Jennifer Ruth is a professor in the School of Film at Portland State University. She writes extensively about academic freedom and higher education in outlets such as the Chronicle of Higher Education and in books such as It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (2022), co-authored with Michael Bérubé,  and The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom (2023), co-edited with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson. She is the director, with Jan Haaken, of the documentary The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests (2024). She is a longtime member of national AAUP’s Committee A for academic freedom, a contributing editor to the Academe blog, and served two years as the faculty editor of The Journal of Academic Freedom. She served three years as Portland State-AAUP’s Vice President of Academic Freedom and Grievances. She holds a Ph.D. from Brown University.