On March 7th, 2025, I was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, taking part in the Stand Up for Science rally. I’m an American professor, and I felt it was my duty to exercise my freedom of speech in educating the public on the benefits of investing in academic research.

As a professor of biomedical engineering and computer science, I conduct computational biomedical research and teach a class related to my research. In my classroom, although I have not explicitly discussed such political activism at length, as a woman, I know that my very existence in this space in this prestigious American university is only possible thanks to the political activism (abolitionism and reconstruction, the woman’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, etc) of those before me. Further, as someone of Chinese ancestry, I am aware that my ability to teach what I want, how I want, without any intervention from the government is a freedom not enjoyed by those under other political systems such as my grandparents during China’s Cultural Revolution. During China’s Cultural Revolution, the government controlled the university’s hiring, admissions, and curriculum. Even topics such as physics were highly politicized, and professors were persecuted and punished for teaching ‘evil Western values’ like Einstein’s theory of relativity. Therefore, these are not freedoms that I take for granted.

I teach computer science, specifically data visualization. In my course, students learn to perform statistical analyses on big biomedical datasets and graphically communicate their analysis results, all using computer programming. Attendance is required as the course demands ample back-and-forth interactions and has a hands-on interactive group programming component. This past semester, a student in my class asked for an excused absence because she wanted to take part in the March for Life, a political rally advocating against the practice and legality of abortion. Regardless of my personal views on the matter, I chose to accommodate her.

As a professor, my goal is to educate every student that signs up for my class with the intent and interest to learn data visualization. Regardless of any differences in our political views, it is my duty to teach them and do my best in ensuring that they learn. I would have chosen to accommodate the student if she wanted to attend a pro-choice rally. I would have chosen to accommodate the student if she wanted to attend a MAGA rally. I choose to accommodate my students because I support them in exercising their freedom of speech.

Why does this matter? An assignment about linear versus non-linear dimensionality reduction with applications to spatial transcriptomics is clearly pretty important. But the value I want to encourage is agency. Agency is the foundation of critical thinking, ethical decision-making, and democratic participation. When my students step out of my classroom and into the real world, they must be able to exercise agency not only in navigating but hopefully also in shaping this complex world. My role as their professor is to equip them with hard skills as it relates to data visualization but also provide opportunities for them to practice making meaningful choices (such as in data visualization design) and taking responsibility for them (such as through their grade).

However, freedom to choose to miss class to go to a political rally does not mean freedom from responsibility; I still held the student responsible for all the content that she missed. The student watched a recording of the lecture she missed, came to office hours to ask questions and engage with the content, and ultimately received an A+ in the class.

Some faculty may consider my decision to accommodate students because of their involvement in political activism to be an erosion between the academic and the political, ultimately to the detriment of both. Perhaps that is why when Dr. Boaz Barak’s students asked for more leniency in academic assignments because of their involvement in political activism, one with a Jewish organization, the other with a Muslim one, he chose to refuse them both. Like Dr. Barak, many faculty members claim to not pursue a political agenda and believe that we should not normalize bringing one’s political ideology into the classroom.

However, I counter that, even as professors of computer science, we bring our political ideologies into the classroom all the time. As already exemplified, I bring the political ideology of freedom of speech into my classroom. I also, unintentionally simply through my existence, bring the political ideology of feminism (woman having rights in the workplace) into my classroom. In my classroom, I encourage my students to question and to challenge me as I believe it is imperative that my students are not simply passive recipients of knowledge but active participants in the classroom so that they are prepared to be active participants outside the classroom as part of our democracy. As such, democracy (the belief that power ultimately resides in the people, and that people should be able to participate in decision-making processes) too is a political ideology I bring to the classroom. So, who decides what kind of ideology is ok to bring into the classroom? I don’t believe a government should make these decisions.

That being said, when I bring such political ideology into the classroom, I also acknowledge the power dynamics inherent to my interactions with my students. This power dynamic is integral to me being an effective teacher because frankly I need to be able to hold accountable and reprimand students who engage in cheating! But this power dynamic also comes with consequences so I must exercise my power responsibly to best facilitate my students’ learning. In the classroom, I emphasize that something is not correct simply because I say it is correct; it is correct because of the math, derivations, and evidence that make it correct. Had I been teaching computer science during China’s Cultural Revolution, perhaps the government would have coerced me into teaching that AVL trees are inherently superior to linked lists simply because the former was invented by good Soviet allies whereas the latter was invented by Americans while a party member kept watch in the audience to ensure my compliance!

Recently, the Trump administration began issuing orders that threaten our ability to teach what we want and how we want. Trump has attacked universities as a whole and my alma mater, Harvard, in particular. On April 11, Trump issued demands to Harvard seeking to control their hiring, admissions, and curriculum. Trump has further sought compliance through revoking research funding and tax-exempt status. I am proud of Harvard’s leadership for resisting the demands made of it and am hopeful that universities can stand united in mounting legal opposition.

The reaction from faculty has been, in my opinion, less than unified. Many like Dr. Barak have suggested that these attacks have been enabled by the lack of popular support for universities and further that academics have contributed to this erosion of trust by allowing the blurring of the lines between scholarship and activism. Indeed, over the past decade, trust in higher education in general has declined. This is a tragedy, because we need fact- and science-based policymaking for topics such as public health and climate change, artificial intelligence and economics. We academics should look at how this erosion of trust has coincided with the lack of affordable higher education due to the lack of public investment in universities that has been perpetrated in order to give tax breaks to billionaires.

The recent actions by the Trump administration make it more urgent than ever for us academics to step up the long overdue work of restoring trust in our universities. If we want to keep doing the work of education and research that has made American universities the envy of the world and the engine of our prosperity, we must exercise our free speech not only through peer-reviewed papers as we’ve always done, but also through directly communicating to the public, plainly and simply, the value that academia contributes to the public good. Professors must do what professors do best: teach.

(I wrote this as a reflection on the article I Teach Computer Science, and That Is All by Dr. Boaz Barak and therefore some of the language is intentionally highly similar)