October 13, 2025
President William F. Tate IV
Chancellor Francine Conway
Rutgers University–New Brunswick
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Dear President Tate and Chancellor Conway,
The American Historical Association (AHA) expresses deep concern about recent threats made against Professor Mark Bray that extended to his partner, Professor Yesenia Barragan, both faculty members in the university’s department of history. Professor Bray has been targeted because of his extensive work as a historian of fascist and anti-fascist movements.
Historians have the right to research, teach, and expect that discussion of their historical work will be free from harassment and intimidation. That right is violated by those who target historians, including via social media, with hate speech; threats; doxxing, trolling, and cyberattacks; and other forms of harassment.
The AHA, with nearly 11,000 members, is the largest association of professional historians in the world. Our mission includes maintaining professional standards and ethics, promoting innovative scholarship and teaching, and ensuring academic freedom. The professional standards we articulate and promote are cited frequently inside and outside the academy. Prominent among those standards is the celebration of intellectual communities governed by mutual respect and constructive criticism. As the AHA’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct explains: “The preeminent value of such communities is reasoned discourse—the continuous colloquy among historians holding diverse points of view who learn from each other as they pursue topics of mutual interest.”
The threats against Professor Bray and calls for his firing have no place in an intellectual community governed by mutual respect and constructive criticism. They are part of an escalating effort among some politically motivated groups to suppress the speech, teaching, and scholarship of faculty whose work does not conform to their movement’s ideologies. Such suppression hinders the ability of scholars to ask critical questions of their research topics that benefit our ability to produce new knowledge and inform our students about the historical context of the world in which we live.
As our Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct asserts, the American Historical Association “encourages administrators to speak out vigorously” against incidents of harassment and discrimination on campuses. “At the same time, the Association strongly disapproves of efforts to limit or punish free speech, whether it be verbal or written, regardless of the medium of communication. We condemn the violation of First Amendment rights to free speech, as well as the harassment and vilification to which individuals have sometimes been subjected for exercising these rights.” The effort to frame Professor Bray as a threat to students and calls for his firing based on the topic of his research expertise are affronts to both academic freedom and the constitutional value of free speech.
We commend Rutgers’ decision to afford Professor Bray and Professor Barragan the ability to relocate and to offer their courses remotely in light of physical threats. We hope you can affirm that such harassment and threats to community safety have no place at Rutgers, as you continue to offer them support and to defend academic freedom.
Sincerely,
The American Historical Association