hesitation, and even uncertainty. Responsiveness, then, is not merely reactive—it is the active construction of a classroom ecology where students can take intellectual risks, explore nuance, feel uncertainty, and learn to live with difference.

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There is another, often overlooked, aspect of self-vigilance—one that speaks to the liberatory potential of academic freedom. If, as educators, we understand knowledge not as fixed or final but as always unfinished, then we must also remain vigilant about how our own conceptual frameworks may calcify over time. This kind of vigilance guards against presenting theories, models, or interpretive approaches as answers rather than as tools for thinking with and through complexity.

The classroom is not a space for reproducing certainty, but rather for pursuing provisional understanding. To teach responsibly is to model for students how concepts are not static doctrines but living instruments—useful, contingent, open to refinement or revision in light of new information, new histories, or new perspectives. The educator’s task is to facilitate engagements with ideas as living and provisional—tools to think with, not answers to absorb—so that students learn to assess their utility, their limits, and their implications in various contexts.

In this sense, vigilance and care are inseparable from accountability—not in the punitive or managerial sense, but as a sustained attentiveness to the material, ethical, and epistemic consequences of our pedagogical choices. It is the practice of continually asking: What forms of thought am I enabling or foreclosing? How am I orienting students in relation to knowledge? What possibilities am I creating for thinking otherwise? Such questions do not undermine academic freedom—they give it depth and integrity. They remind us that vigilance, when rooted in care for others and ourselves, and when informed by accountability and responsiveness, is not about control, but about actualizing freedom, both for ourselves and for those we teach.

Vigilance, then, is not only a reaction to crisis; it can be a pedagogical orientation rooted in care that is informed by accountability, openness, responsiveness, and ongoing self-awareness. It begins with practices that affirm the dignity and agency of students as learners, extending to how we design classrooms that invite multiple perspectives, accommodate complexity, and resist the foreclosure of meaning. It also requires responsiveness to the broader ethical and political conditions in which teaching takes place—conditions shaped by government surveillance, precarious labor, and the erosion of institutional trust. But perhaps most urgently, vigilance demands that we remain open to others while being attentive to the conceptual tools we offer, the assumptions we carry, and the frameworks we rely on. To teach with vigilance and care is to hold space for learning as a shared and unfinished endeavor—one in which freedom is not only protected but continually reimagined in relationship with others. 

I’ve written this piece as a reflection on what it means to teach with care and vigilance under current cultural and institutional pressures. I hope it contributes to ongoing conversations about how we in academia can uphold the shared principles of academic freedom, responsiveness, and inclusive learning in precarious times. Though written from the U.S., these reflections speak to wider debates about vigilance in higher education and the conditions for academic freedom—how attentiveness among peers can uphold shared norms while resisting their misuse.


Luna Nájera is a Senior Lector and Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. Her work engages environmental humanities, border studies, continental philosophy, Indigenous thought, and the teaching of language and culture. She teaches courses on language, literature, environmental humanities, and migration, with a commitment to collaborative learning and critical inquiry that centers care, openness, and student agency as foundations for engaged learning. Among her course offerings are Borders and Globalization in Hispanophone Cultures and Reading Environments: Nature, Culture, and Agency. She is working on a project titled Thinking, Caring, and Doing in Precarious Times: Authoritarian Circuits of Violence and Care in the Americas. The views expressed here are solely the author’s and do not reflect positions of Yale University.


Cite this article as: Luna Nájera, Teaching with Vigilance and Care: Academic Freedom and Responsibility in Precarious Times, in Vigilanzkulturen, 11.11.2025, https://vigilanz.hypotheses.org/?p=13151.



OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
lunanajera (11. November 2025). Teaching with Vigilance and Care: Academic Freedom and Responsibility in Precarious Times. Vigilanzkulturen. Abgerufen am 14. Februar 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/154lb


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Eine Antwort

  1. Thierry sagt:

    Thanks for engaging so thoughtfully with this topic. The difference between vigilance and surveillance in education really is an important one, especially right now. As we try to balance academic freedom with the realities of our current climate, it’s crucial to create spaces that encourage open inquiry and diverse perspectives—without letting external pressures shut those down. Your reflections add a lot to the ongoing conversation about how we can practice care, accountability, and responsiveness in our teaching, and not just protect academic freedom, but truly nurture it in our classrooms.

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