“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...

This is not a “duel,” which suggests both sides are equally culpable, but the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s ideological war on Harvard and higher education. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/u...

We need to flood them with letters now. Write today!

another case of faculty defending the university when the university won’t defend itself.

New at PB: @kirstenweld.bsky.social on why, 50 years after Franco's death, Latin America will never forget the Spanish Civil War.

How did the @nytimes.com editors let this sentence appear? "Critics have likened Mr. Trump’s approach to extortion, while others have chalked it up as a cost of doing business with this administration." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...

Santiago Uribe, brother of former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, was yesterday handed a 28-year prison sentence for forming a death squad at his ranch in the 1990s. I wrote about the case in 2018. nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/colombi...

When the world is on fire… review a novel about the world being on fire?

This is spot-on. The UVA "deal" might be the worst/most dangerous (so far). With the help of UVA's leadership, Trump coerced a leading U.S. university to foreswear all efforts (including 100% lawful measures) to achieve diversity. A betrayal of our values. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Very simple lesson here: Faculty governance will defend academic values, like academic freedom, even when it is unpopular. Political appointees who serve as Regents will blow with the ideological winds, which in Texas are anti-speech.

In this new @usnews.com article, five law profs (including me) with vastly different views on most issues explain why colleges should reject Trump's "Compact" with higher ed, for both constitutional and policy reasons: www.usnews.com/opinion/arti...

WE WON!!! The US District Court for the Northern District of California has issued a preliminary injunction in AAUP et al v. Trump et al (the wall to wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of Title VI to reshape the University of California system. Read the order here:

BREAKING: In AAUP et al v. Trump (wall-to-wall union lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful use of TItle VI to reshape the University of California system), the faculty and staff of the UC system WON!!! We were granted our preliminary injunction! @aaup.org

The intro to Judge Rita Lin's 76-page opinion holding that the Trump admin's pressure campaign against the University of California system is coercive and retaliatory in violation of the First Amendment. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The NYT has used some version of this sentence in multiple stories about the Columbia settlement but it is highly misleading. Yes, the Columbia settlement included that pledge, but it also included multiple terms that “dictate academic matters.” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/u...

The #1 lesson from yesterday’s blowout: Humanities majors killed on the job market 1) Mamdani- Africana Studies 2) Spanberger -French 3) Sherill - Global History

Important new report out from AAUP & MESA, “The data…offers a detailed account of how landmark civil rights legislation – and particularly Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act – has become a primary tool to restrict speech on campus.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

“The data, compiled by the Middle East Studies Association and the American Association of University Professors and relying on publicly available records, offers a detailed account of how landmark civil rights legislation…has become a primary tool to restrict speech on campus.”