In recent years, schools, colleges, universities, and libraries, along with individual scholars, teachers, and librarians, have faced a rapidly growing panoply of politically and ideologically motivated efforts in the United States and other countries to restrict teaching, research, and access to knowledge on subjects deemed to be “divisive” or “controversial,” particularly but not exclusively with respect to race, gender, and sexuality. In addition to direct efforts to restrict or mandate curricular content, these efforts have also included initiatives that more indirectly create chilling effects on disfavored subjects and aggressive structural interventions that seek to impose greater external control over these institutions. At the same time, scholars and other observers also have increasingly warned over this same period that in many of these same countries, the weakening of political institutions has placed democracy itself at risk—which, in turn, has created a more hospitable environment for attacks on education and knowledge. In this introduction to the Drexel Law Review's symposium,Knowledge at Risk: Democratic Erosion and the Contemporary Assault on Education and Expertise, I identify and discuss a number of questions arising from these parallel developments. What are the various components of these recent attacks on education and knowledge, and how have they emerged and developed? How should we understand and conceptualize the relationship between this assault, on the one hand, and growing concerns about the erosion of democracy, on the other? To what extent has democratic erosion facilitated or contributed to this assault? In addition to state actors, what roles have private actors and money played in enabling these attacks? Finally, what strategies might effectively protect education and knowledge in the face of this onslaught?

While Florida frequently has been at the forefront of public attention to this recent wave of ideologically driven threats—and similarly loomed large in discussions by many of the symposium participants—the contemporary assault on education and knowledge has not, by any means, been limited to Florida. While proponents of these incursions have achieved some of their most significant and highest profile victories in Florida, those successes have been the product of efforts by an extensive network of groups that has pursued this agenda nationwide. Drexel’s own state of Pennsylvania, for example, has been a prime target for many of these efforts. Moreover, as discussed by the symposium participants, colleges and universities have often been made more vulnerable to these external attacks in part because the internal commitment of their own administrators and trustees to academic freedom, freedom of speech, and educational autonomy has been uneven, as incidents in this institution’s own recent history illustrate. Especially given the multiplicity of different forms that contemporary attacks on education and knowledge have taken, and the extent to which these attacks are intertwined with broader assaults against democratic governance itself, defending the autonomy and integrity of schools, colleges, universities, and libraries in the face of this onslaught demands a set of strategies in response that is no less multifaceted and dynamic. Litigation can be an important response, but as the symposium participants emphasized, a more complete, effective, and durable set of responses will require a broader constellation of strategies.