A recent survey of university professors in the South made strong but insufficiently documented claims about a climate of fear among faculty in Georgia and the region. At the same time, University System of Georgia Chancellor Sonny Perdue has reaffirmed important ways that the system is combating such a climate of fear.
University of North Georgia professor Matthew Boedy’s recent reporting on the 2025 Faculty in the South Survey highlights anxieties among professors in 12 states. According to the survey, faculty described fears about political interference, canceled grants, and a chilling effect on classroom discussions. A Georgia-specific survey released by the American Association of University Professors this month echoes those concerns, finding that more than half of 800 professors surveyed in the state would not recommend Georgia to a colleague, and nearly a quarter are planning to apply elsewhere this year.
Those numbers should be treated with caution. The Georgia survey gathered responses from only about 800 professors out of more than 11,500 full-time faculty across the state’s public universities. That means fewer than 7% of Georgia’s faculty participated. Such a narrow snapshot cannot credibly represent the views of an entire system.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
The regional survey relied on AAUP networks, social media and email to collect responses. That method introduces the risk of self-selection bias. Faculty most concerned about political pressure were more likely to participate, while those who felt unaffected or satisfied had little incentive to reply. Moreover, the survey does not report its overall response rate, leaving no way to know how representative the results truly are.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
The imbalances by state underscore this problem. Texas and Georgia provided nearly half of all responses, while Arkansas contributed just 56 professors. More troubling still, the survey pool was weighted heavily toward tenured professors — more than 60% — even though many campuses, including Georgia Tech, now employ more non-tenure-track than tenure-track faculty. In effect, the study leaves out a large and growing segment of the professoriate while presenting itself as a broad picture of academic life.
In short, this is not a representative survey. It is a snapshot of the views of those already inclined to be critical, amplified into generalizations. That does not mean the concerns aren’t real — reports of grant cancellations, online harassment, new accreditation agency and administrative oversight of syllabuses deserve attention. But it does mean we should resist treating these surveys as authoritative evidence of a pervasive “climate of fear.”
Context matters. Whatever one thinks of Charlie Kirk’s politics, his tragic death on a Utah college campus this week underscores how fraught conversations around higher education, free speech, and political polarization have become nationwide. In Georgia, by contrast, Perdue reaffirmed the USG’s commitment to ensuring campuses remain places of open dialogue and academic freedom:
“As educators, we have a responsibility to ensure that our students, faculty and staff can speak freely and respectfully, without fear of being unlawfully silenced or disrupted.”
Perdue emphasized that free speech requires both the right to speak and the responsibility to listen, pledging that Georgia’s public universities will continue to defend academic freedom while preserving safe and respectful environments.
Taken together, these developments suggest a more complex reality. Faculty surveys capture frustrations, particularly about political climate and salaries. But when they rely heavily on advocacy networks and voluntary participation, they are best read as illustrative snapshots rather than definitive measures of higher education’s health. At the same time, system leaders are signaling their awareness of challenges and publicly recommitting to guardrails that protect free speech and academic freedom.
The future of higher education in Georgia will not be shaped by potentially unrepresentative surveys or alarmist headlines. It will depend on balancing legitimate faculty concerns with the reality that universities are, in many cases, successfully defending the values of debate, dialogue and knowledge. Until surveys adopt more rigorous and representative methods, their results should be read with caution — not as settled verdicts on the state of academia.
Annie I. Antón is the ADVANCE Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech. She is a member of the University System of Georgia Faculty Council. J. Derrick Lemons is a professor and department head of religion at the University of Georgia. He is also a member of the USG Faculty Council.
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