Incisive rejoinder to the Vanderbilt/WU report on the humanities, by Harvard AAUP’s Dick Moran: www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

many of the faculty that have been fired were critics of the administration - a chilling and shameful episode we should be following, especially those of us in higher ed

What's really astonishing is not the far right authoritarian party doing this, but the near-total lack of <loud public collective action> by university chancellors & presidents to oppose this existential crisis. Almost impossible to overstate how total a failure of leadership this is.

Can't recommend this article enough. Taught me how anti-democratic university governance is and how unusual that is, even among corporate structures in the US and compared to universities in other countries. American universities are in the lower left in this graphic. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Thank you to Daniel Hemel and David Pozen for this. The concept of the Universitas litterarum that emerged in the Middle Ages was a self-governing community of scholars engaged in a quest for truth. What has emerged in the US today is a nightmare that has no relationship with the founding idea.

$6.2M/yr for the endowment manager guy who gets the university a lower rate of return than the S&P 500 Certainly puts the grad union's requests in perspective www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

"For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints in elite higher education." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wer...

Academics are, on the whole, dedicated teachers, researchers, and community members who not only prop up regional economies but also care about knowledge and the public good. The demonization of faculty and grad students at all ranks is a travesty.

Important statement in support of Derek Peterson by @aft.org @aaup.org and our AAUP chapters at UM Ann Arbor and Flint: www.aaup.org/news/aaup-af...

Universities captured by corporate boards drunk on ideologies of growth & expansion trying to turn institutions of learning into “real estate empires”—it’s pathetic + ruinous + ignores the fact that universities don’t need to “grow” they need to attain steady state & persist durably into the future

NEW today in the New York Times: In the face of unprecedented authoritarian attacks, the AAUP is building a powerful and militant resistance movement in defense of American higher education, the freedom to learn, and our democracy. Join Us!

Texas tech now bans students from writing about LGBTQ issues in any form. Mentions of gender identity, orientation etc in textbooks must be skipped. Deafening silence so far from all the brave heterodox free speech absolutists www.erininthemorning.com/p/texas-tech...

This memo really has to be seen to be believed - it’s total madness www.texastech.edu/downloads/26...

“Most Harvard faculty do not seek an adversarial relationship with their employer. Will that change if our administration continues to treat the faculty as adversaries?“ By our intrepid @aaup.org chapter president, @kirstenweld.bsky.social 🔥 www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

“Researchers that have attempted to make the university’s connections –and potential obligations– to the Caribbean explicit say their efforts have been stymied. …“The conversation is not happening,” said Carla Martin, a Harvard professor of African and African American Studies. “We all have tried.””

The idea that universities ”tend to exclude conservative intellectual traditions” is off base on two fronts: 1) how are “conservative intellectual traditions” relevant to the most of the popular majors and faculty research areas, such as computer science, engineering, the natural sciences?/1

Today!

The national media is eating up this report as justification for perpetuating the lie that universities themselves - as opposed to decades of attacks from the far right authoritarian party - are responsible for eroding trust in higher education. You can almost hear them salivating at the chance.

"We've ended DEI - but we need you to give $10 million to pay for conservative professors."

The obvious answer here is that the student protest movement was broadly smeared as anti-semitic and aligned with terrorists, and a variety of institutions from government, media and the universities acted as if that smear was true, threatening, suspending, expelling and even deporting students.

“Faculty members & students continue to speak up & organize to oppose the radical reconfiguration of American institutions launched by the Trump administration & its private-sector allies. Frequently, this has included organizing outside the gates.” — Reinhold Martin & Robert Newton, Columbia AAUP

personally I think "Federal Judge Approves Trump Effort to Obtain List of Jews From Penn" is a bad thing to read in the newspaper www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/u...

On Saturday, come out with your fellow @aaup.org - @aft.org United Academics Local 6741 colleagues from across the country to say: No Kings. No Wars. No ICE! Find your local protest and a toolkit here: docs.google.com/document/u/0...

Speaking of plunder, universities building fancy data science centers and launching AI majors and minors will soon find all qualified profs have fled for companies where they are paid 4-10x more and can publish and research instead of teach.

There's a mention here of our successful campaign at Harvard to roll back a similar crackdown on window signage. Even/especially at a time of rising government authoritarianism and institutional collusion, these workplace battles matter.

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

Thousands of institutions abandoned programs, ended or rewrote scholarships, closed down clubs and publications, all in pre-emptive compliance. And you know why? Mostly because they wanted to do it if they thought they could blame someone else for it.

This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence. The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:

Important piece on the history of the US government's ideological deportation policies in light of the outcome in AAUP v. Rubio, including crucial quotes from the courtroom testimony of AAUP-Harvard member Bernhard Nickel:

"The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone."

Thousands here at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, the site of deportation flights. Clergy have blocked the road at terminal 1 departures singing “before this campaign fails, we’ll all go down to jail. Everybody has a right to live.”

All the evidence one would need to impeach both Rubio and Noem was just posted to the AAUP v. Rubio docket. @hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social

Newly unsealed evidence makes it even clearer that Rubio and Noem knew they were targeting students based solely on their political speech and that they knew this policy was unconstitutional. They just didn’t care. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/u...

🚨HOLY CRAP. An ICE whistleblower just revealed a secret memo authorizing ICE officers to break into homes without a judicial warrant, which DHS's own legal training materials say is unconstitutional! ICE then hid the memo from the public, passing it along by word of mouth and private conversation.

bravo @democracyforward.org & @aft.org. and shame on all the universities that dismantled their legally secure and morally just diversity, equity and inclusion programs becuase Trump sent them an angry letter. democracyforward.org/news/press-r...

Federal judge William Young ripped Kristi Noem and Marco Rubio apart for their efforts to deport pro-Palestinian students/academics — accusing them of "an unconstitutional conspiracy to pick off certain people." "These Cabinet secretaries have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution."

I was in the courtroom for this hearing today and it was, indeed, quite something to hear a federal judge outline a Cabinet-level “conspiracy”—his term—to flout the First Amendment. All the documents in the case will be unsealed as of 1/22 when judgment gets entered. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/u...

The import of this ruling: Foreign citizens in the United States—including green card holders—can be arrested for political speech and imprisoned for months or even years before being given a meaningful opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of their arrest and imprisonment.

Today!

Online today @JewishCurrents: my examination of how nearly a century of cooperation between American universities and the military-industrial complex has made a mockery of the concept of academic freedom jewishcurrents.org/higher-eds-b...

ICYMI the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom has developed resources and language around academic freedom to use in your course materials. See more in this newsletter post from our director, @isaackamola.bsky.social academicfreedomontheline.substack.com/p/your-sylla...

I'm helping pack the gallery at immigration court today because ICE thugs arrested and jailed the dad of one of my daughter’s preschool classmates. Born in Haiti, he's lived in the US for more than 20+ years, but in November ICE ambushed him when he duly appeared for a routine immigration check-in.

Abolishing ICE is the modest, quiet, peaceful option and you can’t post the others in this country

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." surreal times dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

"I can assure you that my mother and father, both of whom endured Auschwitz, would be horrified by the silencing of dissent and its unrestrained normalization."

Incredibly disappointing to see Alan Garber granting the entire bad faith premise used by Elise Stefanik & Donald Trump to launch a full-scale assault on his university & higher education in general.

For anyone looking to read up on the long history of U.S. unilateralism in Latin America -- and how it is inseparable from the history of the United States itself -- one of the books I use in the classroom is Brian Loveman's NO HIGHER LAW. It's dense & encyclopedic, but exhaustive & judicious.

Elizabeth Catlett & Alberto Beltrán, Untitled (Composition for a Peace Poster), c. 1950 www.artic.edu/artworks/222...

New, from me: The NYT reporter who specializes in profiles of beleaguered right-wingers on campus went to New College...and found out that things were going ok! So let me explain some pretty massive errors of omission: 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nyt-re...