When we stand together, we can protect the future of higher education — and help build a better, freer, more just and inclusive democracy and world.
Stand Together for Higher Ed is a national movement of faculty and staff working to protect the freedom to teach, learn, and lead.
We organize across US colleges and universities to build collective momentum in support of academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and the public mission of higher education. United by a shared belief in the power of free inquiry and the importance of broad access to knowledge, we work to ensure that colleges and universities remain places where ideas can be explored, debated, and shared openly.
Stand Together for Higher Ed supports faculty and staff in organizing locally and nationally through:
Creating campus-based Stand Together Teams,
Building cross-institutional alliances to support research, teaching, and vulnerable campus communities,
And helping the public and policymakers understand how higher education contributes to strong communities and a healthy democracy.
We believe:
Higher education is a public good, essential to a free, inclusive, and forward-looking society.
Faculty and staff have the ability to lead, especially when institutions face political interference or public misunderstanding.
An organized, cross-campus response is necessary to preserve academic integrity, institutional independence, and the freedom to teach, think, and learn.
Our Mission
Telling the Story of Higher Ed
To many outside the academy, the inner workings of higher education can seem opaque. Its structures, values, and governance don’t always align with what people recognize from the private sector. What feels like common knowledge to faculty and staff may be unfamiliar to those working in policy, government, or other roles beyond higher education.
Part of our mission is to help bridge the gap. We believe higher education is a public good, something that benefits all of us. Its core purpose is not profit, but the advancement of knowledge, teaching, and research that improves lives and strengthens communities.
The U.S. has long been recognized for its world-class universities built on values like academic freedom and shared faculty governance. But those foundations are being weakened by political decisions made without a clear understanding of how higher education really works.
If we want smart policy and strong institutions, we need to tell the story of what make higher education unique, and why it is worth protecting. Without a clear understanding of higher education’s past and present, how can we make informed decisions about its future?
About Stand Together for Higher Ed
The Stand Together for Higher Ed movement began with a simple but urgent call: We must defend higher education as a public good — and we must do it together.
As political attacks on colleges and universities escalated in March 2025, a small group of faculty at UMass Amherst came together to sound the alarm with our Stand Together letter to the leadership of the 60 universities and colleges being targeted by the Department of Education. We saw that no single campus could stand alone against the forces working to undermine academic freedom, research, and open inquiry. We knew that silence would not protect us — only solidarity would.
At the same time, faculty from various universities and colleges formed the We Are Higher Ed collective, organizing a letter campaign to campus leaders, building community, and creating an online space for sharing critical news and movement information. Then faculty at Rutgers passed the first Mutual Academic Defense Compact resolution, providing a novel mechanism for coalition building across campuses.
From that first call to action, Stand Together for Higher Ed has become a national movement:
Building faculty coalitions across institutions, disciplines, and communities, through the creation of campus-level Stand Together for Higher Ed Teams,
Organizing for mutual defense and collective action,
Reaching out to, collaborating with, and learning from related organizations like We Are Higher Ed, the MADC Consortium, and the AAUP,
Affirming that education, democracy, the rule of law, and the common good are worth standing up for.