"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.”

Harvard AAUP's Ryan Enos explains the importance of colleges working together to combat Trump’s attempts to shake down universities. #defendhighered @ryanenos.bsky.social

W/ @genevievelakier.bsky.social, the @aaup.org today released a letter to the Offices of the General Counsel at US colleges & universities. We detail why the Compact violates the Constitution & urge that no one signs it. www.aaup.org/sites/defaul...

🚨🚨🚨 And THREE stood up! Penn has joined MIT & Brown in rejecting Trump’s loyalty oath compact. When we join together and fight back, WE WIN! No amount of federal bribery is worth surrendering the freedom to question, explore, and dissent. LET’S GO! #DefendHigherEd @aaup-penn.bsky.social

Harvard's AAUP chapter got profiled in the latest issue of Academe magazine! We've had a truly wild year in the eye of the higher-ed hurricane, and you can read a little about it here: www.aaup.org/academe/issu... @aaup.org @academemagazine.bsky.social

PENN IS OUT! That means both institutions that signed prior agreements with the administration have said no. We're at 3 rejections. I told y'all once the second one hit yesterday, the clock started for the rest. www.thedp.com/article/2025...

Their new plan to punish universities: force the IRS criminal division to find cause to strip them of their tax-exempt status. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Brown rejected the compact! www.brown.edu/sites/defaul...

We now enter the most dangerous phase, but also the one with the greatest opportunity. The U.S. has thousands of colleges, some run by red state governments, so it's too much to hope that NONE sign up for this federal takeover. But it matters WHO signs up. The administration is taking a risk.