This is a space to share about my scholarship and views on topics connected to higher education law, policy, and practice. I also want to highlight resources for those teaching about issues related to higher education law.

I am a Professor at the University of Kentucky in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation. I’ve held previous academic appointments at institutions that include Penn State University and the University of Mississippi, where I served as a department chair. My research focuses on the intersections of higher education law, policy, and practice. Much of my scholarship is centered on issues of free speech and academic freedom in higher education, but I also write more generally on legal issues arising in higher education.

An important line of recent scholarly inquiry for me in the academic freedom context has focused on legislative efforts at the state level to ban the teaching of concepts associated with critical race theory (CRT), including at public colleges and universities. Legal wrangling over anti-CRT legislation and academic freedom in Florida and in other states is currently generating news headlines, but debates over faculty independence and academic freedom are far from novel. A continuing focus of my scholarship is on the future of the academy and the current disarray of legal and employment arrangements to safeguard faculty academic freedom and autonomy. Challenges to academic freedom threaten to undercut the crucial role of colleges and universities, when they function at their best, in sustaining and enhancing democratic society.

I have been fortunate to garner recognition for the impact of my scholarship on legal issues in higher education. In 2015, I received the William A. Kaplin Award from the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University. The award is intended to recognize nationally leading scholars whose work embraces intersections of law and policy in higher education. As a faculty member at the University of Mississippi, I was the university’s 2019 senior scholar nominee for the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program.

I am on the author team of The Law of Higher Education, a leading treatise that is also published in a student version. In July 2024, a new edition of the Law of Higher Education will be released. I have also co-authored books on campus speech and shared governance. For the 2022/23 academic year, I was honored to serve as a fellow at the University of California Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.

Along with academic writing, I have written pieces on a range of topics in publications that include The Conversation, The Hechinger Report, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed., and Diverse Issues in Higher Education. I regularly present at conferences and workshops for administrators, professional staff, and faculty to examine legal issues implicated in their professional capacities. Additionally, I regularly respond to requests from media outlets to comment on stories dealing with legal issues in higher education, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and Houston Public Media.