Mission
The Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech (CAFFS) launched at the start of the 2024–2025 academic year. CAFFS's mission is to become a leading hub for academic freedom and free speech. Its purpose is to safeguard these values for future generations.
What We Do
The center brings to campus scholars, university leaders, advocates, and policymakers for both private workshops and public events to discuss the state of free speech and academic freedom, best policies and practices for realizing a robust culture of free speech, and the future of free speech and academic freedom in the United States and across the world.
The center helps track emerging threats to academic freedom, advocate for policies to protect free speech and academic freedom, foster better understanding of and appreciation for the principles of free speech and free inquiry, and support scholarly and public conversations on critical issues relating to free speech and academic freedom.
History
The Center launched at the start of the 2024-2025 academic year with the appointment of Keith E. Whittington, the David Boies Professor of Law, as the center's faculty director. Whittington is a renowned scholar of academic freedom and free speech and has written extensively on both topics. The center was launched with generous funding from the Stanton Foundation.
The Center expanded in September 2025 with the addition of Joe Cohn as its founding executive director. A majority of Cohn’s legal career has been dedicated to defending free speech rights and campus civil liberties, including at two affiliates of the ACLU, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and Heterodox Academy (HxA).
Read more about the launch of the center.
Newsletter
Subscribe to the center’s newsletter at subscribe.yale.edu.