"What this sends is a very strong message that OU is going to do minimal and certainly doesn’t seem to have anybody’s back," Michael Givel, an OU professor and member of the OU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said. 

"DEI, the words need to be reinstated. We’re engaging in cancel culture here. We need to reinstate all the programs that have been canceled."

“The message is that these politicians are entitled to have authority over what happens on a college campus,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. “And that’s just unacceptable in a free society. It’s really … political repression.”

Mulvey condemned antisemitism but said it is being weaponized by bad actors to delegitimize higher education as a pillar of democracy.

“The only thing to do as a college president in this situation is to stand on principle and give a robust, full-throated defense of academic freedom for faculty, and free speech and freedom of the press and freedom of association for their students,” she said.

"Our goal on college campuses is free and open inquiry and debate. What we’ve seen is immediate silencing of speech, without any genuine attempt to talk to the students and understand the concerns that led to the protests, to think about and hear their demands. I’ve spent my entire career on college campuses, and this silencing of speech feels like a crisis of repression," said Irene Mulvey, AAUP president.

Despite the uphill battles to reach agreements on campuses, open dialogue with student protesters is what the American Association of University Professors has promoted as the best route forward in this heated moment, said Irene Mulvey, president of AAUP.

Instead of responding to multiday demonstrations by issuing suspensions or bringing in the police, Mulvey said, colleges should strive to communicate with students and use the negotiating table as an educational opportunity. “The way forward is through education — to talk to each other, to understand each other, even in disagreement,” she said. “I think [the agreements are] modeling what should be done everywhere.”

It’s one thing to see university presidents fail to defend academic freedom” in front of Congress, and it’s “quite harrowing to see that cowardice followed up by the sanctioning of police violence on campus," said Isaac Kamola, Director of the AAUP'd Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.