Editor’s essay: Acting with academic freedom

As reflected in news media and experienced by Journal readers, universities around the world have approached the COVID-19 pandemic and renewed their attention to systemic racism in myriad ways, both operationally and communicatively. I’m hopeful that future public relations scholars will examine various aspects of communication between higher-education organizations and their stakeholders (e.g., faculty-student, administration-faculty, and university-community), as well as the impacts of universities’ operational and communication choices on organizational relationships and reputations. From the pivot to remote instruction to the funding of more faculty lines specializing in diversity-related areas, the studies are endless that could be conducted on how universities have responded to pandemicrelated issues, be they as novel as the latest viral pandemic or as entrenched as institutional racism. What’s interesting (and discouraging) about this last month of calendar year 2021 is not merely that both the health and racism pandemics continue unabated. It’s also that the good intentions and actions of the many (e.g., who get immunized against diseases or who engage in self-improving actions to confront their own implicit biases) seem at times no match for the virulence emanating from the few (e.g., who deny categorically the science-based effectiveness of vaccines [cf. DiRusso & Stansberry, 2022; Hotez, 2019; Hussain et al., 2018] or who seek to undermine the integrity and outcomes of electoral systems [cf.; Haggard & Kaufman, 2021; Kleinfeld, 2021]).