The fight over who controls information is playing out in higher education’s most important battleground: the classroom. But what does this tense environment look like for the people teaching every day? These days, academic freedom, censorship, and ideology have become buzzwords, and many professors and university administrators feel pressure to abandon higher education’s founding principles in the face of the Trump administration’s anti-progressive demands.

At the Faculty Welcome Back Reception held by the Provost’s Office at Wollman Hall on Sept. 4, The New School Free Press asked eight professors what it means to teach in this moment. Between the Trump administration, the rise of artificial intelligence, and mounting doubts about academia’s future, they described both the pressures shaping higher education and the resilience they still find in the classroom. 

At an arts-centered university like The New School, our students are in a complex position. They’re here to pursue careers in visual, performing, or liberal arts, all of which are fields that can feel increasingly uncertain as they’re being rapidly reshaped by technological advancements like AI. But it also means we have a space full of innovative and visionary young people, and that’s reflected in how professors spoke about The New School’s student body.

“Some of those mainstream narratives around people in their early 20s struggling — it’s not really what I see in my classroom,” Misha Volf said, associate professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design. 

Many described their students as creative and ambitious in a way that is unique to this institution. “They come already interested in social justice and critical analysis and how we bring that out into the world,” Kristin Reynolds said, head of the food studies department at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. 

But as we’ve seen, one of the biggest challenges of modern classrooms is the seemingly inescapable presence of AI. Since ChatGPT’s launch in 2022, teachers have been scrambling to figure out the right balance of trust and caution with their students. Some have chosen to encourage it, while some have opted to ban it altogether (often unsuccessfully). 

Volf brought AI up in their first class. Their students told them: “It’s a great tool for sourcing creative references, but everything it produces is absolute trash. So why would I use these tools?”

Volf pointed out the unique role of AI at a school like Parsons, where students enroll to learn how to become artists. “This is what we’re all here for, to learn how to make original, creative things,” they said. As for whether the technology could become a problem in the classroom: “My students don’t see it as a need, and I don’t see it as a risk,” Volf said.

Assistant professor of architecture at Parsons Victoria Benatar proposed that AI can be a tool when used responsibly. She asserted that it’s the modern professor’s duty to teach students how it’s meant to be used. She views AI as an advanced support — it should only be used with previous experience in the subject, and it can’t be your only point of reference.

Swale Nunez, a part-time professor at Parsons’ School of Design Strategies, doesn’t believe in the fearmongering surrounding AI. “I don’t see AI as an inanimate object or technology. I just see it as a product of human invention that could be our tool,” Nunez said. 

Nunez offered some encouragement on its limits: “AI is not going to go off and do anything on its own unless it’s programmed to do that.” Nunez wants to help students be a part of further development of the technology. “As opposed to being consumers of this new technology, I hope that they see themselves as contributors and can offer the foresight and the vision that could possibly shape what the future of AI looks like.” 

For some faculty, concerns about AI are minor compared to the political pressures shaping higher education. During the Trump administration, The New School saw four international students’ visas revoked (and then reinstated) and the university was named in a U.S. Department of Education investigation into antisemitism. 

As higher education becomes increasingly entangled with politics, professors are focused on how those pressures show up in their classrooms. 

“It’s my job to make sure that whatever is happening in the world only impacts the classroom for the good,” Nunez said. “The classroom is a fairly protected space, and quite privileged in a lot of ways,” Volf added. 

Faculty must balance creating a safe, welcoming space for their students and addressing the complicated (and often tragic) issues appearing in students’ lives and news cycles every day. Marcos Steurnagel, a full-time professor of theater at Lang, once had to spend time explaining concepts like facism and dictatorship to students, but today he can move directly into complex discussions of political theory without a beginner’s introduction. 

Students are already familiar with these concepts from watching them play out in their own lives. Steurnagel noted that in the face of federal investigations into professors over antisemitism and the revocation of research funds from schools teaching liberal ideas, avoiding conflict offers little protection.

“Self censorship is always more intense than censorship,” Steurnagel said, “And one of the things that we’ve seen from this administration is that caving in doesn’t necessarily give you any advantage.” 

Elizabeth Lawrensen, part-time professor of The Arts at Lang and a doctoral student at Stony Brook University, fears for her own future in academia. 

“I think that the industry of education and academia in general is volatile, unpredictable, and not a secure future. Even less so than it was when I entered into academia and started my Ph.D. [in August 2020],” Lawrensen said. “I don’t have any assurance, or even tangible hope, that there’s a future assured to me, that I can make a living wage and have the things that I need to live to live my life within academia. And I think that is a shame.”

So why continue to pursue higher education? Streurnagel proposed that it is that doubt itself that has brought us here in the first place.

“We’re in a moment in which the pressures for professionalization, student loan debt, they lead students to be very anxious about, ‘What am I going to be able to get out of this?’ …  It takes away a lot of the work that college actually can do, of showing different perspectives, …  finding out new things, because there’s so much pressure to get it right,” he said. 

Steurnagel suggested that this tension causes a distrust in intellectualism, and pushes some people toward choosing trade success and lower debt instead. “It is the extreme professionalization and the lack of the liberal arts that led us into this mess, in a certain sense,” he added. 

In spite of the looming shifts in the role of higher education, our professors find hope in the young people they see in the classroom each day to help create a better future. Part-time professor of Rhythm at the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music Elsa Nilsson offered another perspective. “The responsibility of artists throughout history has always been to reflect what’s happening in society,” Nilsson said. “We have work to do.”