The Threat to Academic Freedom and Research in Gender Studies The Women's Media Center's research and reports shed light on the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of women in the media. The Women's Media Center's media training and leadership programs seek to elevate women's voices through media training. As a women's, gender, and sexuality studies professor, the author worries about the future of their interdisciplinary field as universities rush to comply with executive orders, state legislatures, weaponized austerity, and a raucous insistence of anti-intellectualism. Trump's explicitly racist, misogynistic, antitrans, ableist, xenophobic, Christian nationalist, Islamophobic, and imperialist agenda positions gender studies as inimical to his delusional and exclusionary vision of U.S. greatness and exceptionalism. Any field of study that offers students an opportunity to rigorously interrogate, critically think, and creatively imagine a more just world is an easy target in Trump's war on higher education. The field of gender studies, with its origins in struggles to reshape the world, is uniquely vulnerable in our current political moment. State legislators across the country are escalating their attacks on academic freedom and research and teaching focused on understanding systems of power, oppression, and privilege. The threat to cut off funding from 'elite' universities such as Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia has spooked numerous schools into making deals with the Trump administration. Women's and gender studies programs were among the easiest units to put on the chopping block given Trump's framing of them as hotbeds of indoctrination. More than a dozen well-established and storied programs and departments have shuttered their doors since Trump's inauguration. There's a growing contempt for those trained to examine power, privilege, and injustice, and it is precisely in a historical moment such as we are in now that women's and gender studies is desperately needed. The Women's Media Center's research and reports shed light on the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of women in the media. The Women's Media Center's media training and leadership programs seek to elevate women's voices through media training. As a women's, gender, and sexuality studies professor, I worry about the future of my interdisciplinary field as universities rush to comply with executive orders, state legislatures, weaponized austerity, and a raucous insistence of anti-intellectualism. Trump's explicitly racist, misogynistic, antitrans, ableist, xenophobic, Christian nationalist, Islamophobic, and imperialist agenda positions gender studies as inimical to his delusional and exclusionary vision of U.S. greatness and exceptionalism.Any field of study that offers students an opportunity to rigorously interrogate, critically think, and creatively imagine a more just world is an easy target in Trump's war on higher education. The field of gender studies, with its origins in struggles to reshape the world, is uniquely vulnerable in our current political moment. State legislators across the country are escalating their attacks on academic freedom and research and teaching focused on understanding systems of power, oppression, and privilege.The threat to cut off funding from 'elite' universities such as Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia has spooked numerous schools into making deals with the Trump administration. Women's and gender studies programs were among the easiest units to put on the chopping block given Trump's framing of them as hotbeds of indoctrination. More than a dozen well-established and storied programs and departments have shuttered their doors since Trump's inauguration.There's a growing contempt for those trained to examine power, privilege, and injustice, and it is precisely in a historical moment such as we are in now that women's and gender studies is desperately needed