The Baylor Interdisciplinary Core (BIC) marked its 30th anniversary last week during Baylor University’s Homecoming celebration with a lecture featuring one of its most distinguished alumnae. Skye Perryman, a 2003 graduate of the program, spoke to students, faculty, fellow alums, and community members about the current dangers facing higher education, placing contemporary challenges within the long history of threats to academic freedom.
The Baylor Interdisciplinary Core was created in response to trends in higher education during the 1970s and ’80s that led to the overspecialization of academic programs. Perryman noted that colleges and universities are at a very different inflection point in 2025. She cited skyrocketing costs, barriers to educational access, and the rise of artificial intelligence as especially urgent challenges.
These challenges, according to Perryman, have been compounded by political movements across the country that have “targeted the ability of faculty to teach, to research, to publish, and to fully explore the scope of ideas without political or ideological interference.”
Perryman is president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a national, nonpartisan legal organization that litigates against federal threats to democracy.
Just before walking into the lecture, Perryman learned that her team at Democracy Forward had secured a federal injunction requiring the Trump administration to release emergency funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) during the ongoing government shutdown.
Academic Freedom
Regarding higher education, Democracy Forward currently represents the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The AAUP, Perryman said, “has recently noted a coordinated effort against universities that threatens to undermine academic freedom, chill classroom speech, and impose partisan agendas on higher education.”
Despite key legal victories, Perryman pointed to recent events at the University of Virginia, the University of California system, the University of Texas, and Texas A&M University that have either threatened faculty and administrators or led to their resignations. Even so, she emphasized, it is faculty and researchers—not university leadership—who have led the fight for academic freedom.
But none of this is new, she noted.
“The academy is on trial today,” she said. “But it’s been on trial before. We know the story. In 399 BCE, philosopher and master teacher Socrates was made to stand trial for not believing in the gods the Athenian government recognized, and for teaching in a way that the government found corrupted students.”
She continued, “In 1633, Galileo was persecuted by the Catholic Church for ‘heretically’ suggesting that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth.”
Perryman continued by noting that contemporary challenges to academic freedom often come from within institutions as much as from external pressures. To this point, she brought the lecture closer to home.
Baylor’s Challenges
“Baylor University has not been exempt from these challenges,” Perryman said. She reminded the audience of an incident from the 1960s, when acclaimed Baylor theater professor Paul Baker directed a student production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. O’Neill’s wife granted Baker rights to the play on the condition that there be no edits to the script.
The play, however, contained profanity, which Baylor prohibited at the time. As the production went public, several members of the university community complained, and the university canceled the play.
“There’s a lot of debate about what went down in the inter-university discussions,” Perryman said. “And it was all probably very complicated. But what we know is that a play was shut down, art was canceled, and there was an uproar in the student body.”
She continued, “Ella Prichard, who was a student writer for The Baylor Lariat and who would later become a major donor and trustee, wrote an editorial calling this out, holding her institution accountable.”
Perryman connected the Baylor theater incident from the 1960s with one from earlier this year. “We know there was an online pressure campaign,” she said, “against ongoing research here at Baylor that decorated professors were studying. They were engaged in studying the experiences of women and LGBTQ individuals in the church.”
“‘Fear not’ is what we’re taught in our sacred text—from Moses to Jesus to Paul,” Perryman said. “Yet the fear is real and the risks are high, and these issues become very difficult for administrators to deal with. And what happened at Baylor is that the university returned $600,000 in grant money that was being used to fund research, discontinuing an important project.”
Perryman reminded the audience that the issues are complex and, in a setting such as Baylor, deep disagreements are aired among people who love each other deeply.
The Answers are Among Us
“I want it to be clear,” she said, “it doesn’t matter what your personal opinion is on the topics of the research. The concern is the pressures that exist to implicitly and explicitly restrict the freedom to conduct research, the freedom to inquire, and the freedom to live an examined life.”
Perryman ended her address with a challenge: “The demolition of the east wing of the White House last week has been seen as a metaphor for what is going on in our country. And so, yes, the academy is on trial. Democracy is on trial. We, as a people who are committed to the examined life, are on trial. And the questions are, how will it end, and what are we going to do about it? I believe the answers are in this room.”
After graduating magna cum laude from Baylor, Perryman attended Georgetown University Law Center, where she earned her Juris Doctor with honors. In addition to being named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People earlier this year, she was also included on Good Faith Media’s inaugural “25 Who Inspire” list.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
